The Politics of Access and Representations of the Sodomite King in Early Modern England.

This essay treats the image of the sodomite king--in Marlowe's Edward II and in the gossip surrounding James 1 and his favorites-- as a figurative response to resentments stemming from the regulation of access to the monarch. Animosities in Marlowe's play anticipate criticism of the Jacobean Bedchamber in part because Marlowe was responding to libels provoked by innovations in the chamber politics of the French king Henri III that also anticipate Jacobean practice. The figure of the sodomite king offers a useful vehicle to explore tensions between personal and bureaucratic monarchy that are exacerbated by the regulation of access.

Recent interest in the politics of homoeroticism and the discourses of sodomy in early modern England has resulted in something like a consensus on two points: first, that the relationships that constituted the patronage system could involve homoerotic desire in a variety of ways; and second, that political disorder of various kinds within the system of patronage attracted accusations of sodomy. [1] Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II has been perhaps the key proof text for both points, offering as it does a richly ambiguous analysis of the relationship between political unrest and the erotically charged affection between the king and his favorites. [2] In many cases, however, these claims have relied on a notion of patronage that is too undifferentiated. As a result, the most influential arguments relating Marlowe's play to the homoerotics of patronage and early modern discourses of sodomy have begun with the problematic assumption that the specific relationship between sovereign and favorite stands in the play for patronage in general. [3]

The patronage of kings, however, is unique in at least two crucial ways. First, the king's bounty is enormous in scope and central to a premodern idea of the state. Linda Levy Peck has described the ideology and practice of royal bounty in detail, noting that the king is frequently imagined as a never-ending fountain, a well-spring of benefit and reward for his subjects. [4] The importance of royal bounty within the ideologies of kingship necessarily mediates the culture's perceptions of the practice of royal patronage, engendering concern about corrupt royal favoritism even among subjects at some remove from the court's inner circles. Figurations of sodomitical royal patronage -- in literary fictions and libels -- reflect this concern. Second, royal patronage in Tudor and early Stuart England is structured by specific institutions and protocols -- variable from monarch to monarch -- that regulate access to the king. Such access is clearly of central importance to the politics of royal favoritism, which mean s that the institutions governing it have a tremendous impact upon the perception of royal bounty and its corruption. This essay attempts to assess the cultural work done by figurations of sodomitical royal favoritism in light of the unique situation of the king as patron. On the one hand, this means attending to the ways in which the figure of the sodomite king is used to respond to tensions built into the ideology of royal bounty. On the other, it entails analyzing, more precisely than has hitherto been attempted, the relationship between these figurations and the institutional developments which give shape to the practice of royal patronage.

Though the figure of the sodomite king recurs frequently in the literature of the period, I will focus primarily on two of Renaissance England's most vivid and fully developed depictions of the sodomite king: Marlowe's Edward II and the sodomitical image of James I promulgated in manuscript verse libels, mean- spirited memoirs, and political pamphlets written by disgruntled contemporaries. [5] The version of James circulated in such texts became a staple of traditional historiography, which in turn described James as alternatively homosexual or bisexual, and used his sexuality as an index to his supposed weakness of character. [6] In addition to being animated by homophobic assumptions, this familiar version of James is built upon contemporary accounts whose descriptive accuracy is highly questionable. [7] For this reason, I treat them cumulatively as a popular representation of the king whose relation to actual Jacobean practice (political and erotic) is mediated and over determined by ideological structure s governing public perception.

The comparison between James I and Marlowe's Edward II is useful since, as has often been noted, the two figures have a great deal in common. [8] So much so, in fact, that there have been numerous attempts to argue that Marlowe based his characterization of Edward on James while the latter was still in Scotland. [9] But though James had favorites who attracted resentment as early as 1579, this argument seems weak to me: where much of the interest in Marlowe's characterization of Edward stems from the relationship between his patronage and his political ineffectiveness, the popular image of James as weak, debauched, and politically irresponsible was not prevalent until after he came to England. As king of Scotland, James VI was seen as a strong and effective ruler, hardly an analogue for the monarch of Marlowe's play. During the 1580s James shored up the Scottish monarchy, wresting power away from the factionalized nobility. Even to the English, who saw him as manipulative and ungrateful, James seemed a shrewd politician. [10] Instead, I treat the resemblance between Marlowe's Edward and the image of James that later arose in England as symptomatic, telling us more about ongoing concern with the meaning and function of royal favor and the politics of access than about the sexual mores or personal character of James VI and I. The centrality of royal bounty to the ideals of court and state ensured widespread concern with favoritism, and the specific pressures involved in the politics of access -- as depicted in Marlowe's play and manifested in the accusations surrounding James -- generate the figure of the sodomite king.

The regulation of access is a major concern of Renaissance kingcraft: it is necessary to protect the king from the crush of suitors eager for the grants and positions distributed by the crown. The key institution differentiating Tudor and early Stuart monarchy from earlier practices is the Privy Chamber or Bedchamber (as it was called under James I): the king's private chamber which, in the words of David Starkey, "marked the frontier between the public and private lives of the monarch" (1987a, 8). Only the staff of the Chamber were guaranteed the right of access to it, which meant that these men had a unique opportunity for intimate contact with the king. The important institutional innovation was made by Henry VIII, who staffed his Privy Chamber with young and high-born favorites. [11] This transformed the intimacy of the king's Chamber into a crucial and contested political venue, since these newly created Gentlemen were important enough to take full political advantage of their access to the king. Gentlem en of the Privy Chamber began to reap significant benefits from their guarantee of access.

This institutionalization of intimacy transformed the king's personal service, making it part of the governmental bureaucracy developed -- out of necessity and in a more or less ad hoc manner -- to meet the needs of increased centralization under the Tudors and Stuarts. The Chamber, under both Henry VIII and James I, had administrative capacities -- the ability to disburse money and authorize documents -- that rivaled those of other functionaries. Starkey and Neil Cuddy have each documented the importance of the Chamber in obtaining the king's signature on documents and in disbursing crown money. If the administration of royal favor seems, as L. L. Peck calls it, "incoherent," this is partly due to conflict engendered by the overlapping responsibilities shared among the Gentlemen of the Chamber and other important administrators. [12] In addition to being intimates of the king and recipients of his bounty, Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber or Bedchamber became key players in the competition over the mechanisms of state.

Since direct patronage given to personal intimates is in keeping with ideologies of bounty central to traditional kingship, Bedchamber patronage can be seen as a laudable part of the practice of monarchy. But the competition generated by these newfangled positions of institutionalized intimacy put pressure on such traditional notions: most obviously, because the enormous wealth and power garnered by these men provoked jealousy among the less fortunate; but also because the strict regulation of access to the king crystallizes a tension built into the institutions of the period, emphasizing the personal and corruptible aspects of a system of government forced to become increasingly bureaucratic to meet the needs of a centralized state. [13] That is to say, competing mechanisms of state created by the structure of Bedchamber patronage institutionalize conflict between the king's personal attachments and more bureaucratic modes of government. This conflict, in turn, foregrounds concerns about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of personal patronage. So, while the practice of monarchy was (as always) simultaneously and inextricably personal and public, the meaning of the personal aspects of monarchy became increasingly fraught. If, in the legal fiction of kingship, the body politic was supposed to "reduce, or even remove, the imperfections of the [king's] fragile human nature," the pressure placed upon the politics of access by the institution of the Bedchamber invites the perception that the reverse might in fact be happening. [14] In Renaissance England, consequently, the patronage of the Bedchamber can always be seen in multiple and contradictory ways: either in terms of the old-fashioned mode of personal generosity or as a corruption of administration in which personal intimacies encroach upon the public circulation of benefits and wealth.

