Choices, challenges and chance in the first part of Dryden's Conquest of Granada

Alright, so time to 'fess up: I am studying a Restoration course this semester and am thus not always thinking about the mediaeval. So I am having non-mediaeval thoughts sometimes. Such as about The Conquest of Granada.

I like to think I'm still not a terrible person?

The first part of Dryden’s Conquest of Granada was written in a society regaining its confidence after the upheavals of the Civil Wars, the Protectorate and the Restoration. It depicts a nation besieged from without, blithely (and wrongly) confident in its own power despite strife and divisions within. However, Dryden does not focus on the city as a direct analogue for English society in the past generation. Instead he explores the human motivations behind each character’s shifts of loyalty that destabilise their society, challenging his audience to self-analysis in a way that perhaps they could not have stood five years before. Almanzor and Lyndaraxa stand out from the general confusion, not for their constancy, but for the control that they alone manage to retain over their own power of choice.

The play opens to an image of a society perfectly ordered, or perfectly controlled. Powerful men – the king and the patriarchs of the leading families – sit in luxury and discuss the day’s games, a mediaeval-style tournament of male prowess and display (under the eyes of the ladies, naturally), with some fashionable local colour in the form of Spanish bulls. As in any era, the expensive and' extravagantly organised games are a display and proof of centralised power; and naturally, as the King expects, the heroes of the establishment[1] affirm their superiority over their hypermasculine opponents. The only catch is that the audience doesn’t see it. Uninvolved in the off-stage action, the audience’s point of view is limited to that of the character-turned-narrator, who thereby asserts his control of the events and world portrayed. The spectator relies on the perceptions of the most interested parties - and their complacent view of their world is soon dispelled by the “confus’d noise within” (I.I.98) that signals the beginning of civil disorder.

The eruption of combatants onto the stage – shocking after the elegant inaction and controlled, distant violence of the preceding speeches – exposes the flaws in Boabdelin’s model of kingship. In his world view, his authority and the system that sustains it are built of rock, not of people: an independent structure that stands regardless of the differences of mere mortals. Magnificent though he may be initially in confronting the armed mobs, his words have no effect because he does not realise the possibility of his subjects having opinions and agendas of their own, nor the necessity of addressing these to resolve the cause of the conflict. To manage the passions of a nation a king must surely first acknowledge them, but the competing hatreds exchanged across him – murders, superiority of family claims, racial or religious contamination - pass by unnoticed. It is his very insistence on absolute authority rather than disputation that causes the situation to escalate, recalling Charles I’s stubborn obliviousness to the depth of the currents, until the water around his stately galleon churned visibly white. Almanzor’s challenge (“I alone am king of me” etc, I.I.206), predicated on individualised honour and choice rather than state-harnessed honour and obedience, is incomprehensible to Boabdelin, alien to his stone-built tower of a world, and consequently unanswerable.

Boabdelin’s tower, however, is soon shaken and divided by the factionalism of civil war, prompting a flurry of about-turns from almost every major character. Abdalla rebels, Abdelmelech vacillates, Boabdelin throws his lot in with just one clan of his empire, and Abenamar and Selin turn against their respective children, who both abandon filial obedience for love. Rather than let these instances simply pile up, Dryden links them with imagery of wind and water, shifting, insubstantial and helpless. Memorably, Almanzor calls Boabdelin a “weathercock of State”, who “stands so high, with so unfix’t a mind, / Two factions turn him with each blast of wind” (III.I.10-12). Abdalla applies this idea to humanity more generally when he laments the insubstantial nature of “frail reason... kick’d up in the Air / While sence weighs down the Scale”: human conscience is too easily “born away: And forc’d to count’nance its own Rebels sway” (III.I.58-63). The same imagery recurs throughout the play, undermining each individual’s attempts to explain away their decisions and changes. The effect of this is to attribute the mutability not to the direct cause of each occasion, but to basic human nature, subject to chance.

The first major defection, Abdalla’s, is also the one Dryden examines most closely, exposing his ongoing fascination with the interior reasonings of these changes. It is initiated by Lyndaraxa’s half-promise to renege on her affections for Abdelmelech, and cemented by the excuses offered him by one of Boabdelin’s strongest subjects. Abdalla’s own consciousness of the moral implications of his decision (II.I.174-253) makes him look curiously helpless. He portrays himself as “tost” like a helpless ship between “love and vertue” (II.I.184), opposing internal forces which will decide his fate for him without the possibility of his own intervention. His plea to Zulema to second his flagging honour so it might “renue the fight” (II.I.189) also seems to absolve him of any personal responsibility for his decision, and Zulema’s persuasive arguments against that honour conveniently finish the job. After the event, he shows no hesitation in laying the blame on Lyndaraxa, using the language of the scorned chivalric lover (III.I.72-74) and of chauvinistic mistrust:

This enchanted place,
Like Circe’s Isle, is peopled with a Race
Of dogs and swine, yet, though their fate I know,
I look with pleasure and am turning too. (III.I.95-98)

To cast Lyndaraxa as Circe implicitly turns Abdalla into unfortunate victim made bestial through womanly wiles, incapable of honour or conscious decision; but it also implies that all of Granada is peopled by men who cannot retain their shape, or lack the moral drive to wish to.

Abdelmelech and Abdalla are equally helpless in their inability to renounce Lyndaraxa. Despite the knowledge of her changeability, each lacks the power to choose to turn away, or to take any other path than the one down which she drives them. Abdelmelech, for example, perceives that her heart “was never fix’d, nor rooted deep in Love” (III.I.164); but, through her skilful handling, he is begging permission within twenty-five lines to pledge his own constancy to the inconstant target, while Lyndaraxa mocks him with the possibility of his own future defection (“You would be perjur’d if you should I fear”, III.I.190). By the time he presses Lyndaraxa to run away with him as “proof of love to me” (IV.II.36), the city is a mess, Almanzor has changed sides and the tides of war twice, and the audience is as conscious as Lyndaraxa of the fruitlessness of any such proof. In this world as presented, no person can be proven, and a person who trusts in such proof is left vulnerable and manipulable.

Lyndaraxa plays to reserve the moment of choice only because she is more conscious of this fact than are the men around her: she admits freely to herself that “I my self scarce my own thoughts can ghess, / So much I find ‘em varied by success” (IV.II.4-5). She speaks the unacknowledged creed of almost every other character in the play when she declares that she “will be constant yet, if Fortune can” (IV.II.7), consciously placing her own steadfastness in the power of that most fickle of deities. By contrast, each man appears to believe his current loyalty to be the only admissible possibility, leaving himself subject to Fortune’s whims.

