Orbis Litterarum 60: 79108, 2005

Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved

Skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt: vernacular

topoi in the carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II
Tom Pettitt, University of Southern Denmark

Matching the literary and rhetorical topoi of medieval Latin and

neoclassical literature, early European traditional culture deployed
narrative, iconographic and dramatic formulas which eectively
functioned as vernacular topoi. Through repeated occurrence
each acquired distinctive resonances which then did not need to be
expressed more elaborately in a given work, so leaving modern
scholarship the task of reconstructing them. At least three such
vernacular topoi mock shaving, consignment to a cesspit, and
impaling on a spit occur in the suerings Marlowe associates with
the death of the King in Edward II, either by adapting his historical
sources, or by choosing between alternatives. Exploration of their
occurrences in medieval and folkloristic sources reveals that these
topoi invoke liminality by subjecting ambivalent creatures (fools,
pigs, babewyns) to transgressive experience (cooking, washing in
lth) in interstitial environments (carnival, sewers, manuscript
margins). Their presence reinforces, even as it is triggered by,
Edwards own liminality in relation to a number of categories, and
is compatible with recent suggestions linking Marlowes play to the
suerings of Christ developed in Baroque religiosity.

As cultural achievements emerging from an Elizabethan theatre precariously poised between literature and popular culture (Lunney, 2002), the
plays of Christopher Marlowe have responded positively to approaches
deploying the methods and materials of folklore. These include not merely,
and rather obviously, identifying folk elements in the plays (Pettitt, 1980),
but more fundamentally, discerning the presence and understanding the
function of dramatic formulas analogous to the verbal formulas of ballads
and oral epics, or diagnosing symptoms of oral transmission in the
surviving text of The Massacre at Paris and the A-text of Doctor Faustus
(Pettitt, 1988, 2003).1 The present study continues this line of research, but
more immediately was both inspired and provoked by the report of a paper
given by Patrick Ryan to the 1996 meeting of the Marlowe Society of

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America, on the Christian imagery behind Edward II, since published

under the title Marlowes Edward II and the Medieval Passion Play
(Ryan, 1997, 199899).2 It was inspiring as the kind of study, better than
any amount of dening and discussion, that demonstrates by example not
merely what it is that we do, but that it is worth doing, and worth doing
well: neither Old Historicism, nor New Historicism, but True Historicism,
Patrick Ryans study clearly and convincingly revealed the connotations of
King Edwards nal suerings in Marlowes play, for Marlowe himself and
for signicant segments of his audience, by appeal to a contemporary
Elizabethan corpus of evidence for plausible analogues of those
suerings.
Ryans study was also provocative, since it was immediately apparent
that my folkloristic approach to Edward II would achieve results
diametrically opposed to his. To put it bluntly, while he was nding
analogues of those suerings and the ensuing assassination that tended to
make of Edward a Christ gure and the Lamb of God, I was nding
analogues that tended rather to make of him a carnival Fool, and not so
much lamb as pig: the carne in carnival. The present essay therefore faces
the task not merely of demonstrating the validity of my analogues and
the signicance of their implications, but also of at least attempting to
suggest how these may be reconciled with Patrick Ryans analogues and
their very dierent implications, the validity of which I do not for a
moment doubt.
Patrick Ryan found his parallels to Edwards suerings in the extensive
literature of what I would call a baroque religiosity, fashionable in elite
circles in late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England, whose bestknown exponent is probably the preacher Lancelot Andrewes. Its
meditations took the imagery of the crucixion to extravagant extremes,
so that if the crucied Christ is the sacricial Lamb of God, then he is
eectively being roasted for the Passover Feast, and the Cross is the spit on
which he is broached.3 This grotesque imagery, with its obvious parallels to
the anal violation with a spit by which Marlowes Edward is slain, was
supplemented by a bizarre apocryphal narrative of the secret suerings of
Christ in the house of Caiaphas the night before the crucixion, suerings
which anticipated Edwards other torments, especially incarceration in a
cesspit, shaving (again like a lamb before roasting), and (in this and other
connections) besmearing with lth.

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81

My procedure has to be less neat, in that rather than a corpus of printed

works, which we know were read at the time and which have survived for
us to read now, my comparative material characteristically comprises folk
traditions, whose traces in the written record are sporadic, geographically
and chronologically spread, and often indirect. I will nonetheless argue, in
a manner which is Bakhtinian in everything save its insistence on
documentation, that Marlowes handling of the suerings and death of
Edward II also invoked a series of striking images familiar to the audience
from popular traditions of narrative, song, lore and festival.
In their purely narrative manifestation, these images probably qualify as
motifs in the sense used by students of folktales; my colleagues in ballad
studies would probably see some of them as analogous to their epic
formulas (Holzapfel, 1980; Andersen, 1985; Andersen et al., 1982); when
they occur in plays or pageantry, they qualify as dramatic formulas of the
kind I discussed in an earlier paper mentioned above. But since they occur
across cultural modes verbal, dramatic, and even pictorial (cf. Holzapfel,
1973) I have widened the concept into what my title calls vernacular
topoi. In other words, I see this paper as contributing to a study of
European Literature and the Vernacular Middle Ages to match Ernst
Curtiuss celebrated European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
(Curtius, 1953). Thus if Curtius claims that Classical, medieval and
Renaissance literature developed a system of Latin topoi standardized
rhetorical set pieces then I will claim that popular tradition, which the
Elizabethan theatre was still in part, correspondingly developed an
alternative system of topoi which was vernacular in the sense with which
we apply the term say to handwriting or architecture (and increasingly to
early popular religiosity), as well as in the merely linguistic sense.
And in a manner already demonstrated for the ballads formulas
(Andersen, 1985), as a result of its regular recurrence under particular
circumstances, each of these vernacular topoi acquired distinct resonances
for which it became a sort of shorthand, so that when encountered in a
given text or performance it conveyed connotations that did not need to be
expressed more explicitly. Modern scholarship consequently confronts the
task of deciphering this now lost system of signication by identifying
these topoi and establishing their connotations by analysing their various
occurrences. As Bakhtin himself put it: Renaissance literature still needs
special study in the light of correctly understood popular-festive forms

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(Bakhtin, 1984: p.275, my emphasis), and what follows is intended as a

contribution to meeting this need, examining and exploring some of the
parallels that help us identify and interpret the vernacular topoi Marlowe
invokes sometimes by adapting his sources, sometimes by selecting
options among his sources in connection with the suerings and death of
his Edward II.4

The mock shaving

In Marlowes play Edward is subjected to a cruel shaving by his captors.
It is done by coercion; cold, dirty water is used; he almost chokes and ends
up besmirched rather than cleaned:
Edward.
O water, gentle friends, to cool my thirst
And clear my body from foul excrements.
Matrevis. Heres channel water, as our charge is given;
Sit down, for well be barbers to your grace.
Edward. Traitors, away! What, will you murder me,
Or choke your sovereign with puddle water?
Gurney. No, but wash your face and shave away your beard
They wash him with puddle water, and shave his beard away.
(5.3.2531; 36SD)5

