Surpassing the King’s Two Bodies: The Politics Of Staging the Royal Effigy in Marlowe’s Edward II

Abstract

In the final scene of Marlowe’s Edward II , young Edward III, newly crowned after his father’s deposition, teases audiences with the possibility that one of English history’s most famous funeral ceremonies is about to be re-enacted on the stage. In 1327, Edward II’s funeral ceremony was the first in English history to feature an effigy of the dead king on the royal hearse. In this essay, I speculate on the staging of this royal hearse in Marlowe’s play and explore the political implications of what might have been an actor performing the effigy on the early modern stage. By animating the royal effigy with an actor’s body, Marlowe’s play recalls the medieval political theory of the king’s two bodies. I propose in this essay that the specter of the staged royal effigy—a prosthetic body that literalizes the persona ficta of the dead king—in Marlowe’s history play engages this theory by undermining the force of sovereign authority fundamental to the concept of the king’s two bodies, supplementing sovereign authority with a prosthesis that is at the same time a reminder of sovereignty’s denuded force; in exploring the paradox of sovereign excess with the king’s royal hearse in Marlowe’s play, this essay makes the case that Edward II offers an immanent challenge to royal absolutism from within the body of the dead king.

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