Marlowe's Edward II as "Actaeonesque History" - Connotations

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CHRISTOPHER WESSMAN
The water in Edward's death scene is completely excremental, "the sink
/ Wherein the filth of all the castle falls" (V.v.2). His "attendants" have
become even further removed from Ovid's nymphs. They are torturers
who feed the fallen monarch scraps, and keep him awake for days to "assail
his mind" (V.v.1, 8). Referred to as a "lake" (28) and visited by the assassin
Lightborn-identified by Harry Levin as a type of Ludfer 36 -this filthy
"sink" has been called by Douglas Cole a "Cocytus," the frozen lake of
Hell. 3 ? And so it is; but Marlowe also mingles the waters of Cocytus and
Gargaphie. In an uncanny echo of "overpeering," Lightborn tells the
sleepless Edward, "You're overwatched, my lord" (V.v.91, italics mine).
In this lake, a failed Diana becomes a suffering Actaeon:
Ed.: My mind's distempered and my body's numbed,
And whether I have limbs or no I know not.
o would my blood dropp'd out from every vein,
As doth the water from my tatter'd robes. (Y.v.66-69)
Edward exhibits Actaeon's confusion, his uncertainty over his own limbs,
and the presentiment that his own blood will shortly fall. Also, in this
scene-in ways that will be considered more fully in the next section-the
language of the "heart" and the "hart" resounds. In thus intimating
Actaeon's punishment, Marlowe engages audience sympathy as well as
taps into a profound ambiguity. Edward's murder-an anal penetration
by a fiery hot spit, designed to leave no mark-has long been discussed
as a parodic gay rape, emblematic of his transgression. It is indeed, as
Gregory Bredbeck suggests, an act of "writing" his crime onto him,literally
"branding" him with it. 38 However; it is also the mythologically appropriate
Cynthian tearing of one who has failed to understand the necessary
inviolability of the Elizabethan double body.
The Hunted Hart and the Wounded Heart
Related to the intersection of Diana and the "Queen's Two Bodies" in
Edward II is a matrix of meanings and effects that have been touched upon