I would label this the Mock Shaving topos (mock in the sense of both not
genuine, and mocking), which in vernacular tradition is predictably a
powerful gesture of humiliation and degradation. For example, in the
traditional comic ballad Get up and bar the door, a married couple resolve
a row on who should lock the door for the night by agreeing that it should be
done by whichever of them speaks rst, each thereafter stubbornly
maintaining silence despite humiliations inicted by intruders, which
include shaving the husband in pudding broo.6 Not surprisingly perhaps,
the topos is strongly associated with the gure of the Fool. In a French
satirical interlude from 1568, Jacques Bienvenus Le Monde malade et mal
panse, the gure representing the World is shaved by four Fools as part of its
anti-Catholic allegory (although it is his head rather than his chin that
suers).7 More often the roles were reversed, to the extent that shaving the
Fool was the subject of a well-documented medieval proverb, a barbe de fol/
Apprent on a rere,8 and duly appears in Pieter Bruegel the Elders painting
depicting Flemish Proverbs of 1559.9 Nor is it surprising that as an actual

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83

performance mock shaving belongs very much under festive auspices. A

mock shaving (which could be said to make a fool of the victim) was a
traditional Wake Game in Ireland, and in this Shaving Game, as an
antiquarian account indicates, there is the added element of besmirching:
the leader and his assistants would pick on somebody whom they might
dislike and drag him out to sit on a chair in the middle of the oor.
The barbers then gathered about him and started to rub water, in which
many kinds of dirt had been mixed, to his face and head. Two would
then begin to shave him with bits of stick or something, as razors. The shaving
was nished by drenching the victim with water. (O Suilleabhain, 1967:
p.83)

There is a modern Danish analogue, a party skit in which the shaving is

done by chain-saw (wielded by a stunning blonde so spectators dont
notice the chain has been removed),10 suggesting the game was known
elsewhere in Europe. Indeed the coercive shaving of the Fool or an
equivalent gure is associated with festive traditions in a number of
countries, over several centuries. Early references include the shaving of
the Chief Fool, precentor stultorum, during the Feast of Fools at Sens,
France, in 1511 (Chambers, 1967: 2.299), and more specically this was
a prohibition of a custom which had evidently been observed
previously, and in public (in theatro, which will mean at least in a
public place if not actually on a stage). Perhaps the most elaborate
early instance is the sixteenth-century Danish carnival interlude, The
Unfaithful Wife, in the course of which the plays clown-gure, a
vulgar Peasant, is scornfully rejected by the lady he woos on account of
his long and dirty beard: he duly visits a barber, only to have the beard
smeared with ordure (luto in the Latin stage direction), and ultimately
burnt o with a candle.11 The occurrence of the latter feature in this
very derivative play suggests that it too, may be part of a wider
tradition: with its phases reversed this double treatment is suered, if
o-stage, by the doctor set to guard Antipholus of Ephesus and his
servant in Shakespeares Comedy of Errors:
My master and his man are both broke loose,
Beaten the maids a-row, and bound the doctor,
Whose beard they have singd o with brands of re,
And ever as it blazd, they threw on him
Great pails of puddled mire to quench the hair. (5.1.16973)

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That the doctor at the same time is being pricked with scissors by the servant
like a fool (5.1.175) suggests a connection with the shaving-the-fool topos,
rather than, as sometimes suggested, derivation from Marlowes Edward II
itself, which of course lacks the singeing.12 Victims of mock shaving in more
recent carnival traditions include the Fool accompanying sword dance and
garland dance performers in Austria (Meschke, 1931: pp.195204; Wolfram
1935: p.39), and the in some ways equivalent bear-man paraded through
villages in the Pyrenees (Alford, 1930: pp.268, 275, 276, 278). To the extent
that Christian tradition, including religious drama, saw the follower of
Christ, or indeed Christ himself, as a kind of holy fool, an innocent,
unworldly gure who accepts or even seeks worldly abasement and
humiliation (Billington, 1979; Stewart, 1999), the legend of the enforced
shaving and besmirching of Christ in elite religiosity might well qualify as a
baroque transposition of this topos.

Charivary
But even before his mock shaving, Edward complained (5.3.26) that his body
was covered in foul excrements, and when he later (5.5.60) lists among his
torments, that One plays continually upon a drum, the combination may
have led an Elizabethan audience to interpret the latter as rough music,
synonymous with (because a denitive feature of) the charivary, the raucous
customary demonstration against those who have breached community
mores, but whose behaviour did not render them liable to the sanction of the
ocial judicial system. At the time of Marlowe (when the custom seems to
have been increasing in incidence and virulence) this would typically have
involved a parade to the home of the victim (most often a domineering wife),
who would be subjected to precisely a cacophony of beaten drums, pots and
pans, as described somewhat later in Samuel Butlers Hudibras (1664):
noyse
Of Horns, and Pans, and Dogs, and Boyes;
And Kettle-Drums, whose sullen Dub
Sounds like the hooping of a Tub.

On the way a gure in the parade would throw grains mixed with dung at
people in the street (probably as negating parody of the fresh grains cast at
weddings, the ancestor of our confetti):

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85

one upon a pair of Panniers

Full fraught with that, which for good manners
Shall here be nameless, mixt with Grains
Which he dispencd among the Swains.13

The lth symbolism might in some cases be extended by dragging victims

out of their houses and throwing them in the nearest dirty hole (or river or
stream), as in the case of the more extreme form of the West-country Stag
Hunt variety of charivary, which to judge from the reporters reticence
may have been restricted to the punishment of unnatural sexual acts:
It was a primitive method of inicting rough justice upon a youth guilty of a grave
moral oence. [T]he men of the village, after darkbearing lanterns and
torches, and armed with frying pans, re irons, cans, bells, etc., which were loudly
beaten together, making a terrible discordant dinmarched in procession to the
home of the culprit. The leader then assumed a pair of rams horns, which were
mounted upon his headand the men danced and howled round the house,
making noises like a pack of hounds in full cry. The man was then brought out,
given a fair start, and hunted with howls and hunting cries. When caught he was
generally thrown into the nearest pond or stream, and then allowed to return
home. (Brown, 1952: pp.105106, on basis of local reminiscences)

Indeed, a northern English variant of the charivary, the stang-riding,

could end with the victim (i.e. the culprit, typically a husband not man
enough to control his wife) being thrown specically onto a midden
(Thompson, 1992: p.8). The carnival connection here is that while
charivaries might occur at any time, as an immediate response to an event
or rumour, there was a tendency both in England and abroad to save
them up for a festive period (be it carnival proper or, in England, more
likely Whitsun) to take advantage of the leisure and mood this provided
(Ingram, 1985: p.175).

