Stephen Guy-Bray Knihy

The book explores how early modern authors employed Theocritan and Virgilian pastoral, along with epic poetry, to delve into homoerotic and homosocial themes. Through detailed analysis, it reveals the allusive techniques these writers used to navigate and express complex sexual and social relationships within their works.

Marlowe's play retains its power to shock even today, and this edition gives full value to its three overriding themes of sexual favouritism, political confrontation and sheer cruelty. Critics in the last twenty years, who have focused on the overtly sexual relationship between Edward and his favourite Gaveston, have hailed it as a 'gay classic'; earlier interpretations concentrated rather on the deposition by his subjects of a weak king, reading it in tandem with Shakespeare's Richard II. The introduction shows how the play works to give the audience an equal emotional commitment to opposing points of view and concludes that this is what makes Edward II such an uncomfortable and challenging play.