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by Christopher Marlowe, directed by Daniel Raggett

Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon Avon, GBR

March 5-April 5, 2025

Lancaster: “My lord, why do you thus incense your peers,

That naturally would love and honour you,

But for that base and obscure Gaveston?”

What a pleasure it is finally to see a production that does full justice to a great play. I have seen two professional productions of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II before – at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, in 2005 and at the Globe Theatre, London, in 2019. The latest staging by the Royal Shakespeare Company is thrilling. It is the both the clearest production of the play yet and the one that reveals the play and its characters as much more complex than is usually the case. The text is severely cut leading to a running time of only one hour 40 minutes without intermission, but director Daviel Raggett more than makes up for these cuts by the insights he sheds on the play as a whole.

We in North America are so preoccupied with identity politics that we seem unable to see a play about a king like Edward II and his male lover Gaveston as anything other than a gay play. By doing so we miss out on what is really the most essential theme of the play, namely the use and abuse of power. All of Marlowe’s plays are based on this theme whether it be supernatural power as in Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) or earthly power as in The Massacre at Paris (c. 1593). I explained why Edward II is not primarily a gay play in my review of the Globe production in 2019. The present RSC production supports this view.

Marlowe gives the Elder Mortimer a speech listing all the famous men of myth and history who have had male lovers as if to put this objection to rest. The barons in the play frequently hurl insults at Gaveston, and later at Gaveston’s replacement Spencer, but those insults have entirely to do with Gaveston and Spencer being lower class. Something British productions easily achieve is to show how Gaveston and his kind speak in lower class accents. It should be no surprise that English lords should be more enraged by a lower class man raised to high position than about the man’s sexual preference.

Director Daniel Raggett views the play’s principal characters in fresh new ways. Most notably he views Edward II not as a king with a weak personality as I have seen before, but as a king with a strong personality. Edward may make poor decisions but they can more likely stem from wilfulness than indecision or pleading. This is how Daniel Evans, Co-Artistic Director of the RSC, in a revelatory performance, plays the role. Evans portrays Edward as strong, intelligent and commanding, backing down on banishing Gaveston only when he sees there is no other alternative. Evans can speak Edward’s famous lines: “If this content you not, / Make several kingdoms of this monarchy, / And share it equally amongst you all, / So I may have some nook or corner left, / To frolic with my dearest Gaveston” not in an imploring tone, as is usually the case, but in anger. Indeed, line after line that Evans speaks demonstrates that the barons fear Edward not because he is so weak but because he is so strong.

This makes sense of the role in two ways. One, it helps explain how Edward is able to endure his imprisonment in the sewer of the castle where the barons expected him to succumb. Evans’s Edward is not the archetypal weak king, like Shakespeare’s Richard II, who finds personal strength after he loses the crown, but a strong king who maintains his personal strength after he loses his political strength. Two, it helps explain where the future Edward III, Edward II’s son, gets his surprising strength. In other productions, young Edward III’s resolve to condemn Mortimer and his mother seems to come out of nowhere. Here, it is clear Edward III has inherited his forcefulness from his father.

What Raggett finds in the characters of Mortimer and Isabella is more remarkable. It is a general tenet that King Lear’s daughter Goneril and Regan do not begin as evil but become so as the play progresses. In Edward II, Raggett demonstrates that that is also true of Mortimer and Isabella. At the start Isabella is truly in love with Edward but humiliated when Edward publicly spurns her in favour of Gaveston. Her first step toward evil is to lobby for the recall of Gaveston from banishment simply so he can be more easily murdered. Even here, her hope is for the return of Edward’s love. After Gaveston is killed and Edward turns his attentions to Spencer, a new male favourite, Isabella abandons hope and encourages an affair with Mortimer. Her final step towards evil is in believing that she and Mortimer can wield power via her and Edward’s young son, the future Edward III.