Filth and liminality

The victims of charivaries were not fools, nor made fools of in any generic
sense; their signicance for Edward is rather that (like the Fool) they were
typically liminal gures, members of the community who by unorthodox
behaviour and consequent ambiguous status challenged the conventional
norms: the sexually incontinent spinster or widow (behaving with the
licence traditionally accorded only to men), the dominant wife, the
dominated (ergo probably cuckolded) husband, the unmarried or

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ill-matched couple, the sodomite.14 And the demonstration itself, like

the transgressions it protested against, was transgressive: in the words of
social historian E.P. Thompson the charivary is about crossing
forbidden frontiers or mixing alien categories, and tracs in transvestism and inversion.15 The besmirching aspect of both the charivary
and the mock shaving may indeed be transformations of a more basic
topos, the simple but deeply symbolic association with ordure, particularly human faeces. Bakhtin, predictably, has eloquently insisted on the
liminal status of excrement, transitional as it is between the human and
the purely material, and has noted its association with that most
transgressive of medieval festivals, the Feast of Fools (Bakhtin, 1984:
pp. 147, 175). Just as predictably, explicit association with excrement is
a particular hazard for liminal creatures, and its demonstrative use was
not restricted to the charivary: the ocial punishment for an unnaturally aggressive woman, the cucking-stool, could involve ducking not
merely in water, but into lth (in merdam) (Spargo, 1944: p.86 n. 3,
pp.4,15). In a quite dierent sphere the very strong scatological
tendency in late-medieval art is closely and regularly associated with
the man-beast grotesques, the Babewynes, who of course essentially
belong as liminal creatures cavorting with liminal matter should in
the margins of medieval manuscripts (Camille, 1992, 1994; Randall,
1966). The implications are particularly strong, of course, when this
association with lth takes the specic form of being discarded to a
place designated for the consigning of ordure; dunghill, and dunghill
slave were favourite Elizabethan execrations, for example. In traditional
narratives creatures who end up, like the stang-riding victims just
mentioned, discarded on dunghills include changelings (in Norwegian
legends) and a talking doll (in a French folktale),16 and if examples
closer to Marlowe are needed, then we might evoke the bodies of two
rebels against authority (and thus unnatural, whatever we might
otherwise think of them): the servant who kills his master, Cornwall, in
King Lear, and the monstrous Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI.17 And in a
way Edward shares this fate after his death when his body, in a variant
of the disposal of the corpse formula, is thrown into the castle moat
(5.5.117), given that in addition to their defensive purposes moats
generally functioned as open sewers, with privies situated in rooms that
jutted out above them.18

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87

Consignment to a cesspit or sewer

But before this, of course, as a result of Marlowes adaptation of his
source, Edwards suerings include the most intense form of association
with ordure, a physical consignment in a better-dened marginal environment, the cesspit under a building. Edwards guards describe him as being
incarcerated in a vault up to his knees in water,/To which the channels of
the castle run (5.5.23), and Edward himself laments, This dungeon
where they keep me is the sink/Wherein the lth of all the castle falls
(5.5.5556), where he stands for days on end in mire and puddle (5.5.58).
(The chronicles merely place Edward in a chamber ouer a foule lthie
dungeon, full of dead carrion, where he would be demoralised by the
abhominable stink.19) Roger Sales, on the basis of local references, has
discerned some of the implications of the incident, invoking the status of
the London Fleet as both a prison and a sewer, as well as the duty of the
prisoners of Bridewell to collect dung in a hand-drawn cart from the
London streets, in support of the notion that the play places a monarch in
a space that was associated with grotesque characters who threatened
order and stability, and who also included the outcasts in Marlowes own
Jew of Malta who attack the city by entering through it sewers.20
But the connections are much wider, for in many ways this is the best
documented of the topoi discussed here, and with the clearest connotations. If human ordure is essentially liminal, then designated places in
which it is collected or concealed cesspools, cesspits, sewers as manmade caves and wildernesses, are quintessentially so. And there is a long
and powerful tradition in narrative and drama from the Old Testament
to urban legend, from the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah, ch. 38, v. 6) to New
York alligators of consigning to such liminal environments gures whose
ambivalent, interstitial quality transgresses or questions received categories:21 meaning that conversely, when we see a gure so consigned the
deployment of the topos alerts us to the likely ambivalence of the gure
and the denitive signicance of that ambivalence for his nature.
The list of ambivalent/transgressive gures thus consigned, in addition
to Jeremiah and the alligators, includes the Polonius gure in the Hamlet
sources (not ambivalent in himself, but becomes so after Hamlet has cut
his bodie in pieces, which he caused to be boyled and then cast into an
open vaulte or privie, so that it might serve for foode to the hogges).22 He
is joined by the bodies of bastards discarded (according to both widespread

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popular belief and judicial process) down house-privies in early-modern

English cities (Dolan, 1994: p.135 n.6), and an Italian doctor with social
pretensions in a fur coat riding on a carnival bear who is tossed into a
sewage ditch by two pranksters in a tale in Boccaccios Decameron.23 The
New York alligators are anticipated by the giant hogs which, according to
legends in Victorian London reported by both the Daily Telegraph and
Henry Mayhew, inhabited the sewers of Hampstead,24 and before them the
thrice-cooked but nine-lived cats encountered in the sewers beneath Fleet
Street by the intrepid voyagers of a Ben Jonson epigram.25 Marlowes own
Barabas, the Jew of Malta, guides an invading army of Turks into the city
through the common channels of the city,26 implicitly qualied to do so
by his race and creed, his ambiguous status in Christian eyes explicitly
demonstrated by the way just previously he is expelled from the city like
carrion his supposedly dead body thrown over the city wall to be eaten
by scavenging animals (while Christian rogues are accorded due burial).
The perspective is reversed in the fate of those medieval Christian childmartyrs ceremonially murdered by Jews in the notorious blood-libel
legend, their bodies discarded variously In to a gonge-put, in a wardrobe
/Where as thise Jewes purgen hire entraille.27 These gures were
perhaps assumed to be as liminal to legendary Jews as Jews were to
ctional Maltese Christians: several of them share Barrabass ultimate
ambiguity of being not dead when thought so. Last but not least there is
Caliban (a salvage and deformed slave, according to the Folio list of
characters in The Tempest) together with a Court Jester and a drunken
Butler whose ambitions make him a mock king. That the lthy-mantled
pool (IV.i.180) beyond Prosperos cell into which Ariel leads Caliban,
Stephano and Trinculo was a cesspool is strongly suggested by the pun on
jakes in their complaint that Ariel has played the jack with them
(IV.i.196), and eectively conrmed by their smelling all horse-piss
(IV.i.197), on an island where by all accounts there are no horses (Pettitt,
1997).28
I see no reason why we should not juxtapose this topos with Patrick
Ryans material and include an incarnate god in our list of interstitial
creatures consigned to this liminal landscape. As already noted there is an
Old Testament prototype in Jeremiah, and indeed the association of Christ
and the cesspool was a feature of Reformation thought quite independently of the secret suerings of baroque religiosity. The New Testament

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(for example, Luke XII.5) is given to referring to hell as Gehenna,

historically a valley near Jerusalem once used for human sacrices in
honour of Moloch but later, in a deliberate act of desecration, re-scheduled
as the citys rubbish-tip and cesspool. This in turn prompted a lively debate
among Elizabethan clerics on whether the assertion in the Athanasian
Creed that Christ descended into hell really meant (as indeed a Jehovahs
Witness once averred on my doorstep) that Christ merely made an
excursion into the rubbish tip and open sewers of Jerusalem.29 And should
we insist on the usual meaning, the equivalence between hell and a sewer or
cesspit was anyway something of commonplace in both Classical and
Christian traditions (Henderson, 1975: p.192; Seiler, 1992). The connection
may well be present in Edward II itself, when the place of Edwards
connement is referred to as the lake (5.5.25), evidently in the now lost
sense of dungeon or underground pit, and very likely with hellish
overtones; Marlowe himself refers to the lake of hell in 2 Tamburlaine
(3.5.24).30 This extends an already extraordinary range, but with categorical ambiguity as a very marked unifying feature, and it is into this
company that Edward is introduced, when Marlowe has him incarcerated
in the castle cesspit.

