Edward II: Did a gay love affair spark a 14th-Century royal crisis?

A new revival of Christopher Marlowe's pioneering play about the 14th-Century King of England puts the spotlight back on his relationship with his male "favourite" Piers Gaveston.

This week, at its base in Stratford-upon Avon, the world-famous Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is opening a new production of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. Though this influential 16th-Century play about a beleaguered queer monarch is more than 430 years old, it still feels stingingly relevant. Marlowe depicted a king whose authority and ability to rule is fatally undermined by his relationship with another man. Modern-day UK monarchs hold only ceremonial power, but overt queerness in the British royal family remains vanishingly rare. Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a second cousin of King Charles III who is currently competing on US reality show The Traitors, is widely described as "the first openly gay royal".

Marlowe's play dramatises the struggles of Edward II, a real-life King of England who reigned from 1307 to 1327. A year after Edward II succeeded his father, Edward I, he married the King of France's daughter, Isabella, in an effort to strengthen Anglo-French relations. Queen Isabella bore Edward II four children, and became a formidable figure in her own right – she is sometimes called "the she-wolf of France". But Marlowe's play really hinges on the king's controversial relationship with his male "favourite", Piers Gaveston, and how this sparked a constitutional crisis that he never recovered from. 

The playwright never says outright that the two men are lovers, but the queer subtext is hardly subtle. In one scene, after he is reunited with his favourite, Edward beseeches him to "kiss not my hand [but] embrace me, Gaveston, as I do thee". In another, Isabella bemoans the fact "the king regards me not, but [instead] dotes upon the love of Gaveston". Only a wilfully obtuse reader of Marlowe's text could miss the insinuation that these two men are more than just friends. 

Ever since it was written, Marlowe's play has helped to cement the real-life Edward's debatable but not entirely misleading reputation as a "gay king". To put it simply, we can never know for certain whether Edward II had a romantic and/or sexual relationship with any of his male favourites. But when it was first performed in 1592, it paved the way for the monarch's queerness to be openly discussed by historians. "The earliest text we have accusing Edward of some kind of sexual transgression was written around the time Gaveston was murdered [in 1312]," historian Kit Heyam, author of The Reputation of Edward II, 1305-1697, tells the BBC. "It says that at the beginning of Edward's reign, there was 'much lechery habitually practised'." 

In the parlance of the time, "lechery" was used to describe any kind of "sinful" sexual behaviour, according to the mores of the Catholic Church, which held religious authority in England at the time. "The text seems to be suggesting that this behaviour will stop now that Gaveston's dead, but it stops short of saying that the sexual transgression was actually between Gaveston and the king," Heyam says. In the centuries after Edward II's death, it became less risky for writers to insinuate that Edward II may have been sexually transgressive, but the invention of the printing press in the 15th Century cranked up the innuendo. "Writers would sensationalise their texts to make them more commercially appealing, so they started saying that Edward II was definitely sexually transgressive, and it was definitely the fault of his male favourites," Heyam says. "But Marlowe was the first person to join the dots, and say that Edward II was actually sleeping with them."

The actor and RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans, who portrays Edward II in the new production, believes that Marlowe's play still feels "radical" in 2025. His interest in reviving it was piqued by director Daniel Raggett, who posed a "provocative", hypothetical question that underlines the piece's enduring relevance: "What would happen if our current king, Charles III, suddenly said: 'I know I've been married for a while, but I actually want someone called Colin by my side, not Camilla?'" It might not cause a civil war, as Edward's relationship with Gaveston begets in Marlowe's play, but Evans questions just how accepting today's "supposedly liberal and permissive society" would be. "Deep-rooted homophobia still exists, and the whole notion of the British Royal Family, of lineage and heirs, is very dependent on a heteronormative family structure," he notes.

Evans and Raggett were also intrigued by the play's late-20th-Century renaissance, which is inextricably linked with the burgeoning LGBTQ+ rights movement. Dr Will Tosh, head of research at Shakespeare's Globe, and author of Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, says that Marlowe's play "doesn't have a hugely long performance history" outside of the era in which it was written. He notes that in the 18th and 19th centuries, it essentially went "into cold storage" because the idea of a male monarch having a male lover would have been anathema to conservative Georgian and Victorian audiences. The play's subsequent revival in the second half of the 20th Century coincides with a "more curious and less judgmental attitude to queer intimacy", Tosh says.

In 1969, two years after male homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales, but 11 years before the same advance was made in Scotland, Ian McKellen portrayed Edward II in a Prospect Theatre Company production that toured the UK. Gaveston was played by James Laurenson, a New Zealand actor who died last year, and their on-stage kiss caused some controversy when the production arrived in Edinburgh. "The late councillor John Kidd took offence to this show of male affection, particularly as it took place on a stage erected within the assembly hall of the Church of Scotland," McKellen recalls on his website. Though a couple of local policemen were sent to watch the production, McKellen notes that they found "no problem" with its contents and this brief fuss "guaranteed full houses for the run."