Almanzor is an exception within this general turmoil. The difference lies not in his stability of loyalties – he is the most infamously changeable character of all – but in his consciousness of the power of his own choices. Instead of reacting to changes in Fortune, Almanzor causes them: if Boabdelin is a weathercock turned by each passing wind, Almanzor turns himself, knowing the wind will swing to follow him. Initially, Almanzor seems to stand in opposition to human fickleness. On his first appearance, he appears to provide a stable moral centre to the play, disproving the supremacy of the old regime and epitomising a new system based on personal honour and conscience. He stands up to the irrational judgements of a tyrannical king (I.I.204-231), advocates responsibility with power (I.I.218-20), notes the weakness in the current system (I.I.226-29, I.I.285-86, III.I.10-12) and offers to fix it by pinning the weathercock with his own immovable weight:

The word which I have giv’n shall stand like Fate;
...
But now he shall not veer: my word is past:
I’ll take his heart by th’roots, and hold it fast. (III.I.9-14)

With these words, the king seems but a butterfly, weak and movable: Almanzor, staunch and strong, standing for eternal principle against self-interest and factions’ advice. But Abdalla’s request immediately following unsettles this comforting impression. Remaining firm to his own individual “word”, Almanzor commits himself to the ultimate social disruption of civil war. As various characters comment, including Almanzor, from that point he takes on Fortune’s role (“I am your fortune; but am swift like her”, IV.I.30), and his actions govern the consequent reactions of the remaining characters. Almanzor is characterised not as a changeable subject to the vagaries of the Fortune’s wind, but as the agent of change, steering the fortunes of others “as winds drive storms before ‘em in the sky” (III.I.526).

The change is not in Almanzor, it should be noted, but in the audience’s growing realisation of their inability to trust any moral advocate, no matter how charismatic. The terms in which he agrees to help Abdalla (III.I.21-28), and announces to Boabdelin his intention to continue to change sides as he chooses (IV.I.54-55), are consistent with his first glorious speeches that win the stage to him. His very first line (“I cannot stay to ask which cause is best; / But this is so to me because opprest”, I.I.128-29), despite its consciousness of the arbitrary nature of any such judgement, shows a determination to retain control of the moral context of his decisions – and potentially the power to change his choice at a later date, if the first judgement should prove erroneous. By consciously assuming the power and responsibility for his shifts in loyalty, and acknowledging the possibility of Fortune changing, Almanzor reserves to himself the power of change rather than the Fortune-shaped reactions of his compatriots.

The sheer number of these human changes, once realised, makes the whole world appear mutable. The city of Granada has little concrete existence of its own. Unlike the village and houses of Sir Samuel Tuke’s The Adventures of Five Hours or the streets and rooms and islands of Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine, the writing of Conquest evokes no firm sense of locale. Most scenes could be set indoors or outdoors, in a hall or garden or a street, or on a blank stage. The strongest scene-painting in the play is the opening description of the bullfight (I.I.1-98), an event which takes place offstage and therefore exists only in the words of its narrators. While a hypothetical set might provide some context and colour, its effect is little next to the spoken word: the theatre’s lack of a cohesive authorial voice ensures that in most plays the characters and their words are the world. Juliet’s orchard is vividly alive, regardless of staging choices. But Granada, as a city, is barely there: she has her only substance in the minds of her inhabitants, and she is soon forgotten. As a society, she is only as substantial as a group illusion. In the first act, by questioning certain fundamental issues of social organisation - the proper nature of government and kingship (I.I.194-288), the right to inheritance and title (I.I.292-346) – Dryden destabilises the social structure binding the individual characters together. With these things recognised as insubstantial, the characters themselves are left to hold their world together unassisted. As each wanders off whithersoever he (or potentially she) would, the whole of social structure becomes illusory.

Despite the gloominess of such a point of view, the final vision, for its first audience, need not have been so bleak. For those who made the comparison between the events in Granada and the storms of the last generation, there remains sufficient distance in Dryden’s writing that they need not have assumed Granada’s downfall was England’s. There is no consistent parallel between any character in the play and any on England’s recent political stage, though there are occasional passing similarities. Granada’s character is sufficiently foreign, especially with the real Christians hovering at the gates, that the audience could be in no danger of identifying themselves completely with the Moors who comprise her population. Dryden challenges his audience to consider the nature, causes and moral implications of the changes humans make under pressure, but England is not Granada. England has come through the wars, is not doomed, and can consider these questions in retrospect, without the danger being pulled to pieces from within.

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[1] Almanzor, the triumphant stranger, is potentially a threat, and will so prove; but at this point the speakers claim him as their hero, the epitome of those qualities that they treasure in the world their words create. Though Abenamar recognises him as "more than man" (I.I.48), he appears to consider it only a matter of degree: the challenge implicit in this difference is not recognised.

The Air-brush and Red Blaming Pen of History

I've never read Froissart start to finish, only dipped into bits depending on what I'm researching at the time. And now that I've set out to read his Chronicles as a whole, I'm becoming increasingly relieved that I only ever quoted his version of Edward II's reign and deposition to demonstrate "tales that were told later about these events", rather than "how these events happened, no really, and this is crucial to my argument". I'm going to assume his 'historical' value rises as he gets closer to his own time and events that he witnessed, but the way he conflates certain characters and events and smooths over others is, in the light it sheds on the transmission and construction of history, more fascinating than accuracy.

Edward II, he claims, is "no part of our subject" (5)[1]. Still, he spends a few chapters narrating his reign - primarily, it seems, to provide contrast with those of his father and his son. For "it has often been observed that between two valiant kings there has most commonly been one less sufficient both in wit and valour" (4). When the recent family history of your (erstwhile/occasional) patron includes events like, oh, said patron's mother overthrowing his father with the help of her lover and setting the patron up as king in his father's place and then being overthrown by the new king who then hangs her lover like a thief, there's some delicate narration to be done, and this is probably going to necessitate finding a few scapegoats to shoulder all their own blame and as much as possible of everyone else's. Edward II is definitely one of Froissart's scapegoats. Positive references back to Edward I ("valiant, prudent, wise and bold" (5)) prove that Our Hero did come of good, strong lineage: his father was just an aberration.

Another scapegoat is Hugh Despenser, who takes the blame for his own deeds, most of Edward II's worst behaviour (as opposed to his simple incompetence), the entirety of the disputes between king and barons, the death of Thomas of Lancaster ("a wise and saintly man" (7)), and, obligingly, the role of Piers Gaveston. Gaveston doesn't appear in Froissart's history at all; instead, we are told that Edward II "truly governed his country with great cruelty and injustice, by the advice of Sir Hugh Despencer, with whom he had been brought up since childhood" (ibid). Now, on the face of it, this could be absolutely correct. He was, in the latter and most notorious part of his reign, strongly influenced by Despenser. And Despenser was one of the ten pueri in custodia hand-picked by Edward I as suitable companions to his growing son in the 1290s. But so was Piers Gaveston (Edward I really knew how to pick them), and it was he to whom the young Edward most adhered, he who was to influence the formation of his personality, political attitudes and developing relationship with his father and barons and his own crown until well after Gaveston was murdered in 1312. Despenser, by contrast, wasn't really in Edward's favour until 1316 at the earliest, and doesn't appear to have substantially affected his decisions before his appointment as chamberlain in 1318[2]. And that's without even considering all the lesser favourites in between and around those times, like Roger d'Amory and Arundel.