Anal Violation
Of course the most powerful of the images associated with the suerings of
Edward is the anal violation with which he is killed. The assassin assigned
the job, Lightborn, calls for a spit, and let it be red hot (5.5.30), as well as
a table and a feather mattress (5.5.33), so that Edward can be held down
without bruising. Whatever its symbolic connotations, the purely practical
point of the whole procedure was evidently to kill Edward without leaving
any mark of violence on the outside of the body: in the later assassination
of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, alleged, in some sources, to be very
similar, a funnel was inserted before the spit.31
The act is duly performed (5.5.112), and screams for interpretation as
forcefully as Edward in agony. There are of course connotations of a
sodomitical rape,32 but other spheres of reference are also invoked. Roger
Sales, has noted (Sales 1991: 115) that the atrocity is compatible with
Elizabethan public executions in targeting the lower body (as in the middle
phase of the classic hanging, drawing and quartering), but it is nonetheless

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a highly specic act, not recorded anywhere in European history as a

systematic form of ocial punishment or execution, beyond an exquisite
variant inicted on male adulterers, raphanidosis, reported (courtesy of
Aristophanes) from ancient Greece.33 Sodomy, the obvious oence for this
mode of execution, was in medieval England considered a form of heresy,
and punished with burning or burial alive; when it was redened as a
felony by the 15331534 Act for the punishment of the vice of buggerie,
the punishment accordingly became death by hanging (Smith, 1991: pp.42
45).34 Horric and grotesque as it is, the ultimate transgression of the
human bodys boundary inicted on Edward, a mortally liminal act, has a
wide range of occurrences in European art, literature, and folklore. There
is a correspondingly wide range of connotations, from which interesting
patterns and tendencies emerge.
Occurrences resolve themselves fairly readily into two broad categories,
the rst comprising those in which the inserted object is absurdly and so
provocatively inappropriate: the plough-coulter at the climax of Chaucers
Millers tale; the musical instruments in Boschs painting of the Garden of
Delights; the daodils, toothbrushes and hair-curlers of modern urban
legends.35 Edwards death belongs rather to the second category, in which
the implement is in some way, however perverse, logical, but where the
action itself eects a reclassifying (or at least declassication) of its victim.

Violation as Cure
The most natural form of violation is of course in medical contexts. A
syringe could be used in this way to inject medicine into the body, or there
could be more local conditions requiring intrusive treatment: one of the
occupational hazards of knight errantry jogging along all day in wet
armour seems to have been the condition known as Fistula in anno,
whose cure could require quite aggressive treatment, including cauterising
with a red hot iron.36 To this extent we may be asked to perceive Edward
as a diseased person needing treatment, but when displayed in public in
pictorial representation or mimetic customs penetrative treatment most
often has carnivalesque connotations and a distinct orientation towards
the posterior of the Fool. Instances I have encountered include one of a
series of ways of curing folly depicted on wooden plates from 1528,
showing medicine being poured through a funnel (Mezger, 1984: p.99,

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91

ill.13), while in a cluster of Italian illustrations of carnival parades

involving comic gures from the commedia dell arte, Maramao injects
medicine into Cap. Cardoni using a syringe.37 Rather less realistic but
virtually ubiquitous are the bellows applied to the posteriors of both beasts
and humans, presumably to blow life in, or blow disease out, in a number
of recent carnival customs, whose medieval antecedents may be recorded
by depictions of this motif in pictorial sources such as misericords.38

Violation as Penetration with Weapon

Another fairly predictable occurrence of anal violation is penetration by a
pointed weapon in connection with conict and combat, but this, too, is
striking enough to provoke additional connotations. We earlier glanced
briey at the moment in Shakespeares Comedy of Errors which reports the
o-stage mock-shaving (with beard-singeing) of the Doctor set to guard
Antipholus of Ephesus, and noted in passing that the latters servant was
simultaneously pricking the Doctor with scissors, like a fool (5.1.175). If,
as seems likely, we are supposed to envisage the scissors aimed at the
Doctors posterior, this would suggest that this rendition of the topos is
also associated with the Fool. Less light-heartedly, penetration by a lance
features with disturbing prominence in the foreground of a battle scene in
one of the fteenth-century illustrations in the celebrated Tre`s Riches
Heures du Duc de Berry, and evidently involves the ultimate but in its
own terms deserved degradation and humiliation of an enemy who by
denition has turned to ee.39 (There is a comic narrative analogue in the
episode in Rabelais Gargantua when Friar John single-handedly beats an
army of 13 622 men, including one who escapes up a tree and whom he
accordingly empaloyt par le fondement.40) But as this particular
illumination is specically of Davids victory over the Jebusites, as evoked
in Psalm 29 (Authorized Version Psalm 30), and occurs in a Book of Hours,
presented for contemplation during prayer, there may be connotations of
Davids own description of Gods wrath in Psalm 77 (Authorized Version
Psalm 78) v. 66: and he smote his enemies in the hinder parts [Vulgate in
posteriora]: he put them to a perpetual reproach.41 This same verse has
been invoked by Karl Wentersdorf in connection with depictions of anal
violation among the scatological marginalia of late-medieval manuscripts.
And as in another book of hours, from c.1300 and illustrated by Joroy

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dAspremont, the characteristic victim of such scenes is a gure we

encountered earlier in connection with marginal ordure: the man-ape or
Babewyn.42 The meaning may be, as Wentersdorf implies, that the gure
represents sinful man, manifestly unable to control his bestial nature, and
suering his due (and appropriate) punishment (Wentersdorf, 1984: p.6);
but it is also striking how the same horrid fate is shared by this less than
human at the foot of the page, and that less than king (less than man?)
beneath the castle.

Violation as Hell Pains

To the extent such wounding is a punishment for sin, we are within reach
of the occurrence of anal violation among the pains of hell or purgatory,
connotations already triggered in the play by the equation between the
cesspit and hell, and Marlowes naming the assassin Lightborn, a nearanglicism of Lucifer, and the name of one of the devils in the Chester
mystery cycle.43 Indeed, Edward urged his captors: to the gates of hell
convey me hence (4.7.88). In the next world, as Thomas a` Kempis averred,
there is no vice that will not receive its proper retribution,44 and
accordingly the punishment of sexual indulgence by the iniction of pain
on the lower body can readily be encountered in the periods depictions or
accounts of hell. Simple, straight lechery (the seductions and obscene
delights in which they had wallowed without restraint) is the crime of the
ladies who in Orderic Vitaliss 11th-century report of a vision of hell rode
with bare bottoms bouncing on saddles of red hot nails,45 and the torments
depicted in the late-medieval Vision of Tundale included Men and
wemenThat pyned were in her prevetees, doubtless for the same reason
(Rooth, 1992: p.37). In a wall-painting of c. 14751510 from the church of
Maria Magdalene in Snderhald, Denmark, a black devil holds a aming
torch to the buttocks of a long-haired and long-legged woman; this may be
punishment by violation but could also be a demonstration of the nature
of her sin: to borrow a phrase from Faustus she is such a hot whore that if
you put a torch to her in the right place it will catch re.46 The situation is
much clearer in the depiction of hell pains forming part of the fourteenthcentury doomsday scene in the cathedral of San Gimignano, Tuscany,
where a grinning devil thrusts a stake into the pubic area of a red-haired
woman.47