Figurations of the sodomite king in Marlowe's play and James's England refract these concerns into the language of libel and sexual slander. In fact, the figure of the sodomite king can be seen in a broader context as part of a menu of lurid tropes arising in response to the politics of intimacy and access in Tudor and early Stuart England. Though the institution of the Bedchamber made concerns about the Jacobean politics of access much more urgent, Elizabeth's favorites also attracted lurid slander. For example, the anonymous libel known as Leicester's Commonwealth (1584) is a virtual anthology of scandalous gossip about the power of Elizabeth's great favorite, describing him as sexually voracious, a poisoner, a sorcerer, and a cunning Machiavel who holds Elizabeth in the sway of his "absolute" authority. [15] Under James, the number of libels aimed at the king's favorites increases exponentially and also includes a wide range of lurid figuration. In addition to the accusations of sodomy, for example, the Du ke of Buckingham was rumored, among other things, to have used magic to bewitch King James. [16]

That said, the figure of the sodomite king recurs because it is a doubly appropriate response to the tensions sketched above. First, because the stigmatization of male-male intimacy as sodomy is closely related to the celebration of male-male intimacy as friendship. The language of friendship, intimacy, and reciprocity was a privileged language for patronage relationships in England, and so friendship between men was understood to be the key public relationship, the very stuff of civility and social order. As Alan Bray has shown, accusations of sodomitical relations between men recast this acceptable intimacy, depicting it as corrupted or inverted, the very stuff of disorderliness. This means that accusations of sodomy are particularly well suited to respond to perceptions of corrupted patronage as disorderly intimacy. [17] Second, since accusations of sodomy were used to stigmatize a broad spectrum of perceived transgressiveness, the figure of the sodomite king is nebulous enough to accommodate the different kinds of political disorder associated with the corrupted intimacy of the Bedchamber. Individual favorites were hated for a variety of faults: upward mobility, dubious religious or (in the case of the Scottish Robert Carr) national affiliation, indecorous behavior, nepotism, the monopolization of power, the insulation of the king, and so on. The affective associations of sodomy are broad enough to include any of these social transgressions, and the figure of the sodomite king depicts any and all such social ills as the result of corrupted royal intimacy.

Implicit in this understanding of Jacobean innuendo and libel is a more general assertion about the social function of the kinds of sexual slander that monarchs (and other political figures, then and now) tend to attract: from the sometimes lurid speculations surrounding Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, to the rumors of lovers and secret pregnancies that dogged Elizabeth I, to the hum of gossip surrounding James I and his favorites. [18] Namely, that such gossip arises in response to more complex political concerns, transforming them into what we today call the character issue. But if lurid speculation about political figures seems ubiquitous, attention to its historically specific contours can tell us a great deal about the structures of feeling governing political perception at a given moment. Carole Levin, for example, links the scandalous gossip about Elizabeth's sexuality to a more pervasive anxiety about the status of a woman ruler in a traditionally patriarchal society (89-90). Murmurs about Elizabeth overs implify these more general concerns, and indeed that is precisely their function: they offer an imaginative vocabulary within which urgent and complex socio-political issues are rendered manageably personal. Similarly, the kinds of scandalous libel which James and his favorites attracted offer a rhetoric of blame that usefully oversimplifies a set of specific and pervasive anxieties about the meaning of the personal aspects of monarchy, of corruption, and of the institutions of royal patronage in Renaissance England.

This rhetoric of blame has its origins in specifically courtly resentment: only those interested in obtaining or brokering royal favor will be directly concerned with the institutional regulations governing access. But figurations of the sodomite king -- in plays, illicit pamphlets, and libels -- translate this courtly animosity to wider audiences. For this reason, the cultural work done by the trope of the sodomite king must be seen as twofold: in addition to offering a vivid oversimplification of more general concerns with the structure of royal patronage, it helps to disseminate courtly concerns to a wider and more heterogeneous audience. These two functions reinforce one another, since the reduction of political discourse to lurid figuration enables it to appeal more easily to audiences at a distance from the immediate world of the court.

The use of the figure of the sodomite king to popularize courtly resentments should thus be understood as part of the developing interest in corruption sketched by L. L. Peck. Animosity aimed at royal favoritism -- under Elizabeth, and especially under James -- expresses and is associated with more general frustrations born from strains upon the outmoded ideologies of royal bounty within the centralizing state: the failure of the crowds finances to meet demands for bounty, the upswing in the number of petitioners, competition between the English and Scots in James's court, and conflicts arising from the crown's attempts to offset the cost of bounty by granting monopolies and selling titles. Although with hindsight we can see that the ideals and mechanisms of royal favor were cracking under the strain of centralization, contemporaries expressed anxiety about the decay of state in terms of corruption at the top. By translating the courtly animosity generated by the politics of access into a popular rhetoric of scandal and blame, figurations of the sodomite king play an important role in what Peck calls the culture's "language of corruption" (11). They offer up a depiction of the failure of royal bounty that uses the personal as a scapegoat for more complicated governmental failures. This helps to explain popular interest in depictions of court corruption, generally, and in these figurations of the sodomite king, specifically.

Edward II is designed to appeal to popular fascination with questions about the intersection of public life and personal desire. Its major figures -- Edward, Gaveston, Mortimer, Isabella -- are embroiled in relationships whose erotic components remain purposely enigmatic but whose political impact is unquestionable. [19] To this end, the play makes what Bray calls "dark suggestions of sodomy" unavoidable while leaving the meaning of these insinuations -- their intersection with the political story -- purposefully vague. [20] The relationship between Edward and Gaveston is staged in such a way as to surround it with erotic affect while making its dramatization indistinguishable in practice from the conventional public behaviors of friendship and patronage. [21] As a result, the political struggle occasioned by Edward's patronage is animated by conflicting ideas about the nature of the king's intimacy as well as competing notions of the nature of personal monarchy.

The most influential account of the political meaning of sodomy in the play is provided by Jonathan Goldberg, who argues that accusations leveled at Edward are sparked not by heterosexist disgust at the idea of male-male desire, but rather by the transgressiveness of Gaveston's upward mobility. Goldberg, thus, takes at face value Mortimer Junior's description of the conflict:

his wanton humour grieves not me,

But this I scorn, that one so basely born

Should by his sovereign's favor grow so pert

And riot it with the treasure of the realm,

While soldier's mutiny for want of pay.

(1.4.401-05)

But while social transgression is seen as sodomitical, Goldberg argues, relations between men in Edward II are openly erotic as a matter of course:

in this play...the lubricant of "love" smooths the paths of friendship, clientage, and promotion. "If you love us, my lord," Mortimer Senior says, "hate Gaveston" [1.1.79]. The peers, as much as the minion, want the king's love. (119)

As Goldberg would have it, Edward II is radical in that it sees homoerotic relationships as unremarkable while seeing class transgression, instead, as sodomitical.