But that's complicated, and creates an unnecessary duplication of the main villain of the piece, which, as any film writer will tell you, confuses the audience. There was always a favourite, and he was someone who'd been raised with the king since childhood, and Edward's government was strongly influenced (or just carried out) by him. And Hugh Despenser fits that description, is easiest to villainise (Gaveston gave half the barons insulting nicknames, which is funny), is most memorable and got executed in a horrible way, so he's much the best candidate for the scapegoat hat.

However, there's absolutely no way we can make his hat big enough to take the blame for Isabella invading England, the dubious legality of deposing a king (or forcing him to abdicate, if you prefer). So we need scapegoat #3. The obvious candidate? Roger Mortimer.

Unexpectedly, then, he barely appears at all in the account of the invasion. Edward II takes all the blame for this one. Isabella escapes his tyranny, fleeing to France with her son[3]. She hears the pleas of the oppressed English, wishes to help them, pleads with king of France and count of Hainault for help (on her knees, weeping, because this is proper and appropriate and very touching), Sir John of Hainault swears to her that "you may count on me as your own knight" (12), which is all very admirable, and he helps her enter England. Naturally, the country rises up to meet her and rejects Edward. Mortimer appears once, just after the queen has (independently) decided to answer her people's call:

Then she left her lodging as quickly and quietly as she could, with her son, who was then about fifteen years old, the Earl of Kent, Sir Roger Mortimer and all the other English knights that had come away with her. They passed right through France... (11)

So right now, Mortimer's function is to avoid stealing Isabella's glory (er, sorry - piety). We need Isabella to be a hero for now, and we don't need him as a villain yet, not until after Edward II and Despenser are out of the picture and we come to the awkward question of Isabella's tyranny. At that point, he will be necessary not only evilly convince Edward III to kill his uncle Kent and to be the focus of Edward III's coup, but also to retrospectively take the blame for any doubts still lingering about Isabella's actions in and after the invasion.

And then, of course, there's the awkward question of adultery. The woman in question is, remember, Froissart's patron's mother, and possibly the most influential woman in the country's memory. Froissart does his best to side-step it - largely by the simple expedient already mentioned, of leaving Mortimer out of the history altogether. If one were to try to pair Isabella's name with that of any man over the course of the campaign, it would be Sir John of Hainault: but he firmly defined their relationship at the outset as a very proper lady-and-her-champion courtly trope. There is a hint of adultery, or rather of some vague inappropriateness, before Mortimer's name is ever mentioned, when Isabella in France is warned that "in all truth, if she did not behave discreetly, the King her brother would have her sent back to her husband in England, and her son with her" (11). But this is muddied by context: it is preceded by Isabella's distress at hearing of England's unhappiness, and followed by "because it did not please the King of France that she should stay away from her husband" (ibid). So the indiscretion is there, if one knows the story, but it's as far from suggestive as he can manage.

Similarly, the only hint we have before the denouement of any relationship between Isabella and Mortimer is painted primarily as mutual interest and influence, and it comes on the very verge of their catastrophe, when Froissart is piling up the tension against them:

The young King of England was ruled for a long time by the advice of his mother and of Edmund Earl of Kent and Sir Roger Mortimer, as you have heard. At length jealousy arose between these two lords, to the extent that Sir Roger Mortimer, with the connivance of the Queen Mother, advised the King that the Earl of Kent was going to poison him... (51)

Leaving aside what Froissart may or may not have known about the actual accusations against Kent[4], this neatly places the Blame of Evilness on Mortimer, while allowing Isabella's "connivance" to the extent that it shows a powerful bloc working against young Edward taking on the full robe of government, elevating Edward III while demeaning his mother as little as possible. Where there is glory to be seen in the actions of Isabella's party, she is allowed to take full responsibility, adorned in the robes of chivalry's belle dame; where something unsightly peeks through, she is, naturally, a woman, and is absolved from true responsibility by the weakness of her sex.

But then, of course, came the part that Froissart couldn't ignore: that little detail where Isabella was suspected of being pregnant with Mortimer's child, and Mortimer's downfall. What he can do, of course, is a) assert that it was all rumour and he can't speak to its truth, and b) shift the focus away by using that as a prologue to AND THEN EDWARD REALISED MORTIMER WAS EVIL AND SMOTE HIM MIGHTILY. And to accentuate this MIGHTY SMOTIFYING, how was Mortimer killed? Not merely hanged as Murimuth and pretty much every contemporary source would have it, oh no:

[The barons and nobles] replied that Mortimer should suffer the same fate as Sir Hugh Despenser, and this sentence was carried out without delay or mercy. Mortimer was dragged through the streets of London on a hurdle, and then tied to a ladder in an open square. His private parts were cut off and thrown onto a fire, as were his hearts and entrails, since he was guilty of treason in thought and deed. His body was then quartered and sent to the four largest cities in England, the head remaining in London. Such was the fate of Sir Roger Mortimer; may God forgive him his sins. (52)

And so all the evil people were punished evilly for their evil, and the rest of them lived happily ever after.

Now, I don't suggest that every instance in which Froissart varies from what we (more or less) know to have happened is a deliberate and conscious attempt on his part to wrest history into a more fitting course. I haven't yet managed to track down a copy of Jean le Bel's chronicles, which I understand Froissart was to a large extent following (alright, copying) for the earlier books. So for some of the "Froissart"s above one perhaps ought to read "Jean le Bel" - and for some, one must surely read "rumour, folklore, that old bloke in the pub and Everyone Knows".

I skimmed through a high-school or undergrad level book yesterday on the events of the English Civil Wars (it had diagrams!). One phrase caught my eye - it said something about "to understand this period, one must..." Well, why must I? Why can't I just take the facts and - well, turn them around my way and make my own understanding of them?

To understand, one must make history into a story in one's mind. Froissart, and the people around him, had certain tropes and shapes into which the facts and events and clouds of history had to fit to become a good, coherent story. It can't be a story until it has meaning - and sometimes it needs to take a few hammer-blows first.


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[1] All quotes are from the edition of the chronicles trans. and ed. John Jolliffe (New York: Modern Library, 1968). Eventually I will get around to reading them in French.

[2] Adam Murimuth doesn't find it necessary to refer to him before his first exile in 1320.

[3] In itself another example of simplifying events by placing blame and telescoping the sequence. Isabella went to France on Edward's instructions to negotiate terms with the king, her brother, who eventually agreed to receiving homage (for the French lands held by the English crown) not from Edward II but from his son the prince. Edward II was reluctant to send his heir over into the custody of his wife and her family, but eventually consented, sending a large loyal retinue with him. Isabella managed to manoeuvre people and events such that the retinue was sent home, and she was left holding the baby, as it were.