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93

Anal violation may sometimes merely contribute to the general sense of

grotesque horror and humiliation in late-medieval notions of hell, as
perhaps with the ute and arrow in Boschs Garden of Delights,48 but on
occasion the connection with sodomy is made explicit. Thus, in another
segment of hell in the San Gimignano mural, an iron rod is thrust into the
sinner by a bearded demon, then emerges from his mouth to enter that of
another man sitting, bound, beside him. Besides which, like most of the
gures in this scene, the main victim is wearing a paper cap with his
category as sinner specied on it; in his case: Sottomitto.49

Violation by Spit
The most distinct feature of Edwards death in Marlowes play, resulting
from a choice among the options in his sources, is the use of a preheated
spit for the violation. We are again approaching the realm of the
ambivalent or interstitial creature, since in addition to everything else, the
use of the spit makes of the human victim not merely an animal, but an
animal dressed (in the culinary sense) and roasted, by implication prior to
being eaten.
Even when expressed verbally it is a powerful image, as when a character
in Shakespeares Titus Andronicus vows (with reference to a bastard, indel
and mixed-race child) he will broach the tadpole on my rapiers point,50
and one wonders what awful fate King Lear has in mind for his (very
unnatural) daughters when he imagines a thousand with red burning spits/
Come hizzing in upon em!51 It is interesting that Shakespeare (or whoever
wrote The First Part of the Contention, which later became 1 Henry VI ),
given the same choice by his sources as Marlowe (between smothering and
the hot spit) for the assassination of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester
(1447), opted for the smothering. Georey Bullough suggests that in doing
so, Shakespeare showed better taste,52 but perhaps rather he sensed a
(vernacular) decorum between the character of the victim and the nature of
the killing. It is nonetheless a tribute to the power of the image of violation
that it should prompt copycat killing (or copycat rumours).53
It becomes a grotesquely powerful image when the implications of
broaching on the spit are made explicit by reference to dressing and
roasting: Rabelais Panurge (1532) narrates an adventure in which he was
captured by Turks, who broached and larded him like a rabbit with a view

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to roasting him live,54 and Patrick Ryans baroque preachers on the

crucixion were anticipated by a fteenth-century mystic in a passage on
the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist oered by Huizinga as
exemplifying the waning of the Middle Ages:
You will eat him roasted at the re, well baked, not at all overdone or burnt. For
just as the Easter lamb was properly baked and roasted between two res of
wood or charcoal, thus was gentle Jesus on Good Friday placed on the spit of
the worthy cross, and tied between the two res of His very fearful death and
passion, and of the ardent charity and love which He felt for our souls and our
salvation; he was, as it were, roasted and slowly baked for us. (Huizinga, 1985,
p.161)55

Not surprisingly the image is if anything more powerful in pictorial form,

and perhaps inevitably can be encountered in Reformation propaganda: a
German Protestant handbill of 1580 by F. Hildenberg, Des Teuels Gar
Kuchen (In the Devils Cookshop), depicts Jesuits being pulled, stued
(more violation), larded, and roasted on a spit by devils.56 An instance of its
application to less polemical, homiletic ends is provided by a detail in Pieter
Bruegel the Elders allegorical depiction of the nature and consequences of
Wrath (1557), one of a series of engravings on the Seven Deadly Sins:
amidst a scene of desperate mayhem visited by grotesques on human
gures, a long-snouted, hooded gure roasts a naked man on a spit over a
re of twigs, pouring liquid from a ladle onto his loins.57

Roasting in hell
Not unexpectedly, most of the depictions of anal violation among the
pains of hell take the more specic form of roasting, with the implement
clearly a spit (with a handle, sometimes being turned by a devil) and the
victim placed above a re. On reection, conversely, anal violation is
implicitly invoked in any reference to a sinner (or enemy) roasting in hell.
Occasionally encountered in medieval drama and narrative visions of hell
(according to Bakhtin, 1984: pp.347, 389), the motif is particularly strong
in late-medieval Italian Last-Judgement frescoes. Early, explicit but
unemphatic appearances in Giottos decoration of the Scrovegni chapel
in Padua,58 and in the mosaics of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in
Florence (the latter including a second devil ladling liquid over the roasting
victim),59 lead on to the more prominent use of the motif in Bualmaccos

The carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II

95

denitive deployment of the punishment-ts-the-sin system in Pisas

Camposanto cemetery.60 This in turn anticipates the San Gimignano
detail of the implement emerging from the mouth of the victim and
entering that of another man (doubtless to signify a sodomitical relationship), which also occurs in the early fteenth-century hell scene on a wall of
the Bolognini Chapel in the church of St. Petronio, Bologna.61
In his comprehensive study of Italian and French depictions of hell
pains, Jerome Baschet warns against assuming an automatic association of
roasting on a spit with sodomy, since in some cases no sin is specied, and
in others another sin is, particularly in France, where the motif is also more
likely to occur in manuscript illuminations.62 Nor do we know the sin of
the man being roasted on a spit by a small, fat, blue-faced devil in
Hieronymous Boschs Last Judgement triptych of c. 1500.63 As we have
seen, however, the association does occur, and it is specically sodomites
who are strikingly described in a late fourteenth-century laudes (Italian
vernacular guild play) of Antichrist and the Last Judgement as rostite a
guisa de porchete, roasted in the manner of piglets.64

The Carnival Pig-on-a-Spit

Which brings us back to carnival, the great feast of roasting, the saying
farewell (vale) to meat (carne) before the fast of Lent, and a day of physical
indulgence in which men not merely ate pigs, but behaved like pigs.65
Renaissance art, probably reecting traditional seasonal custom, was fond
of depicting the combat between gures representing Carnival and Lent,
and if meat is associated with carnival, so is the spit on which it was
roasted: In another Shrovetide custom in Germany, children go from door
to door begging food, which in accordance with their quete-rhyme, chitt
mi watt an meinen Spitt, is impaled on the small spits they carry.66
Accordingly in most depictions of the combat between Carnival and Lent,
Carnival wields a spit, as often as not with a pig on it.67 Thus, in Pieter
Bruegel the Elders celebrated painting on this theme, Carnival, a
Falstaan fat man riding on a great barrel wields a spit on which are
impaled various animals, including the head of a pig. Frans Hoghenbergs
near-contemporary (1558) engraving, Den vetten vastelavont met alle syn
gasten compt hier bestriden die mager vasten [Here comes the fat Carnival
with all his guests to quarrel with skinny Lent], has a similar spit-wielding

