To Sodomize a Nation: Edward II, Ireland, and the Threat of Penetration
Marcie Bianco."To Sodomize a Nation: Edward II, Ireland, and the Threat of Penetration". Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (October, 2007) 11.1-21<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-16/bianedii.htm>.
Previously, when the monarch was referred to as lord of Ireland, the implication was that only those living within the part of the country described as the lordship of Ireland were subjects of the crown and that all living outside that jurisdiction were not provided with the protection of the crown and might therefore be attacked with impunity. In 1541, however, it had been made clear that all inhabitants of the country who acknowledged the English monarch as their sovereign were entitled to the protection of the law. What was decided in 1541 was therefore that those Gaelic elements of the Irish population who previously had been designated 'Irish enemies' [or those living outside of the English Pale] were being provided with the opportunity to become subjects to the crown.
The "opportunity" presented to the Irish natives "to become subjects to the crown" had two obvious repercussions that erupted in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The first repercussion of this "opportunity" arose as the symptomatic undecidability of the status of Irish people—as either English subjects or colonised Irish others. Some argued that the Irish should be treated as English subjects that must be tamed to abide by the crown. Others believed that the Irish were abject others that should remain colonised for England's profit.
ideas about the separateness of the individual, the impermeability of the body, or the fixedness of the nation were yet as emergent [in early modern England], less well established than they may appear today, and hence a source of high anxiety in the period. But this stridency also bears witness to the instabilities that lie at the heart of all attempts to distinguish inner from outer. For one thing, the very act, the process, of distinguishing between two undermines its own declared goal, for while processes of incorporation and expulsion may ultimately be aimed at creating a perfect, closed interior, how can the body (of the individual, of the land, of the nation) help but be seen as endlessly permeable, if it at the same time allows—needs, in fact—so much taking in and letting out.
Thy garrisons are beaten out of France,Mortimer Jr., to emphasise the point, chimes in with "The haughty Danes command the narrow seas, / While in the harbour ride thy ships unrigged" (166-167). From all sides of "this sceptred isle"—from Scotland and Ireland to the north and northwest, to France and the Netherlands from the south and southeast—England is being both encroached upon and invaded by outsiders. In addition to these threats that impinge upon England from the outside, there are internal conflicts: the nobles revolt against the king; Mortimer Junior and Queen Isabella, sailing from Flanders, lay siege to England in an attempt to usurp Edward's throne. External threats and internal threats are implicated in one another—and what constitutes an external threat as opposed to an internal one is a division not easily demarcated, specifically because England is not a perfectly enclosed, defined nation. (In other words, since the English Pale is a geographical space located within Ireland, are the Irish kerns who invade a section of their now colonised land considered an internal threat or an external threat?) Imperialism renders impossible the desire for definitive geopolitical boundaries and a clear-cut distinction between "inside" and "outside." This idea is similar to what Stephen O'Neill, borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt's concept of "contact zones," has described as England's "spatial anxieties" about Ireland. He uses the term in relation to Edward II to convey moments when "English hegemony proves vulnerable…, when references to Irish space crystallises contemporary English fears about Gaelic Irish society and, more fundamentally, corresponding insecurities about English identity."
And, lame and poor, lie groaning at the gates;
The wild O'Neil, with swarms of Irish kerns,
Lives uncontrolled within the English pale;
Unto the walls of York the Scots made road
And unresisted drave away rich spoils. (2.2.161-165)
The nobles' desire for Gaveston's death is implicit from the beginning of the play when Lancaster warns Edward that if he retracts his father's decision to forbid Gaveston from entering the realm then he risks the chance of having the "glozing head of thy base minion thrown" at the foot of his throne (1.1.132). The nobles do not explain their request that Gaveston remain in exile at that time. However, in Act 1 scene 4, Mortimer Jr. offers an explanation: Gaveston must be recalled because he "hath a store of gold, / Which may in Ireland purchase him such friends / As he will front the mightiest of us all." Gaveston poses a potential threat, not only to the nobles but to the English realm. The "burning zeal" with which Mortimer conveys his thoughts to his peers indicates that he recognises the power that has been conferred to Gaveston as governor of Ireland. Gaveston, in short, symbolically embodies the power of the king, which translates into real, material power (his "store of gold" which will purchase him "friends"—perhaps the same rebellious Irish kerns mentioned later by Lancaster who are invading the Pale). The irony is that Gaveston has succeeded in penetrating and possessing the king's other body, the eternal body politic, which invests him with the political power that the nobles feared he would obtain through his relationship with the king.
Mortimer Jr. My lords, that I abhor base Gaveston
I hope your honours make no question;
And therefore, though I plead for his repeal,
'Tis not for his sake, but for our avail—
Nay, for the realm's behoof and for the king's.