This is a provocative but problematic argument. For one thing, epithets like "wanton" take on an accusatory tone at several points in the play (1.1.131, for example), belying the seemingly sharp distinction drawn by Mortimer Junior between the peers' political complaints and the king's wanton humour." Insofar as wantonness -- a vague concept, simultaneously suggesting eros, irresponsibility, and general hedonism -- is involved in the accusations leveled at Edward, it becomes impossible to separate the erotic from the political. [22] For another, the play demonstrates more ambivalence about the proper functioning of "friendship, clientage, and promotion" than Goldberg lets on: when Mortimer Senior says "If you love us, my lord, hate Gaveston," he seems to be distinguishing between two kinds of love. The king's love for Gaveston, whatever else it may be, is personal; Mortimer asks the king to choose an impersonal love for a corporate "us" -- the peers -- over the love of his favorite. Since the latter amounts t o the public and unchanging duty of a king toward his most important subjects, Mortimer is here suggesting that idiosyncrasies of personal affection should play no role in royal bounty. Though the peers see Gaveston's upward mobility as a sodomitical social transgression, the root cause of conflict lies in a disagreement over the appropriate uses of the king's personal patronage. Government based on intimacy -- as opposed to this impersonal kind of public "love" hinted at by Mortimer Senior -- attracts accusations of sodomy in the play because it seems to the peers to lead to violations of normative social hierarchies of rank and blood. [23]

And yet Goldberg is correct to note that Mortimer, in asking for the king's "love," uses the conventional language of intimacy This suggests, despite the animosity of the peers toward the king's favoritism towards Gaveston, that they do conceive of monarchy as personal and of royal favor as intimate. For, as I have suggested, direct patronage based on trust and affection is part of the traditional bounty of kings. As the elements of the play's political conflict are laid out in the opening scenes, in other words, Mortimer Senior's injunction underscores an unspoken ambiguity concerning the practice of royal patronage: while the language of love invokes the traditional notions of bounty which underwrite Edward's personal patronage, the distinction between kinds of love adumbrates a more impersonal and bureaucratic idea of the distribution of royal largesse. Monarchy is personal, but what is the role of the personal in the practice of monarchy? Edward II capitalizes on interest in this question.

While such tensions are frequently involved in the competition over royal favor, Marlowe's depiction of them is most likely shaped by observation of contemporary scandals surrounding the politics of access and favor in the court of Henri III in France. Marlowe was dearly interested in Henri and the French court, dramatizing both, for example, in his Massacre at Paris. Pamphlets with wide international circulation criticized Henri for his personal generosity toward his minions, depicting his love for them as sodomitical in terms reminiscent of Edward II. [24] More specifically, Jean Boucher, a Catholic pamphleteer whose La Vie et faits notable de Henri de Valois (1589) was a source for Marlowe's Massacre, also wrote a pamphlet entitled Histoire tragique et memorable de Pierre de Gaverston (1588) in which he explicitly compared Henri and his minion Epernon to Edward and Gaveston. This pamphlet, which may have been a source for Edward II, cobbles together a mock dedication to Epernon, a translation of Thomas Wa lsingham's chronicle account of the life of Gaveston, an admonitory section on the crimes of Edward II, including "sodomie," and an appeal to the Estates General of France. [25] Though Boucher's piece seems the most likely to have been seen by Marlowe, the comparison between Gaveston and Epernon occasioned a small pamphlet war that may have made the association more generally familiar. [26] We know, too, that the parallel had some currency in England: the late Elizabethan manuscript version of Francis Hubert's Historie of Edward the Second (BL Harleian MS 2393a) explicitly compares Edward's reign to that of Henri III. [27] Given the commonplace nature of the comparison and Marlowe's demonstrable interest in affairs of France, slander surrounding Henri III seems a very plausible context for the writing of Edward II.

Henri III was criticized for lavishing wealth on minions like Epernon. And Henri's relationship with his minions was in turn figured as sodomitical. One anonymous pamphlet, for instance, accuses the king and Epernon of practicing "the art of unchaste Ganymede," and goes on to associate this sexual transgression with a more mundane economic one: Epernon is described as "the Darling [le Mignon], who consumes everything" and as a social climber who "no longer dresses as a gentleman, but as a prince." [28] The association between sodomy and social mobility is clearly reminiscent of Marlowe's play, in which Gaveston too is seen simultaneously as a Ganymede, a consumer of the realm's wealth, and a shameless social climber.

Where French kings had been easier of access than their English counterparts, Henri III increased the scope and importance of the king's private chamber service in hopes simultaneously of insulating himself from court factionalism and of emphasizing the sacred remoteness of the royal person. [29] He formalized these changes in 1583-1585, instituting clear protocols governing access to the king's person at various times and places. Included in the reforms were regularized limitations on access to his private chambers, and these met with resentment at once, since "the demand that the French king remain accessible to his nobility was too strong for the introduction of this kind of stateliness." [30]

A description of the newly reformed French court written by an English observer hints at such resentment, depicting access as the product of royal whim while emphasizing the political influence available to the king's minions:

[the king's] custome was everie morninge ... whilest he made himselfe readie to talke of suche matters as were of greatest importance by secret conference, with some such onelie as pleased his Majestie to call thereunto. And these be commonlie at this daye the K[ing]s minions & greatest favorettes without anie other rule. And for this case it is called the Counsaile of the Cabinet. [31]

This "Counsaile" is merely one example of the advantages of intimacy. The larger question, obviously, is whether matters of "the greatest importance" should be handled in such a private, personal, and withdrawn manner.

The more that access to the king came to be limited to a lucky few, the more it became the cause of jealousy. Lavish patronage given to Henri s minions made conflicts between personal royal favor and the king's public responsibilities freshly vivid in France ("without anie other rule"). And this is an important context for the accusations of sodomy directed at Henri and his minions. The connection between sexual slander and concern with corrupt distribution of public funds to favorites is made concrete, for example, by Ronsard who, in an unpublished coterie sonnet on Henri, imagines bedchamber service as a kind of prostitution: the minions "one after another present their plump buttocks to the king in order to get money." [32] Likewise, Boucher's Histoire, which everywhere strives to emphasize similarities between the story of the "effeminate" Edward II and the contemporary French situation, links the ruin of England to sodomy, the disbursal of public funds to Gaveston and Spencer, and Edward's abuse of "acc ess and favor" (30).

As such accounts make clear, restricted intimacies like "the Counsaile of the Cabinet" provoke criticism by institutionalizing what seems like a conflict of interest between the king's personal favoritism and his public duties as representative head of the body politic. Once access is limited to the lucky few, questions about the role of personal intimacy in monarchy come to the fore. Drawing on his knowledge of this material, Marlowe stages a similar conflict in his version of the Edward II story; there too, as Mortimer Senior's ambivalent awkwardness about the king's love suggests, accusations of sodomy arise in tandem with new uncertainties about the place of the personal within the administration of royal largesse. Though Marlowe does nor depict the politics of access in their institutional specificity, he does go out of his way to emphasize the conflicting ideas about royal favor polarized in France by Henri's institutional innovation. Edward II explores the conflict between two ideas of monarchy and go vernment, one in which favor born of intimacy is necessarily corrupt, and one in which direct patronage is normal and appropriate.