[4] Though if he had heard that the charge was actually about trying to help his brother (former Edward II, officially dead) escape from the place where he had been firmly assured by many notable and trustworthy people that he was, in fact, still being held prisoner, and should probably still be king... well, that was probably a good version of the story to leave out, because there's a whole mess of nasty legitimacy business there that I can't imagine Edward III would have wanted him to drag out. Come to that, I translated Kent's answer to the charges the other day: maybe I should post that.

Notes on Chaucer's Dido and Fame

This is a quick draft of something I may rework in a later paper to reflect on Criseyde and her understanding of the power of her own speech. I think the central ideas of the House of Fame are more focussed on trouthe and its representation than speech per se, so I'm skewing it slightly to my own ends here; but it's just thoughts, for now. Given it's meant to be used later, it doesn't really have a thesis, nor any kind of shape.

All line references are to the first book of the House of Fame, in the Riverside Chaucer.

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The moment in which Dido falls for Aeneas is narrated twice, ascribed once to the intervention of Venus and once to Aeneas’ stories of himself. An intervention by Venus to cause sudden love is a familiar romantic figure, but so is the woman falling in love with tales of the adventuring man. Stories of Yvain’s valour win Laudine over twice. Guenevere’s heart gradually softens as she hears of Lancelot’s adventures, and Bertilak’s wife tells Gawain that she loves him because of the stories she has heard of his valour and courtesy. But the Gawain of rumour has a questionable relationship to the Gawain we see, Yvain himself is hidden once by an invisibility ring and once by a pseudonym, and news of Lancelot is slow, erratic and rumour-coloured. In this case, the fact that Aeneas himself narrates his stories could give his first-hand account greater authority, eliminating that unreliable middleman, Fame. But of course, a man may have any number of reasons for misrepresenting the truth about himself; and Chaucer undercuts the sincerity of the proceedings here by casting a shadow of irrationality and haste over both accounts the crucial moment.

And, shortly of this thyng to pace,
She made Eneas so in grace
Of Dido, quene of that contree,
That, shortly for to tellen, she
Becam hys love, and leet him doo
Al that weddynge longeth too. (240-44)

The repetition of “shortly” emphasises the immediate effect of Venus’ work. So far, this is a story of the gods’ games with mortals, and we expect her to fall in love instantly, and do not question its rationality, psychological likelihood or the moral implications of Venus’ actions. But the ominous tone of the last line, censorious or compassionate, hints at a woman deceived or tricked into not only acting but feeling contrary to her will, to her lasting detriment. And then we see this god’s game from the other side, the actors playing out the plot twist that the producer decreed. The narrator brushes aside the tale of “the manere / How they aqueynteden in fere” (249-50) as too “long” - a word he uses twice in two lines – to return to the rapidity of the seduction:

Ther sawgh I grave how Eneas
Tolde Dido every caas,
That hym was tyd upon the see.
And after grave was, how shee
Made of him, shortly, at oo word,
Hyr lyf, hir love, hir luste, hir lord; (253-58)

We know, of course, that “every caas / that hym was tyd upon the see” does, in fact, make a very impressive story, but the dry brevity of the narration makes her response seem impossibly fervent. The breathless passion of “Hir lyf, hir love, hir luste, hir lord” belongs to the climax of a whole-hearted romantic scene, not the erratic and slightly bemused narration of this dreamer. Its very rhythm feels out of place here - even without the return of that word, “shortly”, snagging the syntax in the middle of the line before it and reminding the ear of Venus’ intervention. Dido’s sudden infatuation is unnatural, and feels so; and we know it will lead to her death. Even before the narrator casts doubt on the truth of Aeneas’ stories (“Wenynge hyt had al be so, / As he hir swor” 262-63), or reveals that “he to hir a traytour was” (267), there is a sense of unfairness about both Venus’ too-partial actions[1] and Aeneas’ too-powerful words.

Dido’s love for Aeneas, on the human level, is presented as the direct result of Aeneas’ words. The man she falls in love with is the man she hears about, not the man she sees – and it is this man “unknowen” (270) who drives her to her death. This potential discrepancy between “apparence” and “existence” (265-66) is at the heart of the House of Fame, and is usually, though not invariably, expressed in concern over words: their weight and power, and their questionable ability to represent reality. Aeneas ascribes less weight to his words than does Dido. For her, they represent reality: for him, they are a deliberate manipulation of reality, a means to an end, conjuring a man who can impress Dido (and perhaps himself), easily set aside for his departure. Dido is left to lament her misconception, that “your bond / That ye have sworn” (321-22) does not have the power she believed it had, to “holde yow stille here with me” (324).

The narrator echoes Aeneas’ actions in the more cynical story of Theseus and Ariadne. Despite everything that “he had y-swore to here, / On al that ever he myghte swere” (421-22), Theseus has no qualms about abandoning Ariadne when her usefulness (or her appeal) has passed. Like Aeneas, Theseus regards his words primarily as a tool: powerful enough to win Ariadne over while he needs her, but ultimately disposable. They have no binding effect on him, and there is no necessity for them to represent reality accurately.

Dido’s experiences alter her perception. In the world that she sees now, men have “such godlyhede / In speche”, but “never a del of trouthe” (330-31). Aeneas’ exposure of the gap between fame and reality has opened her eyes - “Now see I wel” (334) – and left her bitterly aware of fame’s contradictory nature: insubstantial, but ruinously powerful. While it may not reflect reality accurately, its effect on the lives it touches has real substance.

O, wel-awey that I was born!
For thorgh yow is my name lorn,
And alle myn actes red and songe
Over al thys lond, on every tonge.
O wikke Fame! - for ther nys
Nothing so swift, lo, as she is! (345-350)

Like Criseyde, she laments the irretrievable loss of her good name, and the injustice of the words that will memorialise her (353-60). Fame has ruined her throughout her life and beyond her death, but its uncertain nature paradoxically renders her own speech too insubstantial to recreate her in a positive image:

Al hir compleynt ne al hir moone,
Certeyn, avayleth hir not a stre. (362-63)

Uncertainty about the power and accuracy of one's own words extends beyond the characters carved on the wall, even to the narrator. Virgil's robust “Arma virumque cano” becomes a tentative “I wol now singe, if that I can, / The armes, and al-so the man”. (143-44). The narrator's reaction on leaving Venus' temple casts doubt on the poetic form itself. His prayer for protection against illusion undermines the tangibility and reliability of everything that has gone before - a poem relating and discussing the events of another oft-poesied poem - and therefore, by implication, on the validity and “auctoritee” of poetic tradition. How can poetry convey truth, after all, if the poets themselves are at odds with each other?[2] The appearance of the eagle, traditionally clear-sighted and immune to illusion, seems a promising answer to his prayer, and his feathers are the gold of purity and clarity and truth. But we've just read a whole book warning us against deceptive appearances: “Hyt is not al gold that glareth” (272).

The man Dido fell in love with was created by words, created by man, not the reality of the man created by God. There is a hook there, regarding the public and private aspects of speech – Fame vs. vice/virtue, and how each affects and effects the person – but that is for another day!



