This unstable network of interacting attractions and repulsions is complicated by a political conflict of complex and varying rights and wrongs which similarly stabilizes only late in the action, as legitimate power passes to Edward III, and Mortimer hardens into a pure overweening Machiavel. Until the king’s defeat any audience is likely to be alternately drawn to and repelled by each of the main characters-Edward, Gaveston, Isabella, Mortimer. How far that political drama is brought to the fore, how it interacts with the love story of Edward and Gaveston, and how that love story itself is seen-with its mixture of on one side idyllic ideal and ruinous obsession, and on the other exploitative manipulation and real devotion-is open to a variety of presentations. dramatized debate, complex but readily recognizable for the first audience, about the responsibilities that are the obverse of the king’s rights-responsibilities to the Church, to the nobility, and to the commonwealth. Within its chronicle narrative there is a. The individual tragedy of love, with politics only the politics of sex, is the emphasis of the most widely-known modern production, Derek Jarman’s film adaptation.1 The range of focuses with which the play can be staged admits of no simple summary. Love or politics the man or the king: these are the polarities of choice for a director of Edward II.
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