Though Mortimer Junior authorizes his rebellion with reference to long-established hierarchies of blood, it is Edward himself whose political ideas seem most traditional. The king attempts to rule through old-fashioned personal patronage. But since his relationship with Gaveston involves withdrawn intimacies unavailable to other members of the court, even Edward himself occasionally finds it difficult to conceptualize the political meaning of his love for Gaveston. He casts the relationship alternatively as a legitimate example of patronage and as a means to escape the political altogether. Thus, when Gaveston's rank is publicly challenged by the resentful peers in act 1, Edward responds fiercely: "Were he a peasant, being my minion, / I'll make the proudest of you stoop to him" (1.4.30-31). Though politically foolhardy, this stance asserts an important and familiar claim about the royal will: that it can override blood as the basis of public order, and that the king's patronage to a Bedchamber favorite is t o be understood as constitutive of public rank.

Later in the same scene, however, Edward redefines the relationship, telling the peers to

Make several kingdoms of this monarchy,

And share it equally amongst you all,

So I may have some nook or corner left

To frolic with my dearest Gaveston.

(1.4.70-73)

Part of Gaveston's appeal is that he offers Edward a fantasy of escape from the responsibilities of kingship. But this conflicts with the king's own absolutist ideas about royal favor, which dictate that personal actions performed by a king are indistinguishably part of public governmental order. That is why Edward here imagines his love in these impossible terms, as an escape not only from responsibility but from kingship itself.

Edward's conceptual difficulties should remind us powerfully of the dual nature of Henri III's "Counsaile of the Cabinet," which is imagined as both a haven from political infighting and as a central site for the distribution of the crown's wealth and influence. Though the relationship is depicted without emphasizing anachronistic court protocol, Edward imagines his relationship with Gaveston in precisely the same bifurcated terms: as both a private "nook" in which to escape the rigors of public office, and as fully legitimate basis for the king's bounty. Like the ambivalence of Mortimer Senior's remarks on royal love, the shifting nature of Edward's understanding of his relationship with Gaveston serves as an index to the real ideological ambiguity occasioned in the play by the king's style of withdrawn intimacy. As in the example of the French court, accusations leveled at Gaveston and Edward in Marlowe's play serve to oversimplify these ambiguities, associating sodomy and the king's "wanton humor" with a sense that royal gifts to intimate favorites are somehow inherently corrupt, at odds with the public good and the king's duty.

As Mortimer's rebellion takes shape, these ideological tensions manifest themselves also in a contrast between styles of government. Where Edward relies upon presence and direct royal patronage, Mortimer Junior shows a flair for what we might call bureaucratic government: he typically exercises his power by means of impersonal public documents like contracts, letters, and decrees." [33] This is hypocritical -- Mortimer's desire for power is intermingled with and eroticized by his relationship with Isabella -- but also strategic: by acting as if his power were impersonal and public, Mortimer capitalizes on the peers dissatisfrction with Edward's personal favor. Edward, by contrast, proves unable to imagine power as anything other than personal, an inability made clear in the play when he conflates the paper upon which Mortimer's decree is written with the body of Mortimer himself:

Well may I rend his name that rends my heart!

This poor revenge hath something eased my mind.

So may his limbs be torn, as is this paper.

(5.2.140-42)

Edward's confusion of Mortimer's letter and body here demonstrates the degree to which he imagines all power in terms of personal presence. This is of a piece with his refusal to acknowledge complaints about Gaveston; if kingship is personal, then royal patronage based on intimacy must be legitimate.

Conflict generated by the coexistence of these two modes of government -- presence and intimacy on the one hand, and public rank and bureaucratic impersonality on the other -- lies at the heart of the play's antagonisms. Thus, to Mortimer Junior the fact that the king's generosity is based on intimacy rather than public hierarchy means that it is uncontrollable, irresponsible, and unkingly. He expresses this quite precisely in his description of Gaveston as "a night-grown mushrump" (1.4.284), or mushroom. This analogy is proverbial, a comment on the favorite's ability to grow overnight. [34] But since Mortimer's epithet also contains a pun on the word "rump," it associates the social transgressiveness of Gaveston's spectacular rise with the nebulous socio-sexual transgressiveness of sodomitical intimacy. [35]

Mortimer's epithet also resonates with the commonplace association between kingship, bounty, and the sun. This is one of the recurring images in the play, from Gaveston's initial description of himself as one upon "whom the sun shines both by day and night" (1.1.16) to the deposed Edward's familiar question in act 5: "what are kings when regiment is gone / But perfect shadows in a sunshine day" (5.1.26-27). Royal power, and in particular royal patronage, is given as sunshine:

Spencer, I here create thee Earl of Wiltshire,

And daily will enrich thee with our favour,

That, as the sunshine, shall reflect o'er thee.

(3.1.49-51)

Given the currency of this rhetoric within the play, Mortimer's epithet -- "night-grown mushrump" -- seems to imply that the favorite's sudden flourishing has taken place without the benefit of the king's sun-like powers and bounty. Since Gaveston's rise is self-evidently predicated on direct royal access and patronage, however, Mortimer's epithet can only mean that Edward's gifts to his minion are somehow unlike the normal and appropriate distribution of kingly favor. The violation of social hierarchy implicit in Gaveston's rise is thus -- in Mortimer's language and in the play's imagination -- inseparably linked with the resentment engendered by the personal relationship underlying Edward's public distribution of favor.

Implicit in Mortimer Junior's sneer is a careful distinction between kinds of royal patronage. If sunlight names the public and orderly dispersal of patronage, Mortimer suggests that the favor given by Edward to Gaveston is its opposite. Where the one is public and kingly, the other is private and disorderly. Or, in the coded language of the play, the other is sodomitical. Since Gavesron is a "night-grown mushrump," his newly elevated social position, rather than being part of a royally sanctioned public hierarchy, is seen by Mortimer as evidence of a transgressive and sodomitical inversion both of natural order and of kingship.

This sodomitical generosity is juxtaposed in the play with the king's unwillingness to ransom Mortimer Senior, who is abruptly reported the prisoner of the Scots (2.2.114). Despite the animosity brewing between the king and his peers, Mortimer Junior and Lancaster do not hesitate to call upon the king for ransom money:

They rate his ransom at five thousand pound.

Who should defray the money but the king,

Seeing he is taken prisoner in his wars?

I'll to the king.

(2.116-19).

Edward balks at this, and the peers immediately blame his hesitation on generosity to the minion: "prodigal gifts bestowed on Gaveston / Have drawn thy treasure dry" Mortimer complains (2.2.157-58). Though Edward does not here plead poverty, the peers assume that the wealth of the realm -- which should be earmarked for the reward and support of public service -- has been used up on gifts for the "night-grown mushrump" earned only by personal intimacy.