[1] From a divine perspective Venus' actions are internally consistent, but from a human level they appear as arbitrary as Fame's later judgements to her petitioners.

[2] After writing this, I read Nick Havely's introduction to HoF (Chaucer's dream poetry, eds. Helen Phillips and N. R. Havely, London: Longman, 1997), in which he makes a similar point about Chaucer problematising his own medium, the book. When the word “boke” occurs at line 426 it “refers to an authoritative witness to a woman's fidelity and trust [Ariadne's for Theseus]... Yet only three lines later “the booke” is just as emphatically invoked to justify Aeneas' betrayal of Dido”. The effect of this is to “emphasize the medium's capacity both to convey and celebrate 'truth' in love, whilst... compounding and perpetuating falsehood” (114). And of course, that takes us into the question of whether fiction is lies, and what Chaucer would have understood by “fiction”, to what extent he considered Virgil's stories as history and what ethical obligations he would have felt he had to the historical figures he himself was depicting, which is quite another tangent on the topic of fame and memory in itself.

Chaucer and Mozart: Twin souls!

Alright, so the last post wasn't really mediaeval in subject. Neither is this one - but it has a mediaeval connection, in that I leap-frog from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Mozart along a common thread. Never mind that each leap is 200 years long.

I was chatting to a cellist friend, who's staying in this house while rehearsing for an audition for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. She mentioned that she'd like to get to know the operatic repertoire a little better, and... well, it ended up with me having one of my besotted little raves about the three Mozart/da Ponte operas, particularly my favourite, Così fan tutte.

For those who don't know it - well, it's easy to summarise. Remarkably easy, for an opera. One of the reasons I love it is for its beautiful structure - it has a lovely symmetry, both musically and dramatically, which makes it a joy to listen to and gives it the perfect action curve for a theatrical piece. There are six characters - three women, three men (two sopranos, one mezzo, one tenor, two basses - symmetry!), consisting of two pairs of lovers, their older male friend (Don Alfonso) and a ladies' maid, Despina. Don Alfonso makes a bet with the headstrong, enthusiastic young men that, despite their passionate belief in their lovers' fidelity, no woman can possibly remain faithful. They're not made for fidelity, and so "così fan tutte" - all women behave like that. To prove the women's fidelity, the younger men agree to pretend to go off to war, then to dress as foreigners and each attempt to win the fiancee of the other man. Eventually, it works; a wedding feast is prepared, and in the middle of it the men slip off and return in their own persons to upbraid their erstwhile fiancees for unfaithfulness.

A two-sentence summary like that is a little misleading. The young men (Guglielmo and Ferrando) take most of the active verbs, reducing Don Alfonso's role to the initial bet, their lovers' to passive ciphers, and leaving the maid Despina out altogether. But Don Alfonso and Despina in fact run the whole affair - Alfonso is the puppet master from start to finish, and lets Despina think she is one too, though he doesn't let her in on the whole affair and she is, by the end, reduced to humiliation with her mistresses. Despina also provides an important thematic counterpoint, in that she tries to urge the women on to love, asserting feminine independence from men and their ability to choose their own path (while Alfonso maintains they have no choice but to fall), and pointing out repeatedly that men are just as unfaithful as women, if not more so. The summary, however, is not misleading in one thing: the two noblewomen (Fiordiligi and Dorabella) are passive. But to what degree, and just how - this is the critical problem!

Whenever I explain Così to anyone, I usually find myself excusing it. Don Alfonso is proved right - women are like that - so it can come across as horribly misogynistic. Its performance history has suffered from that - I believe in the nineteenth century it was rewritten to have Despina reveal the secret to her ladies early on, so that they are only playing along for most of the second act, and turn the tables on the men in the final scene. But you see, knowing the opera, and knowing (to a certain extent) Mozart and his librettist da Ponte... I can't believe that we are meant to watch it so superficially. If it were a work of non-operatic literature, no one would believe that was the intent. Perhaps operatic audiences are just too used to having morals on the surface, simple but very loud answers, tragic or comic. If the point of the opera were simply "ha, see how faithless women are!" we would be laughing at them by the end. But we aren't - the level of sympathy and the psychological depth in the music of the women - particularly in the second act, when they feel themselves beginning to give way - are such that we increasingly rebel against Don Alfonso's instructions - just as the young men are becoming too drawn in to back out. We can't lay blame easily - the women are played on, Despina is just going along with her cheerful philosophy of 'do unto men as they do unto us', the young men pledged their honour as soldiers to obey Don Alfonso's instructions for 24 hours in the blithe confidence that they would win the bet easily, and Alfonso - well, the indignant lads forced him to promise to prove his assertion, at swordpoint. Over breakfast! And the final scene is heartbreaking. They have to marry - there's no other way forward, no other way to end the opera and insist that it is a comedy, Alfonso and social expectation and genre constrain them, but the music... how on earth are these couples going to ever trust each other, or anyone else, ever again?

It's generally believed that the opera was commissioned - Lorenzo da Ponte and Mozart did not have the freedom to choose their plot, could not decide that the women would remain faithful and disprove the adage, but they could choose how they treated it: spreading the blame, exposing the cruelty to all parties involved of the situation, the plot, the actions of the characters that weren't meant to be cruel, that were all a bit of fun until... And suddenly, as I was explaining this, I realised that this line of argument was familiar - not just from my own previous rants about the opera, but from much more recently:

For which right now myn herte ginneth blede,
And now my penne, allas! With which I wryte,
Quaketh for drede of that I moot endyte.
For how Criseyde Troilus forsook,
Or at the leste, how that she was unkinde,
Mot hennes-forth ben matere of my book,
As wryten folk through which it is in minde.
Allas! That they sholde ever cause finde
To speke hir harm... (Troilus and Criseyde, IV.12-20)

And:

Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde
Ferther than the story wol devyse.
Hir name, allas! Is publisshed so wyde,
That for hir gilt it oughte y-noe suffyse.
And if I mighte excuse hir any wyse,
For she so sory was for hir untrouthe,
Y-wis, I wolde excuse hir yet for routhe. (V.1093-1099)

And so on. Chaucer's uneasiness with Criseyde's fidelity is well-known, of course, and there's little point quoting more of it. But the attitude in both cases seems to me very similar. The essential difference, I think, is the necessary lack of authorial presence in a stage production. But is it necessary? Not really. It's easy enough to add an authoritative moral presence - either through a consistent moral message that's easily detectable (often put in the mouth of the chorus), or physically, in the form of a character whose opinions are meant to be taken as sound judgement (and who is usually, in opera, disregarded, otherwise the tragic ending might be tragically averted). And then, of course, there's the even simpler expedient of sticking to plots that completely fail to challenge the audience's judgement at all and go for their effect by either tickling or punching in the belly. This is the majority of opera.[1]

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that disrupting the easy moral closure of any theatrical piece requires conscious effort on the part of the composer/playwright. Well, either that or extreme carelessness. Which brings us to our convenient midway point, he who made a theatrical piece out of Troilus and Criseyde, he who was the expert at avoiding giving us any hint of his real voice: William Shakespeare.