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Tom Pettitt

fat man (on a barrel on a cart), with unidentiable animals on the spit
(Kinser, 1990: p.49 g. 2), while Fr. Langlois gure of Mardy Gras (early
seventeenth century) rides into battle wielding a spit on which is impaled,
in deance of proportion, a complete pig (Holm, 1991: p.218).
And so Edward dies, in a shattering echo of the revenge-tragedy ghost
evoked in the Induction to Middletons A Warning for Fair Women (ca
158599), skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt,68 so loudly his assassins fear
this cry will raise the town (5.5.113). The moment recreates, rearranged
and re-contextualized, a compound image of pig-broaching and sexual
violation rst deployed in the Archanians of Aristophanes, where an
impoverished man, adroitly invoking the Greek use of piglet as slang for
female genitalia, oers his daughters for sale in the market disguised as
pigs, suitable for impaling on spits.69

Concluding remarks
Edward himself has long rested quietly, in the elegant gothic tomb in
Gloucester Catheral, and it was only his shadow who relived his suerings
on the Elizabethan stage, to whatever eect Marlowes particular and
powerful rendering of them will have achieved. The 2003 season at the rebuilt
Shakespeares Globe in Southwark may have given us a production of the
play as close to the original performance conditions and techniques as
modern scholarship can achieve, but to match this authentic performance
(and its authentic spit) with an authentic, historical appreciation we need to
identify and understand the vernacular topoi in the play: a task to which the
evidence adduced above is, in its laborious way, designed to contribute.
It can be claimed, I think, that the evidence has revealed, or in some
cases merely conrmed, the connotations of the individual topoi as they
are featured in the stage action and verbal images. The mock shaving does
not merely hurt and humiliate, but eectively makes a fool of Edward;
the drumming and the besmirching mark him as a social outcast; the
cesspit is self-evidently a place where unwanted matter is discarded,
predictably a kind of hell, but furthermore the natural habitat of the
heterodox. The way he is killed has connotations of hell pains in general,70
and indeed those inicted on sodomites in particular, but evokes at
broader kaleidoscope of related images including the fool, cooking,
carnival, and the pig.

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97

But the impact of any one topos is also clearly reinforced by its
association with the others, in this play and elsewhere. Patterns seem to
emerge connecting or even equating them with each other, and with others,
suggesting they may be part of a system. Thus, if for Edward the mock
shaving leads to incarceration in lth, for Christ incarceration in lth leads
to a mock shaving. The babewyn who revels in lth on the manuscript
margins is subject to anal violation. Fools are both shaven and violated,
particularly at carnival. A human who is cooked (the Polonius gure in
boiled in the Hamlet source) ends up in a sewer; a human who has been
through a sewer (Marlowes Barabas) ends up cooked (in his cauldron); the
pig which is roasted and eaten at carnival is at home in the sewer where it
eats human waste (and the occasional human); Hell is both a sewer and a
site of broaching and roasting on spits. We can just glimpse an intriguing
set of permutations between evidently analogous contexts (Hell, cesspit,
margin, carnival), experiences (shaving, besmirching, rough music, violation, roasting), and evidently, if unexpectedly, analogous beings, in
particular: Christ, the Fool, the babewyn, and the Pig.
The liminality in relation to the established categories of the great
chain of being god/man/beast of an incarnate god born of virgin, a
human whose lack of reason and often misshapen body have something
of the bestial but whose folly may have something of the divine, a human
ape that can play musical instruments, and an animal whose humanoid
qualities were recognized long before the startling revelations and medical
implications of an extensively shared DNA71 equates them with the
objects of the charivaries, which protested precisely such liminality on
other categorical boundaries (the manly woman; the eeminate man),
and qualies them as the victims of ambivalent treatments like the
shaving-that-is-besmirching, violence-that-is-violation and the killingthat-is-cooking, and for incarceration in a liminal environment like the
cesspit alongside an interstitial substance like sewage, not to mention
association with Carnival, that most ambivalent moment in the calendar,
between the festivity of Christmas and the self-denial of Lent.72 Edwards
joining them through the plays vernacular topoi is both facilitated by,
and draws attention to, his analogous problematic relationship to
categories. It is, of course, natural to explore the specic sexual
connotations of the anal violation in the light of Edwards evident
predilections (Boyette, 1977: pp.4849), but the perspectives are broader,

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Tom Pettitt

and match a wider ambiguity in Edward, in a play written before the

emergence of the modern notion of a distinct homosexual identity. To the
extent that love is the issue, the problem is not merely that Edwards is
unorthodox, but more that it is immoderate, nearly wild (Bray, 1982:
p.26), and the issue goes beyond love to identity in relation to established
norms of both gender and rank:
The highly unconventional hero violates all the expected external forms,
including bodily gestures, of demonstrating his masculine status as king. He
wears fashionable, feminine clothes; his public appearances are governed by
private desires; and he behaves in a disrespectful way towards his barons.
Edward rejects those patterns of behaviour commonly used to establish
masculine identity. In dening himself by private love aairs and in depending
on his favourites, he deliberately chooses a feminine position. (Feldman, 2000:
p.29)73

Ambiguity on one axis is likely to have connotations for others, and it

would be interesting to explore the way the transformation into an
animal also implied by the impaling on a spit completes a notion rst
mooted by Gaveston in his lyrical outburst at the beginning of the play,
where (at least in some interpretations) he equates Edward with
Actaeon, transformed in the likeness of an hart, in the context of a
whole set of categorical confusions in the description of the shows he
will stage: Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad (mortal/
immortal; male/female); My men, like satyrs grazing/Shall with their
goat-feet dance (human/animal); a lovely boy in Dians shape (male/
female; human/god), and all this to entertain an audience itself
categorically confused: the pliant king (1.1.5268).74
In our current terminology the message is, more or less synonymously: Edward is ambivalent (he may belong to one category or
another); he is liminal (situated athwart the boundary between two
categories); he is interstitial (falling into the gap between categories).
However we term it, Edward is not merely problematic in relation to
categories, he problematizes categorization, and categories are the
mirror by which we identify ourselves, the map by which we orient
ourselves, the compass by which we navigate our way through the
cultural and natural environment. It is not only in Hell that the
punishment ts the crime: Just as the charivary uses transgressive action
and symbolism to punish transgressive behaviour, so this challenger of