Mortimer Senior's capture and ransom is an invention of Marlowe's usually explained by critics as atmospheric in the play, a way of gesturing toward ongoing wars with Scotland. [36] But it also serves a contrapuntal function, opposed to the king's intimate patronage as an example of royal expenditure fully consistent with the peers' ideas of state: as the ceremonial head of the bureaucratic machinery of state, the king should automatically pay the ransoms of the great soldiers in his wars. This in turn suggests an account of the play's political crisis which, while compatible with Goldberg's explanation, has very different emphases. For where Goldberg traces the resentment of the peers only to Gaveston's upward mobility, the peers -- who immediately assert a connection between the ransom and Edward's generosity to Gaveston -- seem primarily concerned with the perceived corruption of royal patronage. This juxtaposition, in other words, brings us back to the kind of tensions provoked in France by Henri's insti tutional restrictions: if access to the king is disproportionate, should royal patronage involve personal intimacy?

The most radical thing about Edward II is the way it takes these topical issues -- lifted in the case of the French court from accounts which depict outlandish behavior -- and recasts them as structurally inherent in kingship. This is suggested, for instance, by having Edward himself struggle conceptually with the politics of intimacy, unable to sustain his own royalist ideology; and, more strikingly, by the ease with which Gaveston is replaced -- in the love of Edward and the enmity of the peers -- by the "wanton" Spencer (4.6.50). By suggesting that the peers object to favoritism rather than to Gaveston, this analyzes for us the sodomitical accusations leveled at Edward: resentment of Gaveston, which is represented as richly interconnected with hints of sodomy and complaints about the king's wantonness, is shown retroactively to have been a symptom of political conflict by its more skeletally rendered repetition in the case of Spencer. The peers' accusations are revealed as the product not of patronage to G aveston, but of tensions surrounding royal favoritism as such.

Marlowe's ability to universalize issues made vivid by the scandal surrounding Henri III makes it possible for Elizabethan popular audiences to find topical interest in the play's depiction of favoritism. For though Elizabeth's great courtiers vied for familiarity with the queen, the institutional structure of this competition for intimacy was unlike that of the court of Henri III. Elizabeth's Chambers were staffed by women who could not have the kind of public profile enjoyed by Henri's minions. [37] For access, the key Elizabethan office was the Mastership of the Horse -- a position held in succession by Leicester and Essex -- which guaranteed proximity to the queen during excursions. Within her court, however, the exclusion of men from her most private Chamber allowed Elizabeth more flexibility in her management of access and faction. Tension between personal patronage and bureaucratic government was minimized since "the bureaucrat-minister" was not significantly disadvantaged relative to other courtiers b y restrictions on access to the queen. [38]

In order to tailor his exploration of the politics of intimacy to a heterogeneous Elizabethan audience, Marlowe crystallized the implications of his French source material while displacing the protocols which made them urgent in the first place. The play is quite brilliant in its analysis of the conflicts generated by intimate royal patronage, and it is Marlowe's interest in the libels produced in France that makes his depiction of the sodomite king anticipate so uncannily the production of sodomitical innuendo surrounding James: when James revived the institution of the Bedchamber, the resulting pressure upon politics of access provoked precisely the kinds of libel and gossip that surrounded Henri's "Cousaile of the Cabinet." At the same time, Edward II helped set the stage for similarly structured perceptions of James's Bedchamber patronage by popularizing a link between corrupt bounty and the sodomite king. [39] Though the play explores the tensions which produce sodomitical figuration, its popular repres entation of royal favoritism as sodomy also contributes to England's "language of corruption."

Institutional similarities between courts in France and England are often the result of direct contact and borrowing: Henry VIII created the office of Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in imitation of Francis I of France, and James's first royal household in Scotland was organized in part by his cousin and favorite Esme Stuart, who came to Scotland from the court of Henri III. [40] Within these institutional continuities, royal temperament makes all the difference. What matters is the degree to which each monarch chooses to regulate access, and to empower and reward intimates.

Some of the dynamic of Henri III's "Counsaile of the Cabinet" is anticipated in the English court, where Henry VIII first regulated intimacy and made institutionalized access crucial to government. [41] And -- as later in France -- this institutional change concretized tensions between the king's two bodies resulting in almost immediate factional turmoil. Roughly a year after the establishment of Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, Henry's favorites were denounced as a blemish on the royal honor: the kynges counsaill secretly communed together of the kynges gentlenes & liberalitee to all persones: by the whiche they perceived that certain young men in his privie chamber not regardyng his estate nor degree, were so familier and homely with hym, and plaied suche light touches with hym that they forgat themselfes: Whiche thynges although the kyng of his gentle nature sufferd and not rebuked nor reproved it: yet the kynges counsail thought it not mete to be suffred for the kynges honor. [42]

Though this account makes it sound as if Henry's minions were triflers, the concern voiced here proves their political importance. These minions were powerful enough to threaten Cardinal Wolsey, who convinced Henry to banish them from the court a few years later. [43]

Goldberg has proposed that we see a homoerotic undercurrent to the articulations of factional intrigue surrounding the Privy Chamber of Henry VIII (47-60). Though plausible, such a claim has very little to go on: to the best of my knowledge we do not know that any contemporary described the king's relations with his minions as sodomitical. We can say, however, that along with the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber there emerged a structure of institutionalized courtly jealousy that anticipates the resentments depicted in Edward II: minions seem to be running the state based only on their access to the king in his most private "nook." And if nothing else, this commentary demonstrates how resentment of the minions focuses on physical contact and political indecorum, a combination that anticipates the sexually explicit criticism of James's intimates which has survived.

The political influence of James's English favorites -- most notably Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham -- was greatly augmented by the king's reinstitution of the Bedchamber as an important locus of royal patronage along the lines of the Henrician Privy Chamber: under James, for the first time since Henry VIII, important courtiers combined guaranteed access to the king's chamber with high rank and important official duty. Gentlemen of James's Bedchamber enjoyed the king's lavish generosity and exerted such influence over the machinery of government that even the most important administrator of early Jacobean England -- Robert Cecil -- had to cultivate them to ensure his own position. [44] As a result, factional struggle in James's court involved rivalry between two kinds of political clout: that based on access to the Bedchamber, and that based on control of the Privy Council and the bureaucratic mechanisms of state. The power of Carr and Villiers, grounded on access and f avor, contributed to widespread criticism of James as overly profligate and insulated from public duty.

This criticism included insinuations of sodomitical favoritism hearkening back to the accusations of sodomy leveled at Edward II in Marlowe's play. In fact, the story of Edward II -- which had already received a few pointed Jacobean rehearsals -- seems to have become urgently topical in England during the 1620s. In 1621, Sir Henry Yelverton publicly compared Buckingham to Edward's favorites in a speech in Parliament. [45] As news of Yelverton's telling outburst was reported to interested subjects in manuscript newsletters and separates, Marlowe's play was republished for the second time in 1622. [46] Francis Hubert's Historie of Edward II was published in editions of 1628 and 1629, and Elizabeth Cary's tacitean History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II was probably written about this same time. [47] The circulation history of Hubert's poem, in particular, suggests how versions of the Edward II story popular during the last years of Elizabeth's reign may have helped shape the kinds of sodomitical acc usations which later came to surround her successor: manuscript evidence suggests that The Historie was begun as a study of court factionalism during the late 1590s, modified several times to reflect Jacobean concerns with corrupt royal favoritism, published anonymously after the death of James, and published in an authorized version only after the death of Buckingham. [48] Like Hubert's Elizabethan verse history, Marlowe's Edward II may have served as a kind of template, giving shape to articulations of dissent in the 1620s. At any rate, the topical application of these latter poems is fairly overt indicating that James's relation to his Bedchamber favorites was widely seen, by the 1620s if not earlier, as comparable to the sodomitical relationship between Edward II and his minions.