But even for Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida is remarkably unstable in terms of a moral base. The introduction to the play in the Norton Shakespeare[2] details admirably the competing codes for evaluating actions and events that are thrown at us in a dizzying array within just the first few scenes of the play. Those of them that do recur are never finally resolved, unless it is to be proved insufficient. The only character who might be seen as finally admirable is Hector, and his code is, finally, not sufficient either: we see him abandon it for the sake of glory when he agrees to sell away Criseyde so that he can have his duel with Achilles, and his adherence to it in the end deprives Troy of its greatest protector, Priam of his son, Andromache of her husband, his son of a father, his city of a future. Nothing that is presented to us in the course of the play suffices to judge it: they are all proved limited points of view, belonging only to the characters that speak them, incapable of comprehending the whole world. The scene that brings this most sharply into focus is quite near the end: the scene in which Criseyde, in the Greek camp, finally gives herself to Diomedes. She and he talk in the centre; she comments on her own actions; Troilus and Ulysses watch and comment on that scene; Thersites watches actors and watchers, commenting on all of them; and the audience sees them all. The instability and limitation of every judgement passed onstage is witnessed by the final set of watchers, putting them in a privileged position and inviting them to judge for themselves, but demonstrating in the process the limitations of any judgement at all.

So why the distancing? why the instability? Is Shakespeare disassociating himself from the story, drawing back as Chaucer the narrator does? I don't think so - at least, not in the same way. But certainly, to focus specifically on the question of harsh judgement on the fickle woman - it would be much harder to ascribe any comments passed about her in the play to Shakespeare himself than it is to, for example, imagine him agreeing with the final dismissal of Don John as a villain in Much Ado About Nothing. His attitude to Cressida, so far as it can be detected (which is barely at all) doesn't seem to me very similar to the attitudes of Chaucer and Mozart/da Ponte to their unfaithful women; but there may be a thread of connection there.

Mozart and da Ponte don't dissociate themselves to nearly the same extent. Neither have a narrative "I" to intrude into the theatre - but Mozart was literally in the theatre, remember, dominating the performance in a way that Shakespeare couldn't, even as an actor. As a conductor, he led it, and as composer... well. He gives it a soul which is much easier to trace, to feel, than grasping through printers' errors and actors' amendments for Shakespeare's meanings. The warmth and tenderness in his music, the wit and the humanity and the delicate distinctions in the reactions of parallel characters in identical situations... they are human, where they could so very easily remain ciphers to the plot, as the women seem determined to remain ciphers to social constructions.

... And now I think of it, there are a remarkable number of eavesdropping/spying scenes in the opera too - especially in the second act, where the seduction starts to take effect, and the characters start to obsessively analyse their own actions and feelings, as well as those of the others onstage.

That was entirely too long a post, wasn't it. If anyone read to the end - well done!

I did mention Mozart makes me rave besottedly, right?


[1] As a former singer who adores opera, I have licence to say so, just as I'm allowed by virtue of nationality to poke fun at Steve Irwin's accent.

[2] I don't remember who wrote it, and my Norton is in Melbourne and I am in Adelaide. This will have to do for a citation for now.

Essay on Edward II

Edit: This is now the second draft of my essay on Edward II, for the course The Mediaeval Body at Melbourne University. The inspiration came from a post by Alianore, and she was also kind enough to point me to a few very useful sources - thank you!

Still a little editing and proof-reading to do, of course, but it's much tidier than it was. And, of course, I need to double-check everything to make sure I'm not entirely misrepresenting what actually happened. Since I'm not used to writing history essays (I'm usually more of a literature person), this is all an exciting and unfamiliar process for me.

To that end, those of you who have spent a good deal more time than I have studying Edward, feel free to tell me where I've gone wrong, in large ways or small!

------------------------



The rise of queer and gender criticism has led to a tendency to regard certain historical figures and events primarily from that point of view. Reinterpreting the reign of Edward II in the light of these critical views does help us to understand certain aspects of his life. However, it is possible to overstate this angle, to use suggestive phrases in the later chronicles to reconstruct the story of the barons’ objections to Gavaston and Despenser as a protest against transgressive sexual relations with the monarch. There are, in fact, very few hints that his relationships with Gavaston and Despenser were perceived as sexual in nature prior to 1326, or even the question was considered particularly important. It was not until Isabella and Mortimer invaded England that these accusations began to circulate. The propaganda used to involve the populace in deposition and the resulting popular perception of Edward used sodomy as an allegory for other kinds of transgressive behaviour. He had disrupted public order, the tiers of rank and the natural flow of the economy, largely to aid his favourites. In doing so, he had subverted the accepted social metaphor of the king as head of his country, the man as head of his wife. The graphic imagery of Edward’s body as subject and object of the realm’s disorders multiplied in the wake of his deposition to retrospectively narrate the country’s experience. His undeniable weakness as a monarch, together with depictions like Geoffrey le Baker’s chronicle and Marlowe’s play, encouraged later generations to characterise him as a sodomitical rex inutile – the perfect subject for enthusiastic re-examination by proponents of queer criticism. But whether Edward’s relationships with Gavaston and Despenser contained a sexual element is not, ultimately, historically important. What is beyond doubt is the strength of Edward’s emotional attachment to each of these men, and it is that, together with contemporary perceptions of these relationships, that had the greatest effect on events.


Piers Gavaston: hot-headed young Gascon knight, doubtless devilishly handsome, exiled by Edward I to keep him away from the future king, recalled three months later as soon as the old king died, far preferred by Edward II to his mere wife, recipient of lavish gifts by the king (including the earldom of Cornwall), denied nothing he asked for, with a habit of swaggering about the court and giving the other earls insulting nicknames, exiled twice more at the insistence of the earls, recalled each time by Edward, finally arrested and murdered on the orders of the most powerful earl in the country, leaving his corpse unburied for years as Edward swore revenge on his dear friend’s murderers – it has all the ingredients of the best star-crossed love stories. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the earls were acting out of homophobia or righteous defence of a neglected queen. Despite elaborately public displays of affection, in defiance of his father and the opinion of his court, contemporary records have left us no whisper of sodomy. On returning to England with his new bride early in 1308, Edward’s first action on disembarking is said to have been an enthusiastic and demonstrative greeting of Gavaston, kissing and embracing him in front of the crowd, his young wife and her royal brothers and uncles1. The same man received the most prominent role in his coronation (dressed in royal purple and pearls, “non regis sed gloriam propriam quaerens”, according to the Annales Paulini (262)), Edward’s constant attention throughout the coronation feast, and all Edward’s wedding gifts – even those from his bride’s father, the king of France (AP 262)2. Not surprisingly, Isabella’s brothers are said to have stood up, shouted angrily at Edward and stormed out of the hall. Within four months the English barons had forced Gavaston back into exile. By anyone’s standards, this is a gross failure of tact and international diplomacy, and the reactions of the French representatives and English earls are understandable even if they read the relationship as remaining emotionally within the bounds of normal male-male friendship.


