4 - Stink or Swim: Knee-deep in Marlowe’s Edward II

Summary

Abstract

This essay examines Marlowe's image of a king standing in sewage, which appears near the end of Edward II, in relation to the other aquatic environments and creatures conjured in the play's dialogue. Edward's beloved Gaveston thinks of himself as another Leander, and imagines producing a sexy amphibious performance for the king, featuring a swimming boy “in Dian's shape.” Conversely, Gaveston is figured by his rivals in a decidedly less lovely way, as both a torpedo (an electric ray) and a flying fish. The vertical figure of a human prisoner stuck in the sewer is an up-ending of the play's pattern of metaphors that submerge human bodies, mobilizing them in a horizontal, piscine position.

Keywords: Edward II, waterways, sewage, fish, aquatic habitats, swimming

Many readers have paused to reflect upon the image of a man standing in sewage in the penultimate scene of Edward II. The scatological circumstances of the king's incarceration are deeply and stinkingly Marlovian. Christopher Foley, citing the work of Lisa Hopkins and Roger Sales, notes that “despite a relatively small dramatic corpus, Christopher Marlowe shows a persistent interest in waste and waste-waterways as threats to the body and the body politic.” Where human waste is absent from his source material, Marlowe is likely to introduce it. For example, Joseph Tate marks a telling addition to the story of Tamburlaine's fevered end: “his death is heralded by a uroscopic diagnosis,” a physician having reported that his urine is “thick and obscure” (2.5.3.83). In Edward II, Marlowe puts the dung in dungeon, as the guards charged with watching over the deposed king talk about the shitty situation in which Edward now finds himself:

… I wonder the king dies not,

Being in a vault up to the knees in water,

To which the channels of the castle run,

From whence a damp continually ariseth

That were enough to poison any man,

Much more a king brought up so tenderly. (24.1–6)