Similarly, when we first meet Mortimer, he is just one of the many barons who oppose Edward’s conferring so many material benefits on the low-born Gaveston. Mortimer is always the harshest of Edward’s critics and immediately supports Isabella’s idea of recalling Gaveston in order to kill him. When Isabella turns to him for comfort, it becomes easy for Mortimer to see his way to power, thinking that he and Isabella will be able to manipulate young Edward. Neither Isabella nor Mortimer suspect that even as a boy Edward III can think for himself and that Mortimer’s murder of Edward’s brother Kent, sympathetic to Edward’s cause, and then their sanctioning the murder of Edward himself will turn Edward III against them.

Ruta Gedmintas and Enzo Cilenti carefully detail the descent of Isabella and Mortimer from just objecting to Edward’s outrageous behaviour to using murder to cure Edward of his distractions to murdering Edward himself to secure power. The fact that Isabella and Mortimer should begin an affair is similar Goneril and Regan beginning affairs with Edmund in King Lear, as people of like minds longing for power find each other. Presenting this gradual shift in these characters only makes them and the play itself richer.

Raggett also shows that there is a parallel but opposite change in Edward’s two favourites, Gaveston and Spencer. We first meet both when they give speeches about their plans to use Edward’s affection for them for their own gain. Strangely, though, once they perceive the depth of Edward’s love for them, they give up their mercenary ambition and begin defending Edward because of his love. Raggett makes clear that just as Edward’s love for the base-born Gaveston and Spencer seems to ennoble them, this love simultaneously seems to push the noble-born Isabella and Mortimer into degradation.

Eloka Ivo is physically imposing as Gaveston which makes him appear as a force that when on stage simply cannot be ignored. Ivo also shows that Gaveston is well spoken to emphasize that fine feeling and intelligence are not just the prerogative of the well-born. Stavros Demetraki portrays Spencer as much more a thug when compared to Ivo’s Gaveston. This only makes Spencer’s softening under Edward’s influence the more striking.

In other roles Henry Pettigrew is persuasive as Edward’s brother Kent, who functions as the conscience of the play. When Mortimer kills Kent against the future Edward III’s objections, we feel as if the world has lost its bearings. Evan Milton is a waspish Lancaster, who seems second only to Mortimer in his potential menace. Jacob James Beswick makes Edward’s assassin Lightborn a truly frightening creature. The care and gentleness he shows Edward before he brutally murders him is like a gruesome parody of Gaveston’s real love for Edward.

Designer Leslie Travers has relocated the action to some period after the advent of television and before the arrival of personal computers. When we enter the Swan Theatre, we see the elaborate bier of Edward I and are invited to pay our respects to the king in whose heroic shadow Edward II will live his life. Raggett stages the first part of the play on the platform where the bier has stood. Once Edward II has been condemned to prison, this platform slides upstage to reveal a space of clayey earth with standing water. As Edward describes it, “This dungeon where they keep me is the sink / Wherein the filth of all the castle falls”. For all the scenes following Edward’s imprisonment that return to the court, the platform slides only halfway back so that we see both the opulence of the court and the desolation where Edward suffers. This double vision is the perfect emblem of Marlowe’s view of life where human vanity strives for pomp and power to cover over the inevitable reality of misery and death.

Raggett’s direction, all the actors’ performances, above all Evans’s as Edward, and Travers’s design work together to revel Marlowe’s play as the great work it is. The RSC has not staged the play since 1990. The Stratford Festival of Canada has staged the play only once. Let’s hope the insights that inform the present production encourage other companies to stage the play and for the world’s major Shakespeare festivals to revisit it more frequently.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Eloka Ivo as Gaveston and Daniel Evans as Edward II; Ruta Gedmintas as Isabella and Enzo Cilenti as Mortimer; Daniel Evans as Edward II and Jacob James Beswick as Lightborn. © 2025 Helen Murray.

For tickets visit: www.rsc.org.uk