A Critical Commentary on the "Murder Scene" in Edward II
This essay critically evaluates the "Murder Scene" (Act V, Sc. v) in Edward II by Christopher Marlowe.
The ?Death Scene? or the ?Murder Scene? [V.v] of King Edward is the horrible climax of the ?Deposition Scene? [V.i]. Here we find the king facing indescribable ignominy and humiliation. Marlowe conceived it with a rare imaginative excellence. Out-doing Holinshed, his original source, Marlowe presents here a situation that makes one?s hair creep and fills one?s mind with a deep gloom. Of the ?Murder Scene? of Edward II, Charles Lamb has his celebrated comment:
?The death scene of Marlowe?s king moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted?.
The king is shown confined in a dungeon at Berkeley Castle where the filth of the entire castle falls. Edward must keep standing here, and he cannot sleep and lest he falls asleep, one keeps beating the drum all the time. Such inhuman is the condition that Edward?s guard Gurney remarks:
?I opened but the door to throw him meat,
And I was almost stifled with the savour? [V.v L.8-9].
His guards, Matrevis and Gurney, are rather eager for his early death and torment him by words in order to accelerate his end.
Lightborn, who is the murderer, appointed by Mortimer arrives with the letter of his master. Lightborn seizes the helpless king who immediately guesses his foul objective and becomes active in no time to accomplish his heinous crime. He asks Matrevis and Gurney to prepare a red hot spit. A table is laid upon the king and Lightborn and others stamp on it. The weak, poor king resists in vain against death and falls at last after commending his soul to God.
The horrible murder is performed with utmost devilry by Lightborn. But the murderer gets no way out, and is killed by Gurney, who, along with Matrevis, flees away. Holinshed?s Chronicle tells us that the death shrieks of the king ran through the castle and town of Berkely. The shrieks of Marlowe?s king must have also overflowed the dungeon for Matrevis remarks:
?I fear me that this cry will raise the town,
And therefore let us take horse and away? [V.v L. 116-117].
Thus the horrors which the scene presents are too shocking for our senses. The very setting of the dungeon makes the death sordid and undignified. The language with its particulars of the murder: a table, a feather bed, a red hot spit etc. focuses our attention on his sufferings. Edward?s frantic cries such as ?I feel a hell of grief!? or his death cry evokes an atmosphere of terror.
In this context a comparison may be invited between the ?Death Scene? of Marlowe?s king in Edward II and Shakespeare?s king Richard II in Richard II. The ?Death Scene? of Richard II has tender poetic touch. It is full of intense pathos. Richard in his last moments inspires affection in the groom and his monologue shows that he is still the poet, a devotee of the fancy. His death fills us with a profound sense of sadness. But the scene of Edward?s death is too cruel and horrible. Edward is the embodiment of humiliated humanity. As F.P. Wilson remarks that compassion seems not to have come to Marlowe and there is a cruelty in the last scene which we do not find in Shakespeare. Placed beside the ?Death Scene? of Richard II, the ?Murder Scene? of Edward II seems more shocking and awe-inspiring. Clifford Leech remarks that no other tragic figure is treated in the degrading way that Mortimer permits for Edward II. Henry VI is suddenly stabbed; Richard II dies fighting and eloquent; Richard III and Macbeth are killed in battle; Julius Caesar is suddenly stabbed by Casca; the Duchess of Malfi makes a pious speech before she is strangled and Marlowe?s own Faustus dominates the scene in his despair. The Jacobean playwrights could think of strange ways of torment and murder but they never tear at our nerves as Marlowe does in this scene.
This scene is of an utmost significance to draw the sympathy for the king. The incredible cruelty with which he is put to death, no doubt turns the balance of sympathy in the favour of the king. Boas rightly remarks:
?So persuasive is his art that our recollection of Edward?s sins is almost effaced in the contemplation of his long-drawn journey?.
In the ?Deposition Scene?, something of the king?s arrogance and unreasonableness still remains. But, in the ?Murder Scene?, the king is cleansed of all impurities and all that is found about him is truly pathetic and pitiful. The scene, indeed, serves to evoke tragic awe, although the full element of tragic pity cannot be perceived here because of the basic weakness of the king.
In this scene we find a variation from the Holinshed?s Chronicle in the mode of the murder of the king. Holinshed describes the king's assassination as follows:
?they came suddenlie one night into the chamber where he laie in bed fast asleepe, and with heauie featherbeds or a table (as some write) being cast vpon him, they kept him down and withall put into his fundament an horne, and through the same they thrust vp into his bodie an hot spit, or (as other haue) through the pipe of a trumpet a plumbers instrument of iron made verie hot, the which passing vp into his intrailes, and being rolled to and fro, burnt the same, but so as no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardlie might be once perceived. His crie did mooue manie within the castell and towne of Berkley to compassion....?