Most of the evidence from the earlier part of Edward II’s reign suggests the earls’ quarrel with Gavaston was on quite different grounds – not least the insulting nicknames. The official records of the Articles against Gavaston in 1308 and the Ordinances of 1311 agree with the Vita in their assessment of Gavaston. The Articles state that he “disinherits the crown... puts discord between the king and his people, and he draws to himself the allegiance of men by as stringent an oath as does the king, thereby making himself the peer of the king and so enfeebling the crown” (English Historical Documents 526). The twentieth Ordinance accuses him of “drawing to himself royal power and dignity”, and goes into more detail about specific acts of offence, such as “causing blank charters under the great seal of the king to be sealed to the deceit and disinheritance of the king and of his crown” (EHD 532). These documents are, by their nature, unlikely to contain more than veiled allusions to a suspected sexual relationship, but that isn’t really an issue. The extensive list of objections to Gavaston shows just how destructive his relationship with Edward was perceived to be in the public sphere. There was no need for the earls to turn to the private sphere to explain the necessity to be rid of Gavaston. In fact, the first sentence of the Articles explains the political advantage of dwelling on the public, judicial failures of the king:

Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person and are more closely related to the crown than to the king’s person; and this is evident because, before the crown has descended to the person, no allegiance is due to him. (EHD 525)

Having described the objections to Gavaston and the dilemma that results when the king, as head of the judicial system, is partial and “will not right a wrong”, the articles conclude that “he cannot be judged or attainted by an action brought according to law, and therefore... the people rate him as a man attainted and adjudged, and pray the king that... he will accept and execute the award of the people” (EHD 526). In this way, the disastrous effect of Gavaston’s influence over Edward was turned to advantage, allowing “the people” (a euphemism for the barons, at this stage) to concoct distinctions between the traditional ‘two bodies’ of the king, deny the authority of his mere physical manifestation and take matters into their own hands.
Chronicle and other evidence suggests that the public perception of the situation was a simplified version of the barons’ understanding. The Vita Edwardi Secundi - almost certainly written before 1326, and so not coloured by knowledge of those events - suggests that the reason Gavaston was universally hated was twofold: arrogance, and monopolising the king’s ear (Vita 27-29). Less analytical, the Annales Paulini gives a similar picture but attributes Gavaston’s unpopularity to events such as the Wallingford tournaments, rather than breaking these events down into ongoing frictions (AP 259). Even allowing for the unmentionable nature of sodomy, it seems that at this point the barons did not need that string in their bow, with the result that there were no widely known rumours about Edward’s sexuality.


When Piers Gavaston threw his weight about, it affected the nobility. When Hugh Despenser started to throw his about, it affected all of England. More ambitious than Gavaston, more ruthless, unquestionably more cruel, Despenser “wretchedly disinherited many, forced some into exile, extorted unjust ransoms from many, [and] collected a thousand pounds’ worth of land by means of threats” (Vita 195). He was canny at accumulating money, but neither he nor Edward had the knack of spending it well. The economic distress of the country, coupled with Edward’s extravagance in spending money on himself and his friends, eventually prompted the pope to write urging financial moderation and care (Saaler 89-90). During this period, all of Edward I’s advances into Scotland were lost to the determined leadership of Robert Bruce, who also took over much of Ireland. Powicke points out the emphasis on military failures in the reasons given for Edward’s deposition. The seriousness of this in mediaeval notions of kingship is suggested by warrior-saint allegories like Lydgate’s story of St Edmund, whose virginity – ie, the preservation of the integrity of his physical body – was closely linked with his military success, and therefore his ability to maintain the analogous integrity of England (Lewis). Law and order deteriorated, even as Edward and the Despensers tightened their hold on the upper levels of society in order to maintain their position. The beginning of famine can hardly have helped. In a society whose belief system included the image of the king as figurative head of the country, and a vengeful God not averse to punishing the whole body for the sins or inadequacies of that head, the universal human instinct to blame authority figures for crises must have manifested itself even more strongly than usual.


The rebellion and subsequent call for Edward’s deposition were handled with a keen eye to public support. Isabella’s mourning weeds, her care to keep her adulterous relationship with Mortimer out of sight and to identify her cause with that of Lancaster (Thomas of Lancaster, killed in 1322 for rising against Edward and Despenser, was now widely regarded as a saint), to visit shrines as she travelled “quasi peregrinando” (AP 314), to stay on the right side of the populace and to present herself as a rejected wife anxious to save the country and set her son on his rightful throne, formed masterful and effective propaganda. It was now, as it became necessary to engage the people in the momentous business of overthrowing and deposing an inadequate king, that the metaphor of sodomy became a useful shorthand for other forms of cultural transgression. Ormrod hints that it also worked to obscure Isabella’s own contraventions of marital and gender rules – usurping royal power with her lover – by laying similar charges against Edward (Ormrod 27). The idea of Despenser subverting the proper relationship between the king and his lawful wife, first invoked by Isabella when she refused to return from France on Edward’s command (Vita 243), was repeated in various speeches and proclamations. The judgement on Hugh Despenser, for example, is a long catalogue of abuses of power, containing several references to “notre treshonurable dame la Roigne”, and the “descord” Despenser had created between her and her husband as well as “entre notre seignour le Roie et entre les autres gentz du Roialme”, to the “grant deshonur de lui et de son people” (Holmes 265-7).


Even at this time, however, the focus of criticism was not any one action of Edward or Despenser, but their disruption of the proper order. The necessity to simplify events to provoke popular sentiment led to a telescoping of blame. Financial, military and judicial failings, offences against the church and social order, were simplified to the result of “evil counsellors”. The evil counsellors were represented in the person of Hugh Despenser (and, to a lesser extent, his father), while his influence over Edward was, ultimately, sodomy. For example, Isabella’s proclamation against Despenser claimed that he had “usurped royal power against law and justice and his true allegiance... And we... have long been kept far from the goodwill of our said lord the King through the false suggestions and evil dealings of the aforesaid Hugh”3. The rabble-rousing sermons of Orleton, Stratford and Reynolds4 picked up the themes of transgression and misuse and explicitly applied them to Edward’s body – and, by extension, the metaphorical body of England. Preaching on texts like “I will put enmity between thee and the woman” [?ERC], “Vae terrae, cujus rex puer est”, “Cuius caput infirmum, caetera membra dolent”, “Caput meum doleo” and “Rex insipiens perdet populum suum”5, they emphasised Edward’s weakness, puerility and inability to properly manage or care for his “body”. Orleton went further and called Edward a “tyrant and a sodomite” (Haines King Edward 42), claiming that Edward had threatened in his rage to kill his wife if he should see her again (Mortimer “Sermons” 51). This attractively scandalous and memorable simplified the issues at stake almost to the point of parable. Its contrast with the complex precision of the official articles of deposition suggests the political necessity at this point of engaging popular opinion.