This which I urge is of a burning zeal
To mend the kind and do our country good.
Know you not Gaveston hath store of gold,
Which may in Ireland purchase him such friends
As he will front the mightiest of us all?
And whereas he shall live and be beloved,
'Tis hard for us to work his overthrow. (1.4.239-262)
 Stephen O'Neill's Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama is the only full length text to analyse representations of Ireland on the English stage (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007). Otherwise, I have found three critics who point to Edward II's marked allusions to the contemporary historical and political context involving Ireland. A.D. Wraight suggests that the play's "references to Ireland would immediately have awoken a response in [Marlowe's] Elizabethan audiences for there Raleigh and Gray had fought the wild Irish kerns, and there was an unceasing resurgence of rebellion; while the threat of invasion, not by the Danes, but by Spaniards, created dramatic tension by the reawakening of recent memories in the hearts of Londoners when the Armada threatened" (Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn (London: Adam Hart Publishers Ltd, 1993), 127). Willy Maley uses Edward II as a counter example to the "historicist desire to pin the play's Irish allusions to a particular context, rather than to see them as part of a larger and more enduring structure," which he finds fault with in studies of Irish references in Shakespeare's plays ("The Irish Text and Subtext of Shakespeare's English Histories," in A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Vol. II: The Histories, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 98). Mark Thornton Burnett hints at the implications of Gaveston's exile to Ireland: "Ireland is imagined as a haven for Edward's minions, but at the same time it is feared as a nursery for conspiracy…" ("Edward II and Elizabethan Politics," Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1998), 103).
 Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second (1594), ed. Charles R. Forker (New York: Manchester UP, 1994), 166. All internal citations refer to this edition.
 William Dinsmore Briggs, Marlowe's Edward II (London: David Nutt, 1914), cii. In regard to this particular line and the reference to O'Neill, Briggs observes that "[n]either Holinshed, Fabyan, nor Stowe mentions an O'Neill as leading the Irish rebels who aided Edward Bruce in his endeavours to wrest Ireland from the English. It so happens that there was an O'Neill who was of more or less importance in this struggle, but it is probably that Marlowe had never heard of him. Marlowe had rather in mind some one of the O'Neill's who played so important a part in resisting the subjugation of Ireland by the English in the sixteenth century, perhaps Turlough O'Neill (d. 1595), who gave a great deal of trouble…" (141-2). Forker also makes this observation, as does Richard Rowland who writes in his edition that "[t]he printed sources make no mention of the O'Neill who was actually involved in the Irish hostilities of 1315-1318; but two 'wild' O'Neills, Turlough Luineach and Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, were persistently troubling the 'Pale'…throughout the 1580s and 1590s" (Edward II, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. III, ed. Richard Rowland Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, 104).
 There are four editions in particular that contain detailed footnotes on the discrepancies between Marlowe's play and his historical sources. See Briggs, Charlton and R. D. Waller (1933), Rowland, and Forker (1994). Only the Charlton and Waller and the Forker editions note the collapsing of Gaveston's two exiles into one.
 Two essays—Joel b. Altman's "'Vile Participation': The Amplificiation of Violence in Theater in Henry V" (in SQ 42.1; Spring, 1991) and Michael Neill's "Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories" (in SQ 45.1; Spring, 1994)—opened avenues of inquiry into representations of Ireland in early modern drama, which was then followed by Mark Thornton Burnett's and Ramona Wray's volume Shakespeare and Ireland New York: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997. Since this last publication, three scholars in particular—Willy Maley, Andrew Hadfield, and Andrew Murphy—have provided the most-definitive analyses of Ireland in early modern England and English literature. Maley, in "British Ill Done?: Recent Work on Shakespeare and British, English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh Identities," in Literature Compass 3 (2006), assesses "the critical preoccupation with the ways in which Shakespeare's drama responds to the circumstances of its own time," which he refers to as the plays' "topicality" (1). Earlier, in his essay "The Irish Text and Subtext of Shakespeare's English Histories," he invokes Jameson's notion of "subtext" in order to suggest that critical preoccupation with Ireland in early modern drama is no more than a projection of critics' desire, which, in turn, corresponds with the desire of the text to create an idea of Ireland: "'the "subtext" is not immediately present as such, not some common-sense external reality, not even the conventional narratives of history manuals, but rather must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact….' Subtextually speaking, do Shakespeareans bring into being the colonialism they claim to be reacting against?" (96-97). The term "proximity" is taken from Murphy's important study on the politico-cultural relations between England and Ireland, in which he challenges the stability of various binary structures that have been employed to describe the relationship between England and Ireland, claiming that "Ireland's colonial positioning…is shaped by the extended relation of 'proximity' between the two islands of Britain and Ireland…. The value of the term 'proximate'…is that it indicates, as well as a relationship of closeness, a certain kind of 'approximateness'—the Irish are, in some respects, very like the English, but they are also distinctly different from them…" (But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1999), 6). Michael Neill, in "Broken English and Broken Irish," interprets relations between England and Ireland in a similar vein, whereby he asserts that "in Shakespeare's history plays, Ireland functions as a recurrent point of reference—the crucial implied term in an unstable dialectic of national self-definition" (11). These critics have worked to show that binaries premised on the general idea of self/other (English/Irish, and so forth) are culturally constructed through a necessity—although impossible to achieve—to fashion an idea of a coherent, temporally and spatially bounded idea of the self (nation).