Direct accusations of sodomy were dangerous and so tend to be muted, but there is a bass-rumble of such gossip linking James with his Bedchamber favorites which nevertheless survives. [49] For instance, a volume entitled Corona Regia -- falsely attributed on its title page to Isaac Casaubon, the humanist scholar in residence at James's court, but actually published overseas by a satirist and smuggled into England in 1615 -- makes explicit allusions to the king's sodomitical bedchamber. [50] Significantly, Carr and Villiers are named, and sodomy is closely associated with the politics of access and the king's lavish financial generosity. The epithet "Magnus Cubicularius tuus" (your Knight of the Bedchamber) is added to cap a list of Carr's honorific titles, where it is intended at once to convey a hint of sodomy and to satirize the puffed-up importance of the king's lofty intimates. [51] This Latin text can have had only an educated audience. But the volume's influence is nevertheless corroborated by an accou nt in the diary of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, which specifically describes discussing the book with friends in London (100).

The essayist Francis Osborne, synthesizing anti-Jacobean sentiment in his Traditional Memoirs on the Reigns of Elizabeth and King James (1658), summarizes James's relations with Carr and Villiers in a manner that clarifies the connection between the politics of access and accusations of sodomy:

Nor was [James's] love, or what else posterity will please to call it... carried on with a discretion sufficient to cover a less scandalous behavior; for the kings kissing them after so lascivious a mode in publick, and upon the theater, as it were, of the world, prompted many to imagine some things done in the tyring house, that exceed my expressions no less then they do my experience: And therefore left floating upon the waves of conjecture, which hath in my hearing tossed them from one side to another. [52]

Such accounts, as David Bergeron has argued, are not unusual: it may well be the case that observers at court found the king's public affection for his favorites too "lascivious" (87-88). But at the same time, Osborne's memoir is generally considered to be an unreliable account of the Jacobean court fuelled by anti-Scottish sentiment and a resentful imagination. The historical value of the piece, as Robert Ashton observes, is derived not from its accuracy but from the fact that it presents "a view of the king which came to be held by many of his subjects, and perhaps by an increasing number of them, as his reign drew on" (xx-xxi). From this perspective, Osborne's description is interesting in that it captures for us an act of unwarranted speculation, in which visible public affection is taken as a sign of withdrawn sodomitical intimacy.

Public kissing was a regular expression of affection between friends, so it is at least possible that James's putatively "lascivious" kisses demonstrate no more than that. For, since James himself described sodomy as an unforgivable crime in his Basilikon Doron, he may well have wanted to avoid displaying such "scandalous" sexual desire "upon the theater, as it were, of the world" (20). This is not to say that James did or did not have male lovers, but merely that he probably would not have wanted his public demonstrations of affection to generate what Osborne calls "waves of conjecture." But the king's kisses were also the public signs of a brand of royal favor which included free access to the king in his least formal capacity. Such access resulted in lavish gifts and enormous influence of a kind likely to provoke jealousy. What, then, is the king's "scandalous behavior?" The display of lascivious public affection becomes emblematic in Osborne's account of the irresponsible manner in which James conflates w ithdrawn intimacy and the dictates of public responsibility. James's generosity to his intimates of the Bedchamber seemed to many to involve the same corruption of categories. Though Osborne tells the story the other way around, "waves of conjecture" about the corruption of royal patronage may have made James's public affection seem like part of his wanton humor.

Osborne's memoir provides a snapshot encapsulation of the way that political resentment engendered within the court by James's Bedchamber favorites shades into sodomirical conjecture. The same resentments are also encoded as sodomirical in several of the Jacobean poems and libels transcribed and re-transcribed into commonplace miscellanies, newsletters, and journals. For example, among the many bits of libel and news recorded in the commonplace book of the Suffolk clergyman John Rous, we find a section of a poem sometimes called "The King's Five Senses" which, by praying for James to avoid the blandishments of lovely male favorites, manages to imply that he is in fact too vulnerable to them. [53] It is difficult to gauge the audience which such material may have reached, but Rous at least receives the poem at quite a distance from the immediate concerns of the court. Spurred in part by interest in court scandal and animosity toward favorites like Carr and Villiers, the culture of manuscript libel blossomed d uring the second half of James's reign. [54] One sign of this is the increasing official concern it prompted: proclamations forbidding such material were issued in 1620 and 1621. Manuscript circulation disseminated courtly concerns with favoritism and access to a much broader and more heterogeneous audience, further popularizing in the process an array of lurid and scandalous attacks on favorites and favoritism including the figure of the sodomite king.

With this in mind, I want to turn to a little known Jacobean manuscript poem -- "The Warrs of the Gods" -- which encapsulates the association between access and sodomy in ways that should remind us of Marlowe's play. [55] In one manuscript, "The Warrs of the Gods" is dated 1623, which corroborates what is already fairly self-evident from the poem's content: namely that it is as a satiric portrait of James's affection for the Duke of Buckingham. And while it may be unusually explicit in its sodomitical insinuations about the king, it is only one of many manuscript poems from the 1620s to encode resentment of Buckingham in terms of sexual libel. [56] James is figured as Jove in the poem, and Buckingham appears as Ganymede. As in the Greek and Latin sources, Ganymede is a beautiful mortal boy who is seized by Jove, taken to be his cup-bearer and, in some versions of the story, his catamite. The association with Buckingham is specially appropriate since Villiers too got his start as cup-bearer to the king.

Here are the poem's first two stanzas:

Arme, Arme, in heaven there is a faction,

And the Demy gods

Now are bent for Action,

They are at odds

With him that rules the Thunder

And will destroy

His White fayst boy

Or rend the Heavens in sunder.

Great Jove that sways the Imperiall septer

With his upstart love

That makes him drunke with Neckter

They will remove.

Harke how the Ciclops labour,

See Vulcan sweats

That gives the heats

And Forges Mars his Armour.

At the outset, the poem gives us two alternative explanations for the resentment created by Jove's "White-fayst boy" Ganymede. First, the description of Ganymede as an "upstart" suggests that Jove's affection has lifted the favorite beyond his appropriate social standing. Second, we see that Ganymede makes Jove drunk with nectar, which suggests more broadly that the favorite encourages the ruler's political irresponsibility and wantonness. Each of these suggestions reflects animosity about the Duke of Buckingham: in the 1620s he enjoyed an unprecedented social ascendancy based on monopolizing royal favor; and as he took control of the avenues of access and patronage, Buckingham seemed to many to encourage the king's withdrawal from public duties. Though these stanzas might remind us of the innuendo surrounding Edward II's "wanton humour," they stop short of rendering James's political irresponsibility in explicity eroticized terms.

But the poem then gives us an alternative explanation for the revolt. The relationship between Jove and his "upstart love" is recast as sodomitical, and that in and of itself is used to explain the motivation of the rebellious gods. Here the poem is unusually explicit:

The chast Diana by her Quiver

And 10000 maids,

Have sworne that they will never

Sport in the shads

Untill the heavens creator

Be quite displac'd

Or else disgrac'd

For lovinge so gainst nature.