Most chronicles stress the role of the crowd in the decision to depose Edward. Valente writes that “for most contemporaries, the decision of the magnates, though perhaps of greatest weight, did not fully constitute the deposition. The approval of the rest of the assembly was certainly of practical utility, since it spread the burden of guilt, but it may have been considered legally necessary as well” (“Deposition and Abdication”, 865). This would account for the eagerness of the post-invasion propaganda to emphasise Despenser’s crimes against the country, and the king as its representative, contrasting to the tone of the articles against Gaveston which complained of specific acts that irritated the barons and reduced the king’s honour. That the chronicler of the Annales Paulini6 relates that Despenser was accused of “multis criminibus et transgressionibus erga populum regni Angliae” (AP 318) suggests that this tactic was generally successful. No calling earls childish nicknames for Hugh Despenser – he was to be a proper villain on a national scale.


The death and popular afterlife of Edward and each Despenser also reflected the political needs of the moment. The judgements on the Despensers detail very precisely the relation of punishment to crime. The relentless repetition of “E pur ceo qe vous... e pur ceo qe... e pur ceo...” in the judgement of the elder Despenser is matched by “qe vostre teste seit mene a Wynchestre... qe vous seietz pendu en une cote quartile de vos armes, et seint les armes destruz pur touz jours” (AP 318). The younger Despenser’s sentence uses the same formula at much greater length, ending chillingly, “Et pur ceo que vous fustes tot tempts desloyaut ... si enserrez vous debouwelle, et puys ils serront ars” (Holmes 265-66). It’s worth noting that this official judgement does not include castration, though some later chroniclers (most notably Froissart) state this did occur before he was disembowelled7. Whether the detail was thought up by his executioners or rumour-mongers, it was probably regarded as an appropriate punishment for his perceived sexual transgressions. Though this care to explain the relation of punishment to the crime is in no way unusual in passing sentences at the time, the emphasis on the almost allegorical significance of each act is striking. It suggests a care to be seen to visit the results of each crime back on the body of the perpetrator, to enact on him the physical manifestation of the damage he had done to society. In addition to satisfying visibly and bloodily the public drive for vengeance, this meticulous turning-back of each act against social order suggests a visible re-establishment of that order – despite the dubious legality of the executions themselves. The same popular urge to see an appropriate punishment visited on the physical body of the tyrant may be present in the various ‘anal rape’ accounts of Edward’s death that started to circulate in the 1330s, and eventually gained such currency as to still be accepted by many people today. Ian Mortimer (“Sermons of Sodomy”) argues that these stories both strengthened and vindicated people’s perceptions that Edward had in fact been a sodomite, and that this was the reason for his poor leadership. By comparison with the physical purity of the virgin St Edmund, the image of Edward’s body being sexually violated by another man functions as a metaphor for the damage he brought to his country in many different spheres. By the time Froissart narrated the events, the view seems to have been sufficiently widespread for him to cautiously attribute the younger Despenser’s castration to his sexual relationship with Edward.


In a culture where the story-telling (and theological explanation of day-to-day life) is saturated with allegory, symbolism and parable, what counted was the symbol, to be shaped by the needs of the moment. This was not necessary in the first half of his reign, when Gavaston’s sins largely consisted of stepping on barons’ toes and there was no real question of deposition. In fact, there never seems to have been much use of stories of sodomy in the upper levels of political events, among people who actually knew him. The barons, being closer to the action, seem to have seen a more detailed and nuanced version of events, and (being personally affected or irritated by him) found the real reasons sufficient to move against Gavaston. When it came to narrating reasons for objection to the populace and engaging their support, these nuances and personal experiences became secondary to rabble-rousing. Invoking common ideas of the king’s body and its relationship with his country helped to simplify, vilify, and turn real life into a parable.



Footnotes.
1 Foedera, Conventiones, Literae et cujuscumque generis Acta Publica, or Rymer’s Foedera, 1066-1383, ed. Rymer, Thomas, 1704-35; ed. Clarke et al, Records Commission, London, 1816-69, cited in Weir (29).
2 Chaplais does suggest that at this time Gavaston may have been acting more or less officially as Edward’s chamberlain, and that in this case it would be logical and respectful for Edward to give the gifts into his care (Chaplais ?).
3 Foedera, cited in Weir (30).
4 Respectively the Bishops of Hereford and Winchester, and Archbishop of Canterbury.
5 Lanercost Chronicles, Historia Roffensis, cited in Haines (169-71)
6 The Annales Paulini seem to rely largely on gossip and, being the annals of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, may be taken as more or less representative of popular opinion in London at the time.
7 Alison Weir states that “until 1326, the penalty for treason had not included castration”, and suggests that this detail was included on Isabella’s vengeful instructions (243). In fact, William Wallace had been castrated as part of the formal traitor’s execution in 1306, and Simon de Montfort was castrated posthumously as a traitor in 1265. Whether other traitors had received similar punishments since, it seems to have still been unusual enough for Froissart to comment on it, and to read it as symbolic judgement for his crimes of sodomy, “even, it was said, with the King, and this was why the King had driven away the Queen on his suggestion” (44).




Incomplete bibliography because I am too lazy to redo it for this version of the draft:

Ed. Trans. Childs, Wendy R. Vita Edwardi Secundi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
Ed. Eckhardt, Caroline D. Castleford's Chronicle, or, The Boke of Brut. Oxford: EETS, 1996.
Froissart. Ed. Trans. Brereton, Geoffrey. Chronicles. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
Holmes, G. A. "Judgement on the Younger Despenser, 1326". The English Historical Review 70 (1955): 261-267. 1955
Ed. Maxwell, Sir Herbert. Scalacronica: The Reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as recorded by Sir Thomas Gray. Glasgow, 1907.
Ed. Stubbs, William. Chronicles of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II. Rolls series 76, 1882-3.
Ed. Thompson, E. Maunde. The chronicle of Adam of Usk, A.D. 1377-1421. Felinfach: Llanerch Enterprises, 1990.

Ed. Betteridge, Tom. Sodomy in early modern Europe. New York: Manchester UP, 2002.
Chaplais, Pierre. Piers Gaveston, Edward II's Adoptive Brother. Oxford, 1994.
Ed. Cullum, P. H. and Lewis, Katherine J. Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Cuttino, G. P. & Lyman, T. W. "Where is Edward II?" Speculum 53 (1978), 522-3. 1978.
Ed. Dodd, Gwilym & Musson, Anthony. The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives.
Dunham, William Huse & Wood, Charles T. "The Right to Rule in England: Depositions and the Kingdom's Authority, 1327-1485". The American Historical Review 81 (1976): 738-761. 1976.
Edwards, Kathleen. "The Political Importance of the English Bishops during the reign of Edward II". English Historical Review, 59 (1944): 311-47. 1944.
Haines, R. M. The Church and Politics in Fourteenth Century England: The Career of Adam Orleton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.
Johnstone, Hilda. "The Eccentricities of Edward II". English Historical Review, 48 (1933): 264-7. 1933.
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