When this production was broadcast on the BBC a year later, it made history by including the first same-sex kiss ever shown on British television. In a 2017 interview, McKellen said that the Prospect production also had a profound impact on "many, many Americans" who watched it on US network PBS. "They saw for the first time in their lives two men kissing and couldn't believe it, but took comfort from it," he said.

The play's place in the queer canon was further cemented by a 1991 film adaptation directed by artist and gay rights activist Derek Jarman. Featuring a deliberately anachronistic mix of modern and medieval props, costumes and backdrops, Jarman's film dials up Marlowe's homoeroticism, and reframes the story within the context of the contemporary LGBTQ+ rights movement. As Gaveston (played by Andrew Tiernan) is tortured for his transgressions, Jarman shows police clashing with protesters from gay-rights group OutRage!. 

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A year before Jarman's film, Marlowe's play was staged by the RSC with Simon Russell Beale in the title role. Angela K Ahlgren argues in her 2011 essay Performing Queer Edward II in the 1990s that Jarman's film and this RSC revival of the play "reflect notions of queerness circulating in the 1990s because they stage violence, same-sex desire, and references to contemporary gay political issues". At the time, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was devastating the gay male population globally, and queer activists in the UK were protesting against Section 28, a piece of legislation that prohibited the supposed "promotion of homosexuality" by schools and local councils. It had been enacted by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Government in 1988, following a rising tide of anti-gay sentiment in the media.

Still, Marlowe's play should never be regarded as a work of historical gospel. Tosh says the playwright's "major dramatic innovation" is to make the king's relationship with Gaveston the "central drama" of his life by "compressing the timeline". In reality, Edward II cultivated relationships with other highly influential male favourites after Gaveston was murdered in 1312, just five years into his 19-year-reign. But Marlowe depicts his bond with Gaveston as by far the most emotionally significant. "After Gaveston's death in the play, Edward invokes his memory to justify whatever he's doing. And later, when Edward is imprisoned and mistreated, he invokes Gaveston's name again as a plea for salvation," Tosh says. 

Of course, Marlowe's play also invites us to make serious presumptions about the nature of the two men's relationship. Historian Kathryn Warner, author of Edward II: The Unconventional King, says we can never know for certain how Edward II felt about Gaveston and his other male favourites because the king didn't keep a diary or write personal letters. "All we have is the word of outsiders, which is obviously open to interpretation," she says. But in all likelihood, given that he fathered an illegitimate child with an unknown woman, Edward II's sexuality was probably more complicated than his reputation as a "gay king" might suggest. "I think in purely physical terms, we could probably call him more bisexual than gay," Warner says. "But emotionally, it strikes me that he probably was gay, because he was very, very close to his male favourites." 

This closeness almost certainly caused his downfall. According to Heyam, Edward's fundamental error throughout his reign was to grant his favourites too much power. "He failed to realise that being king of England in the 14th Century is very much a manager's job," they say. "Edward needed to keep a number of powerful nobles happy, but when he gave Gaveston power over them, he made them very angry." After Gaveston was murdered by a group of rival barons in 1312, Edward II made the same mistake again with Hugh Despenser the Younger, whom Warner describes as "the last and most powerful" of his male favourites. 

It's worth noting that Despenser does appear in Marlowe's play, but only as a relatively minor character called Spencer who is essentially a stand-in for Gaveston following his death. The real-life Despenser had much more agency. In 1324, amid growing tensions with France, he began to wield his influence against Queen Isabella because of her French heritage. Isabella fought back with support from her own favourite, Richard Mortimer, which ultimately led to Despenser's execution in 1325, and Edward II's forced abdication the following year. "If he had just kept his public and private lives separate, he would probably have been fine," Heyam says.

In Marlowe's play, the fallen monarch is killed at Mortimer's behest by a red hot poker through his anus. Warner says the idea that Edward II was murdered in this way is "almost certainly a myth" – one Marlowe didn't invent, but definitely helped to "popularise". Over 430 years later, it remains a shocking image with crassly homophobic overtones. But even if Marlowe's poker scene is apocryphal, the play still has a lot to say about the consequences of intolerance. When Edward complains about being forced to "leave my Gaveston", the disapproving Earl of Lancaster replies derisively: "Diablo, what passions call you these?" His use of the Spanish word for "devil" is surely no accident. "I hope audiences who see this play think deeply about what happens when you try to ban love and sublimate someone's natural way of being," Evans says. "The endless cycle of violence that this can create is something we can all learn from today." 

Edward II is at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until April 5, rsc.org.uk

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