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99

categories had to undergo suerings and a death that amounted to a

multiple decategorization.
NOTES
1. I am happy to express my appreciation of the encouragement and advice received
from members of the Marlowe Society of America, at whose international conferences earlier versions of these papers were presented, and who responded constructively to this one in the form it was oered to their July 2003 International
Conference in Cambridge.
2. My article does not cover the apocalyptic features Ryan discerns in the play.
3. The notion supplies a kind of missing link and retrospective legitimacy for Ruth
Evans suggestion that the mistreatment of Christ in the York Crucixion is a kind
of homosexual rape (Evans, 1994: p.121).
4. References to the play will be made parenthetically in the main text in what follows,
citing Marlowe, Edward the Second, Charles R. Forker, ed. Revels Plays, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1994.
5. W. Moelwyn Merchant, ed., Edward the Second, New Mermaids, Benn, London,
1967, Introduction, p. xxi takes it that the shaving occurs in a dungeon. Edward has
indeed just complained (5.3.17) that Within a dungeon Englands King is kept, but
need not be referring to the present moment, which seems rather to be on the road
between places of incarceration, as implied by the channel water of 5.3.27.
Channel is explained by the Revels editor as a street sewer, gutter when it occurs
at 1.1.187.
6. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed F.J. Child 5 vols.,18821898; Dover
Publications, New York, 1965, No. 275. Reference to a ballad is a useful reminder
that just as in ballads, a line can be both a traditional formula and participate in
repetition patterns with similar lines elsewhere in the text, so establishing the status
as topos of the mock-shaving scene in Edward II is quite compatible with its
function, within the play, as a balance with an earlier scene in which the Bishop of
Coventry, at Edwards behest, is humiliated by being fouled with channel water
(1.1.18691); on parallels between the two scenes see Dessen, 1978: p.64.
7. G. Bonet Maury, Le Monde malade et mal panse, ou la comedie protestante au
XVIe sie`cle, Societe de lhistorie du protestantisme francais: Bulletin historique et
litteraire, vol. 35 (1886), pp. 210222, at p. 218. My thanks to Jelle Koopmans for
bringing this item to my attention.
8. Proverbes en Rimes, Grace Frank and Dorothy Miner, facs. eds. Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, 1937, No. VIII. My thanks to Malcolm Jones for
bringing this to my attention.
9. The relevant detail is conveniently reproduced in Mezger, 1991: 234, ill. 125, in
association with a discussion (pp.234237) of the shaving of the Fool in medieval
and modern carnival customs of the kind discussed below. The painting is frequently reproduced, and is accessible for example at Olgas Gallery, http://
www.abcgallery.com.
10. Personal communication, 1994.

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Tom Pettitt

11. Leif Sndergaard, Fastelavnsspillet i Danmarks senmiddelalder, Odense University

Press, 1989, p. 111, Den Utro Hustru, l. 184 SD. For an English translation see
Tom Pettitt and Leif Sndergaard, The Unfaithful Wife (Den Utro Hustru),
Medieval English Theatre, 21 (2000, for 1999), 111134, ll. 167184.
12. The possible connection with Marlowe is noted by R.A. Foakes, ed., The Comedy
of Errors, Arden Shakespeare Second Series, Methuen, London, 1962, 1963,
Introduction p. xix, and notes to V.i. pp.169. (which I quote from this edition).
See also Brooks 1968: pp.7879. The implications of the pricking are explored
further below in connection with the topos of anal violation.
13. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964, Book
II, ll. 566. For a more detailed discussion of this and other aspects of the charivary
(and a justication for this spelling), see Pettitt, 1999.
14. For an eighteenth-century English charivary-like demonstration aimed specically
against a sodomite see Rollison, 1981.
15. Thompson, 1992: p.13; see also Ingram, 1985: p.172, speaking of the charivarys
characteristic riding backwards, cacophony, transvestism and animal symbolism:
these symbols are characteristically expressive of anomaly and/or transition
changes of state or the crossing of behavioural, spatial, or temporal boundaries.
16. See respectively Simpson, 1988: p.170; Darnton, 1984: pp.5455.
17. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Jay L. Halio, New Cambridge
Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 3.7.9596; The Second Part of
King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway, New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1991, 5.10.74. His slayer, Iden, calls Cade monstrous at 5.10.59, and at 5.10.77 anticipates a further unnatural feature in Cade
becoming food for crows to feed upon.
18. This formula is not pursued farther here: its main purpose seems to have been to get
corpses o stage in a theatre with no curtain. For discussion see Pettitt, 1988.
19. Cited in Forker, ed. Edward the Second, p.58.
20. Sales, 1991:p.114; the insight is undermined slightly by Sales making Edwards
place of incarceration, like the Fleet, an open sewer. See below for the sewers in
The Jew of Malta.
21. Fuller discussion, and more detailed presentation of the instances listed in what
follows, will be available in my study, The Ambivalent Beast in the Liminal
Landscape: Categorical Transgression in the Contemporary Legend, forthcoming
in ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore.
22. The Hystorie of Hamblet (1608), translated from the 1582 edition of Belleforest,
Histoires tragiques, quoted in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed.
Georey Bullough, vol. VII, Major Tragedies, RKP, London, 1975, p.94.
23. Boccaccio, The Decameron, day 8, story 9, trans. G.H. McWilliam, Penguin
Classics, second edition. London, 1995, pp. 615632.
24. Daily Telegraph, 10 October 1859, cited in Boyle, 1990: p.204; Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor, second edition, 1861. Cass, London, 1967:
p.154.
25. Epigramme CXXXIII, On the Famous Voyage, ll. pp.149154 in Ben Jonson,
Poems, Ian Donaldson, ed. Oxford University Press, London, 1975.
26. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, David Bevington, ed., Revels Student
Edition, Manchester University Press, 1997, V.ii.89.

The carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II

101

27. The rst quotation is from a thirteenth century legend, Hou the iewes, in despit of
vre lady, threwe a chyld in a gonge, l. 48, in Carleton Brown, The Prioresss Tale,
in Sources and Analogues of Chaucers Canterbury Tales, W.F. Bryan and G.
Dempster, eds. 1941; Humanities Press, New York, 1958, pp. 470474, the second
is from Chaucers Prioresss Tale itself, in The Works of Georey Cbaucer, F.N.
Robinson, ed., second edition. Oxford University Press, London, 1966, The Canterbury Tales, VII: p. 573.
28. References are to The Tempest, Frank Kermode, ed. Arden Shakespeare, Methuen,
London, 1964.
29. Sir John Harington, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis
of Ajax [1596], Elizabeth Story Donno, ed. RKP, London, 1962: pp.146150.
30. See Edward the Second, Forker, ed., notes to 5.5.25, and the discussion in Briggs,
1924.
31. See later for references.
32. Forker, ed., Edward the Second, p. 79.
33. For this violation by horseradish, see Rey-Flaud, 1985: p.231; Schmitt-Pantel,
1981: p.119.
34. Medieval European punishments included castration. See Goodich, 1979: ch. V,
Secular Law.
35. The Complete Works of Georey Chaucer, second edition. F.N. Robinson, ed.,
Oxford University Press, London, The Canterbury Tales, ll. 38093813 (evidently
signicant it is the coulter, rather than merely a ploughshare); Gibson, 1977: p.94, ill.
79; the urban legends referred to are those concerning the obnoxious patient humiliated by nurses who use a daodil instead of a rectal thermometer (or the man stuck in
a cat-ap whose posterior is thus embellished by passing students); the burglars who
obscenely misuse a familys toothbrushes, and take pictures with the victims camera,
to be found when the lm is developed; the woman who walks out on her philandering
husband, having rst (under pretence of a sexual romp) bound him, inserted
her electric hair-curler, and switched it on. For instances search, respectively, for
daodil, toothbrushes and curler iron at http://www.snopes.com/.
36. DArcy Power, ed., Treatise of Fistula in Ano etc. by John Arderne, EETS. os. 139,
1910. Oxford University Press, London, 1968, p. xvi (Arderne himself advocates a
less brutal treatment).
37. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, ca 1620, reproduced in Holm, 1991: p.115.
38. Claude Gaignebet and Jean-Dominique Lajoux, Art profane et religion populaire au
Moyen Age, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1985, pp.153 (15th-century
choir-stall), 218219 (14th-century stone carvings on Troyes cathedral, 16th-century choir stall, and a dance of souaculs from 1978). Bellows are also used in this
way among the cures of the Fool depicted on the wooden tray mentioned above;
see Mezger, 1984: p.98 ill. 12. Bellows occurred in the cure scenes of English
mummers plays, but the manner of their application to the body is never specied.
39. Les Tre`s Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, facs, ed. Jean Longnon and Raymond
Cazelles, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, 1993), p. 85 (illustration) and p. 204
(description). The illustration is actually one of the additions made by Jean
Colombe.
40. Rabelais, Gargantua, Pierre Michel, ed. Gallimard, Paris, 1965, p. 231; invoked in
Bakhtin, 1984: p.208.