According to Thomas de la Moore ?a:
?On the night of October 11 (1327 AD) while lying in on a bed (the king) was suddenly seized and, while a great mattress... weighed him down and suffocated him, a plumber's iron, heated intensely hot, was introduced through a tube into his secret parts so that it burned the inner portions beyond the intestines?.Thus Edward was killed by the insertion of a red hot spit ?into his intrailes?. It was considered by his captors as an appropriate punishment for his
homosexuality, and one which would show no outward signs of violence. William Empson suggests that, Edward?s death is the parody of the homo-sexual act. (
The Nation, CLXIII 1946). But in the ?Death Scene? of
Edward II by Marlowe, we find that though Lightborn instructs Matrevis and Gurney to prepare a red hot spit and finally he does not use it.
The scene also throws light upon the character of Lightborn. He is both symbolic and disturbingly real. The name Lightborn is ambiguous meaning both ?bastard? and ?bearer of light?, and the appropriateness of the second meaning is very ironic. It has been suggested that the name itself is a translation of Lucifer. He literally comes with a light in this scene. Probably Marlowe drew this character from a devil that appears in the Chester Mystery Cycle.
There is another remarkable aspect which must not go unnoticed. The stage arrangements in this scene are not very clear. There is no change of scenes though it was thought that one was needed at Line No. 37 when Gurney gives a light to Lightborn to go into the dungeon. Later Lightborn asks the king to lie down on the bed. But no notice is given of this having been brought on the stage. Probably the action is not in the dungeon, the murderer not going down; but the king coming out from it almost as soon as Lightborn lifts the curtain, looks down and begins to talk to him. As the king comes forth, he says ?this dungeon? [L 53] and having passed out he turns and says, ?There?.have I stood? [L 56]. The bed has been in the chamber and has not been just now brought in. Even according to Holinshed, the king was murdered in the chamber above the dungeon.
The scene is also important from the structural stand-point. It ends the tragedy of the king and prepares the ground for the retribution of Mortimer?s tyrannical ambition. It is the gruesome murder of his father that prompts the prince to gather courage to stand against Mortimer and bring about the tyrant?s just doom. The scene is, thus, the end of the hero, Edward, and a prelude to the punishment of the tyrant, Mortimer.
Another phenomenal aspect of this scene is the complex panoply of Christian images. Marlowe embellishes these dramatic actions with verbal and visual images derived from conventional medieval and early Renaissance descriptions of Christ's Passion. Marlowe's suffering king--like Christ, according to medieval exegesis is largely suppressed by the Reformation. In the ?Death Scene? of Edward II, the playwright elaborates the chroniclers' cryptic accounts by adding physical and psychological assaults modeled on some that Jesus supposedly endured. Specifically, Marlowe rehearses symbolic degradations adapted from traditional lore of Christ's Secret Passion, a series of bizarre torments not recorded in the Gospels but which Jesus suffered after his arrest, according to medieval and Tudor exegesis of Hebrew prophecy.
The humiliated king is enclosed within the cesspool of Berkeley Castle, where he has stood in darkness for ten days ?up to the knees in water?, in the ?sink / Wherein the filth of all the castle falls? reminds us of David ?As a figure of Christ? in Psalm 69:
?I sticke fast in the depe myre...I am come into depe waters, and the streames runne ouer me?.
According to Caxton's version of The Golden Legend, Christ's ?sorrow was in smelling of ordure and filth... [the] great stench of Calvary whereas were the bodies of dead men stinking?. As does Jesus on his cross, Edward in his dungeon breathes in human corruptions and death. In the ?Death Scene?, Marlowe constructs a stage picture that may be seen to complete this biblical figure: skewered on a red-hot spit, pressed beneath an overturned table, Edward dies in an inverted image of the Pascal lamb on a spit, a figure that translates The Old Testament ritual into an image of the Christian Eucharist. Dramatizing the king's degradation and murder in Edward II, Marlowe adapts a controlling purpose of the Passion Play, to reenact Christ's torture and death as the "ne plus ultra" of human suffering. Lightborn's "grim game of deceit and destruction" recalls also the playful sadism of the "tortores" who, in the Passion Plays, execute Jesus with giddy professional pride. In Psalm 69, David speaks ?As a figure of Christ?, according to the Geneva Bible, ?I am poore...? In Edward II, the king attempts to dissuade his hired assassin with a bribe, a vestige of his royal wealth. ?One jewel have I left; receive thou this?, Lightborn?s tearful dissembling has failed to trick Edward. "I see my tragedy written in thy brows?, Edward says before undergoing a kind of Christian ?anagnorisis?. Just before Matrevis and Gurney rush to press and tread him beneath the table, Edward prays, ?Assist me, sweet God, and receive my soul?--a prayer like Jesus? last words:
?Father, into thine hands I commend my spirit? [Luke 23:46].
Bibliography:
1. Marlowe?s Edward II and the Medieval Passion Play by Patrick Ryan, University of Iowa.
2. Helps to the Study of English Honours by Profs. Roy and Chakraborty.
3. Christopher Marlowe Edward the Second by Dr. S. Sen.
4. Christopher Marlowe Edward the Second by Kalyannath Dutta
5. Tragedy by Clifford Leech
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