The Faire Proserpina next wherrys

In firey coach

Drawn by Twellve blacke Furies.

As they Approach

They threaten without mercy

To have him burnd

That thus hath turnd

Loves pleasures arse verse.

(stanzas 6-7)

Here the gods are rebelling not against Jove's political irresponsibility, but rather against the transgressions of natural order implied by sodomy. The "arse verse" nature of the king's love becomes symbolic of the political disorder occasioned by royal intimacy with this "upstart." "Arse verse" love is here preposterous in the literal sense of that word described by Patricia Parker: "preposterous in the sexual as well as other sense is in this respect a more revealing term than sodomy, for it links something represented as sexual inversion with a whole contemporary range of other orders" (27).

This invective against preposterous love is again recontextualized by the poem's closing depiction of Jove, which once again recasts these complaints in an explicity political register. Here is the poem's final stanza:

Jove with Ganimede lyes playing

Heares no Tritons sounde

Nor yett horses neighinge

His eares are bounde;

The fidlinge god doth lull him,

Bacchus quaffs

And Momus laughs

To see how they can gull him

The poem concludes by showing us a king who has withdrawn from the responsibilities of government as a result of the manipulative wiles of "Ganimede" and his cohorts. This last stanza can be read as a complaint about Buckingham's monopoly of access, and the king's resulting insulation ("His eares are bounde") depicts a real and urgent political concern of the day. Consequently, the last stanza can be said retroactively to recast earlier stanzas in which unnatural love as such was given as the reason for the gods' rebellion. The juxtaposition of sodomy and Bedchamber politics as alternative explanations for rebellion in the poem can be read symptomatically, as evidence that Jove's "arse verse" love translates the perceived political disorder resulting from institutionalized access into sexual libel. What exactly is Jove's sodomitical crime? Is it "lovinge so gainst nature" or his willingness to retire into his private nook with his favorite, thereby giving the latter too much influence? As in Edward II, the tw o are inseparably interconnected. The favoritism which James envisioned as the legitimate exercise of royal patronage is seen simultaneously as escapism, corruption, and (thus) sodomy. This dual nature ensured that James's lavish generosity -- intended in part as an index to his monarchical grandeur -- would seem to some like the result of sodomitical intimacy with his own court's night-grown mushrumps.

Momus is the god of ridicule. The implication of this last stanza, therefore, is that the king's sodomitical reliance on Buckingham has made him an object of scorn within his own dissolute court (remember Osborne's "waves of conjecture"). Indeed, the poem's attention to the politics of access would seem to suggest that it is itself an example of this courtly scorn. And yet the circulation of this poem in manuscript may well have granted it a wider audience, popularizing the image of the sodomite king beyond the immediate sphere of men and women who might specifically resent limitations on access to the king. This means that in addition to encoding the perceived corruption of the politics of access as sodomitical, the poem is itself a vehicle for the dissemination of the court's resentment.

Though complaints about the favorites of Elizabeth and James imply criticism of royal patronage, they tend on the whole to exempt the monarch from direct blame. The power wielded by men like Leicester or Buckingham is often depicted as a threat to the monarchy rather than an expression of royal favor. Edward II exposes the flawed logic of such rhetoric. For while the peers in Marlowe's play present themselves as loyalists who object only to Gaveston's abuse of power, their challenge to Edward's prerogative of favor is a prelude to deposition and regicide. In this, too, Marlowe's play is proleptic: by the 1620s, as L. L. Peck argues, widespread animosity toward James's favorites began to raise "dangerous questions about whether the king himself, and not just his courtiers, could be corrupt" (181).

Such questions are clearly invoked in a poem like "The Warrs of the Gods." On the one hand, the last stanza treats Jove as a passive victim, "bound" by favorites within a dissolute and disrespectful court. On the other hand, the sections of the poem which focus primarily on the "arse verse" nature of sodomitical intimacy blame Jove quite directly and call for "the heavens creator" to be "displac'd." As part of the culture's language of corruption, figurations of sodomitical intimacy offer an unusually direct way of handling the delicate question of royal culpability, since depictions of the sodomite king necessarily involve the monarch in their distribution of blame. This may have been part of the figure's appeal: sodomitical accounts of James's patronage fuse animosity toward corrupt favorites with an increasing vociferous disapproval of the king himself.

It is a sign of the pervasiveness of the figure that Charles I felt the need to distance himself explicitly from sodomitical innuendo. When Charles succeeded James, he made an attempt to reform the structure of royal patronage by limiting the political influence of his Bedchamber staff, and by reemphasizing the ceremonial, and therefore public, aspects of the performance of kingship. [57] In Thomas Carew's masque Coelum Brittanicum (1634), these Caroline efforts are celebrated with the conceit that the gods are reforming in emulation of the virtue of Charles's court. The reform of Bedchamber politics includes the remarkable proviso that "Ganimede is forbidden the Bed-Chamber, and must only minister in publique" (219). Ganymede's crime here seems to be political corruption born of Bedchamber access, but his name associates his actions unmistakably with sodomy: the association, of course, makes Carew's Ganimede heir to the figurations of sodomitical royal favoritism in Edward II and "The Warrs of the Gods."

What is remarkable here is that an association between the abuses of the politics of access and sodomy should be acknowledged in such a public entertainment before the king and his court. The implication, I think, is that the continued circulation of sodomitical innuendo surrounding James transforms the figure of the sodomite king -- with its direct assertion of royal corruption and its scandalous popular appeal -- from an unpublishable figuration of corrupt favoritism into a standard trope for the abuse of access. The inclusion of the figure in Carew's masque is a sign, therefore, of its ideological power as a trope for the perceived corruption of Jacobean favoritism. By banishing Ganymede from the "Bed-Chamber" in this public and royalist forum, the masque in effect acknowledges the damage done to the prestige of the crown by Jacobean representations of the sodomite king.

(1.) On the distinction between the politics of homoeroticism and the discourses of sodomy, see DiGangi, 1-28.

(2.) On these two points see Archer, 67-94; Bartels, 143-72; Bray, 1990; DiGangi, 100-33; Goldberg, 105-43; and Smith, 191-223. Since the publication of Bray's influential Homosexuality in Renaissance England it has become clear that accusations of sodomy in Renaissance England are frequently associated with -- and used to symbolize -- a range of politically and socially transgressive behaviors: charges of sodomy tended to accompany and symbolize suspicion of heresy, treason, or some other sociopolitical transgression. On this, see also Bredbeck.

(3.) See for example Archer, 76, and Goldberg. The exception in this case is DiGangi, who emphasizes the special importance of the monarch/favorite relationship.

(4.) L. L. Peck, 1-2, 185, and 208. See also Perry, 1997, 115-24.

(5.) For a discussion of some other depictions of sodomitical royal favor, see DiGangi, 100-33.

(6.) The freighting which James's putative homosexuality has generally received in studies predating the last decade is suggested by the index to Akrigg, where discussions of royal homosexuality are listed under the heading "James I, King of England -- morals" (423).

(7.) See, for example, Wormold. Lee provides a judicious recent biography of James.

(8.) Most recently, Orgel has described Marlowe's play as "a mirror of King James's behavior" (48). For a full elaboration of the comparison see Kuriyama, 209-10.