 Neill, "Broken English and Broken Irish," 11.
 James P. Myers, Jr., "Introduction," Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland, ed. James P. Myers, Jr. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1983, 3.
 Irish Statutes (1786), I. 176, cited in Constantia Maxwell, Irish History From Contemporary Sources (1509-1610) (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1923), 101.
 Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 161.)
 I am quoting from Jonathan Gil Harris's Foreign bodies and the body politic: Discourses of social pathology in early modern England New York: Cambridge U P, 1998, 45.
 King Philip II agreed to 6,000 soldiers, but approximately 3,400 arrived safely on Irish shores nine months later. See Steven G. Ellis's Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447-1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule New York: Longman, 1998, 349-350.
 Maley, in his essay "The Irish Text and Subtext," explains that "[t]hroughout the histories, Ireland is invoked as part of a back door theory (conduit for French or Spanish invasion); domino theory (if it goes, Wales and Scotland will follow, Kent and Cornwall too); and conspiracy theory (English rebels use it as a launch pad), and sometimes all three together" (102). Neill similarly describes Ireland's sodomitical function in England's demise: "if the Irish were essential to the formation of English identity, they also threatened it. For in the English mind, Ireland constituted not merely a defining limit but a dangerously porous boundary, a potential conduit of papal subversion…" (3).
 Gil Harris, 87.
 See also, as Ron Levao pointed out to me, Forker's note on page 173 about the mushroom that "springs up overnight."
 Alan Shepard, Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002, 1-2.
 Derricke, Image of Ireland (1581), cited in Willy Maley, Nation, State, and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 56.
 David Hillman, "The Inside Story," in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, eds. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor New York: Routledge, 2000, 310.
 Gregory Bredbeck, "Writing Edward II," in Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991), 48-77
 O'Neill, Staging Ireland, 68.
 The origin of this association is biblical, as David Stymeist succinctly writes: "perhaps the most virulent attack against sodomy [in Edward II] is the inclusion of Old Testament language concerning its 'unnatural' and 'base' nature" ("Status, Sodomy, and Theater in Marlowe's Edward II," SEL 44.2 (2004): 42). The OED includes the term's etymological origins in the 16th century as pertaining to someone or something "low on the moral scale."
 Mario DiGangi, "Marlowe, Queer Studies, and Renaissance Homoeroticism," in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1998, 197.
 Any strong piece of criticism within the past two decades that focuses on the play's homoeroticism has observed this fact. Gaveston as sodomite is the scapegoat for broader political and social concerns pertaining to the maintenance of the ideological state. See in particular Gregory Bredbeck's "Writing Edward II" in Sodomy and Interpretation; Emily C. Bartels's "the Show of Sodomy: Minions and Dominions in Edward II," Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 1993), 143-172; DiGangi's piece, op. cite; and most recently David Stymeist's "Status, Sodomy, and Theater in Marlowe's Edward II.
 Bredbeck, 61.
 DiGangi, 208.
 Bredbeck, 71.
 Burnett, 103.
 Holinshed, 338-339, cited in Briggs, 173.
 Briggs, 173 n. ll. 1751.
 Neill, 24.
 Bartels, 145.
 In the extant editions of the play, there are only two mentions of this condensation, or switch: Charlton and Waller note that Gaveston was exiled twice after Edward II came to the throne, and that "Marlowe runs the two occasions together" (39). Forker also highlights this fact in a footnote to his edition (189).
 O'Neill's book offers a comparative reading of Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI and Richard II with Marlowe's play. He argues that "in contrast to [Shakespeare's plays], where Ireland's offstage status confers a significant distance on it, in Marlowe's play it is a proximate space by virtue of its association with Gaveston" (97).
 Andrew Murphy, "Ireland as foreign and familiar in Shakespeare's histories," Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, ed. Ton Hoenselaars New York: Cambridge UP, 2004), 45.
 He writes: "Contextualization can lead to closure and containment. To see Shakespeare's preoccupation with Ireland stemming from the outbreak of the Nine Years War in 1594 and ending either with Essex's unsuccessful campaign or O'Neill's submission to Mountjoy in 1603 is narrow" ("The Irish Text and Subtext of Shakespeare's English Histories," 98).