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41. The King James Bible is of course from 1611, but the Anglican Book of Common
Prayer (at Psalm 78, v. 67) has a near identical formulation, with shame for
reproach: this form of death is not merely painful, but shaming.
42. Randall, 1966: ill. 541. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, MS 1254/3, f. 16.
43. Forker, ed., Edward the Second, p.78. The tortures of the damned, geared to the
sins they have committed, are evoked in discussion of Edwards assassination by
Merchant, ed., Edward the Second, New Mermaids, p. xxi although in a note to
5.5.110 (p. 104), Merchant would prefer to think of the act as heard but not seen,
performed behind the arras of a stage pavilion or inner stage.
44. Quoted in Gibson, 1977: p.56. For the conformity between sin and punishment in
medieval visions of the otherworld see Gurevich, 1988: p.112.
45. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, vol. IV, Books VII and VIII. Marjorie
Chibnall, ed. and trans. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973, pp.229231, Book VIII,
17.
46. The image is accessible on http://www.kalkmalerier.dk.
47. Baschet, 1993: p.638, and g. 101 (bottom left).
48. Gibson, 1977: 9495 (ill. 79 & 80); see also Rooth, 1992: p.36.
49. Baschet, 1993: p.638, and g. 101 (middle right). One of the clearer internet
reproductions is at http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/germanistik/mediaevistik/8_bilder.htm. It might be noted for completeness sake that in Dantes Hell (Inferno,
canto XII) sodomites are consigned to a sandy wasteland and pelted with burning
rain: the unnatural nature of the sin may be hinted at by nearby beasts which are
hybrids, or even results of bestiality: the Minotaur, centaurs and harpies. For a
discussion, see Radcli-Umstead, 1978: pp.5556.
50. Titus Andronicus, Jonathan Bate, ed. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, Routledge,
London, 1995, IV.ii.87.
51. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, Jay L. Halio, ed. New Cambridge
Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 1992), III.vi.1314.
52. Bullough, 1966: p.107, commenting on his extract (same page) from Edward Hall,
The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548),
which includes the rumour that Gloucester was killed by having a hot spitte put
in at his foundement.
53. For another source reporting this rumour about Duke Humphrey see Chronicles of
London, 1905. C.L. Kingsford, ed., Alan Sutton, Dursley, Gloucestershire, 1977, p.
157: And some said he was throst into the bowell with an hote brennyng spitte.
54. Rabelais, Pantagruel, Pierre Michel, ed. Gallimard, Paris, 1964, p. 201. The episode
is repeatedly invoked by Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1984: pp.210211, 279, 332), in a
characteristic exploration of Rabelais conglomeration of military and kitchen
imagery which is quite pertinent to the present discussion.
55. Jean Berthelemey, Le Livre de Crainte Amoreuse, cited in Huizinga, 1965: p.191.
56. Picture Book of Devils, Demons and Witchcraft, Ernst and Johanna Lehner, eds.
Dover, New York, 1972, p. 162, ill. 228. The engraving is clearly signed F. Hildenberg; the caption has, erroneously, F. Hildeberg.

The carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II

103

57. Pieter Bruegel, The Seven Capital Sins: Wrath (155657), in Jacques Lavalleye,
Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Lucas van Leyden: The Complete Engravings, Etchings
and Woodcuts. Thames & Hudson, London, 1967, Pl. 41. For the original drawing
see Bruegel: The Drawings, Ludwig Munz, ed. Phaidon, London, 1961, 1968), Pl.
131.
58. Baschet, 1993: g. 48 and (detail) g. 49 (top right).
59. Baschet, 1993:p. 206 and g. 43, bottom right.
60. Baschet, 1993: pp.293304 and g. 87 (foreground, centre right); see also pp.624
626 for the reconstruction of this fresco, which suered severely from war damage.
61. Baschet, 1993: pp.363364, and g. 96 (bottom right); see also 639641.
62. Baschet 1993: p.502, and (for specic instances) gs. 33 (MS of Somme le Roi; cf.,
p.186), 130 (Narbonne Cathedral, cf., p. 409), 140 (MS of City of God, cf., p.422),
plate 6 (MS of Voie denfer, cf., p.470).
63. Gibson, 1977: p.51 ill. 36 for the whole picture; p.59 ill. 44 for this detail.
64. Baschet, 1993: p.453, LAnticristo e il Giudizio nale and p.454 n.11.
65. For some highly speculative remarks along these lines (if more characteristic of
Margaret Murray than of the Annales school), see Gaignebet & Lajoux, 1985:
pp.9899.
66. Siuts, 1968: pp.40, 245. Figures bearing (stylised) spits on which they have impaled
pancakes also gure in recent Carnival parades in the Tyrol: see Moser, 1986:
p.129, and p. 14 of the unnumbered plates between pp. 160 and 161.
67. On a poorly sourced, anonymous sixteenth-century engraving reproduced in
Hausmann 1991: p.346, a female Carnival carries a spit on which is impaled what
looks like a roasted fowl, but she rides on a giant hog (pulling a wheeled barrel on
which sits Bachus).
68. A Warning for Fair Women, C.D. Cannon, ed. Mouton, The Hague, 1975, Ind. 56.
The image of pig screaming in connection with roasting also appears in Titus
Andronicus, IV.ii.148, as Aaron kills the midwife who knows the secret of his
bastard son: Wheak, wheak! so cries a pig prepared to the spit.
69. Aristophanes, The Acharnians, V W.J.M. Starkie, ed. and trans. 1909; Hakkert,
Amsterdam, 1968), Episode A, ll. 79596, discussed in Stallybrass and White, 1986:
pp.4445.
70. Which incidentally and interestingly gives us three of Marlowes plays ending with
hell pains: literal in Doctor Faustus, symbolic here in Edward II and in The Jew of
Malta (many of the hell-scenes mentioned above also include souls boiling in
cauldrons).
71. For the humanoid qualities of the pig see Stallybrass and White, 1986: pp.4459,
Thinking with Pigs.
72. For a fascinating thesis on the compatibility between the disruptiveness of carnival as a festival and the nature of the gures, especially the quintessentially
ambivalent wild man, see Kinser, 1995.
73. For further, historically aware, discussion of Edwards sexuality see Comensoli,
1993; Deats, 1997, and for the context, DiGangi, 1997.
74. For the equation between Edward and Actaeon, see Forkers notes to ll. 668 in the
Revels edition, and Zucker, 1982: p.170.

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Tom Pettitt
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Tom Pettitt, M.A., University of Wales, Ph.D. University of Odense. Associate Professor, Institute for Literature, Culture and Media Studies, University of Southern
Denmark. Research interests in folk traditions of narrative, song and drama.