Abstract

This article attempts, through a reading of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, to articulate both formally and historically the nexus of power, violence and desire in Renaissance England. The opening section establishes the play’s engagement with an interlocking set of social conflicts constitutive of the discourse of order in sixteenth century England: the paradoxical relationship of monarch to aristocracy, and a class conflict which threatens historically the established social hierarchy. The specific collision of these two historical determinations can be directly traced to the complex of desire–specifically, homosocial desire–and violence which the play posits as in-forming the very structure of the social whole. The second section consequently follows the dynamic of desire which drives the play’s narrative forward. The ostensible climax of this narrative is Edward IPs violent and troubling death, to which the final section of the argument is devoted. Exposing narrative violence and narrative desire as the forms through which the social order grounds and legitimates itself, the scene’s own disruption of narrative and its claims to authority constitutes, I argue, a far-reaching meta-critique of the play’s own historical moment, a complex de-construction of the very foundations upon which the social formation has been established.