(9.) Ibid. See also Burnett; Goldberg, 271n.26; and Normand. To the best of my knowledge, the possibility of a relationship between Marlowe's play and James VI was first suggested by Berdan. While I do not think the parallel between James and Edward can explain the most interesting features of Marlowe's exploration of monarchy, there is no reason to deny completely the relevance of this material to the play. There may, for example, be a parallel between Gaveston and Aubigny (sly Frenchmen both). I am grateful to Dr. Burnett for sharing his helpful essay, which sees Scottish material as one among many contexts for the play, in advance of its publication.

(10.) See Lee and Wormold.

(11.) Starkey, 1987b.

(12.) L. L. Peck, 42. See also Starkey, 1987b, and Cuddy, 1987a.

(13.) The classic study of Tudor bureaucratization is Elton. On the debates engendered by Elton's historiography, see Coleman and Starkey.

(14.) Kantorowicz, 9.

(15.) D. C. Peck, 107. Accusations involving poison, sorcery, and sexual license are scattered throughout the text, but see especially 191. See also Levin, 72-82.

(16.) On Buckingham's use of magic, see the account of a servant who is supposed to have remarked that "the duke need never fear Parliament or doubt the king's favor, while he wore that he had on himself" in The Calendar of State Papers ..., 604. The best account of the range of libel attracted by Buckingham's preeminence is offered in Bellany, 1995, 440-677.

(17.) Bray, 1990. For a detailed and theoretically sophisticated discussion of the public rhetoric of friendship in Renaissance Europe, see Hutson. Stewart, 122-60, discusses points of contact between friendship and sodomy in humanist discourse.

(18.) On Henry VIII, see Warnicke, 19 1-233. On Elizabeth, see Levin, 66-90.

(19.) See Perry, 1998.

(20.) Bray, 1990, 9. There has been a great deal of interest in the relationship between the erotic and the political in Edward II. In addition to the studies cited in n. 2 above, see Brady; Boyette; Summers, 1994 and 1988; and Tyler.

(21.) Bray, 1990. See also Mills, 1937 and 1934, who found Edward II compatible with classical and Renaissance ideals of friendship.

(22.) See Bartels, 163-64.

(23.) Compare Archer, 77-81.

(24.) For an overview, see Teasley. Briggs suggests that some elements of Marlowe's play -- Gaveston's description of elaborate Italianate pageantry in particular -- have more in common with these pamphlets than with earlier versions of the story of Edward II. See also Burnett; Kocher, 1947 and 1941; and Thomas and Tynedale, 251-92 and 341. On the international circulation of such pamphlets see Kingdon and Salmon.

(25.) Boucher, 30. I cite, and later translate, Boucher from the copy in Harvard University's Houghton Library. This copy is bound together with twelve other contemporary tracts, though each retains its own pagination. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically. On the possibility that Marlowe may have used this text, see Bakeless, 2:88, and Briggs.

(26.) 0n these pamphlets see Hauser, 313-14; Cameron, 1974, 162, and 1978, 31.

(27.) Hubert, 51-53. On the relationship between different manuscript versions of the poem see Mellor's collation in Hubert, 280-83.

(28.) Qtd. in Coudy, 236-37.

(29.) Potter and Roberts. See also Cameron, 1978, 12 and 17.

(30.) Ibid., 325.

(31.) Qtd. in Potter and Roberts, 331.

(32.) Ronsard, 415-16: "Eux [the minions], pour avoir argent, lui presrent tour a tour / Leurs fessiers rebondis."

(33.) Voss and Archer both discuss the conflict between Mortimer and Edward in terms of an emerging tension between feudal hierarchy and central monarchy. In such a reading, it is Mortimer who is the throwback and Edward whose personal power is newfangled. But Edward's ideas about face to face generosity are, in fact, traditional.

(34.) On the proverbial meaning see Tilley, 486.

(35.) Forker's edition of the play regularizes the quarto's "mushrump" to "mushroom."

(36.) See, for example, Marlowe, 47.

(37.) Shepherd, 23-24, argues that English Renaissance writers used homoeroticism as a trope for exploring issues of court favoritism regardless of the gender of the sitting monarch. DiGangi, 100-01, follows suit, arguing for the Elizabethan topicality of Edward II. Burnett offers an extended commentary on Elizabethan topical meaning in Marlowe's play. On Elizabethan polities of familiarity, see Adams. On interest in the politics of familiarity in Elizabethan drama, see Palmer. On Elizabeth's private chambers, and the difference gender makes, see Wright.

(38.) Cuddy, 1987a, 9.

(39.) On the popularity of the play, and its influence upon other versions of the Edward II story, see Marlowe, 99.

(40.) On Henry VIII and Francis I see Starkey, 1987b, 81-82. Francis used the title as an honor to be given liberally rather than as a limitation on intimacy and access. On James VI and Henri III see Cuddy, 1987a, 14.

(41.) "Comparison with Henry VIII also crops up in French pamphlets attacking Henri III; see Cameron, 1978, 32-33.

(42.) Hall, 598. I have spelled abbreviated words in full.

(43.) Starkey, 1987b, 102-03.

(44.) Cuddy, 1987b, 197-98.

(45.) Gardiner, 47. See also Lockyer, 100-105, and Zaller, 116-22.

(46.) Forker suggests that the reprinting of Marlowe's plays had to do with the acquired Jacobean topicality of the sodomite king. For an example of the manuscript transmission of Yelverton's comparison see Egerton ms., 48v-49v.

(47.) Lewalski, 201-11, offers a succinct account of the Jacobean topicality of the story of Edward II and a fuller description of Gary's History. Bredheck, 48-86, provides a useful survey of the constructions of sodomy in various retellings of the story of Edward II.

(48.) Hubert, 279-89.

(49.) Though in many cases I disagree with his conclusions, Young, 51-101, offers a useful and thorough catalogue of the sodomitical innuendo surrounding James and his favorites.

(50.) Schleiner describes this piece in two recent essays (1995 and 1990). I am grateful to Dr. Schleiner for showing me the latter of these in advance of its publication.

(51.) I. Casauboni, 90.

(52.) Scott, 1:275.

(53.) Though there is no good reason to think it written by William Drummond, "The King's Five Senses" can be found in Drummond, 2:296-99. Rous's journal and commonplace book are bound together and consecutively foliated in British Library Addl. ms. For this poem. see fol. 105.

(54.) On the culture of manuscript news and libel see Bellany, 1993 and 1995; Cogswell, 20-53; Cust; and Fox.

(55.) By making explicit what is submerged in published texts, this poem offers a useful counter-example to Orgel's claim that Jacobeans found it impossible "to acknowledge sodomy as an English vice" (46-48). The poem is discussed briefly in Smith, 202-03. Several versions of this poem have survived, copied by interested readers into different commonplace books: see Marotti, 86 n.21. I have consulted the Osborn ms., fols. 111-13 in the Beinecke Library. Citations by stanza will be given parenthetically.

(56.) Surveys of the manuscript poetry about Villiers are provided by Marotti, 107-10, and Hammond, 49-66. Many of the poems are reproduced (and some expurgated) in Fairholt. See also Bellany, 1995, 455-512.

(57.) See Sharpe.

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