- On the question of author, see the introduction to Brereton’s edition of the play,
x–xxxi; Larry S. Champion, Thomas Dekker and the Traditions of English Drama(New York:
Peter Lang, 1985 ), 149 – 51 ; J. L. Simmons, “Lust’s Dominion: A Showpiece for the Globe,” Tu -
lane Studies in English 20 ( 1972 ): 11 – 22 , esp. 11 – 12 ; and Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, 60. On the
question of the date, see Champion, 150 ; Brereton, xiii–xvii; and Hunter, English Drama, 436. - In the Brereton edition, the line numbers correlate with the editor’s own line breaks
(which I see no reason to preserve). Hence, as here, the number of lines and line numbers
in my text will not always add up. - Little, 73 – 74 , has posited Venice’s commissioning of Othello to fight in Cyprus as
a deportation, but this assumption, however provocative, takes some metaphoric license
with Shakespeare’s text. - The idea of a belated revision originated with P. J. Ayres, “The Revision of Lust’s
Dominion,”Notes and Queries, n.s., 17 ( 1970 ): 212 – 13. See Ayres on the play’s possible evo-
cations of the Gunpowder Plot. - Root, 119. Ayres too admits that reference to the expulsion may “show nothing
more than a familiarity on the part of the dramatists with a well-known and long-
established aim of Spanish foreign policy” ( 213 ). - Brereton, 154 – 55.
- Quotations are from Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, ed. Moelwyn Mer-
chant ( 1967 ; New York: Norton, 1992 ). - See Merchant’s discussion of the play’s date, xi–xiii. The quotation is from the title
page of the 1598 text, reprinted in Merchant, xii. - For instances of verbal echoes, see the notes in Brereton: 161 n 126 – 30 , 197 n 1571 – 73 ,
204 – 5 n 1870 – 72 , 214 n 2231 – 34 , 220 n 2743 – 45 , 224 n 2872 , 227 – 28 n 3182 – 83 , 233 n 3450. Brere-
ton downplays these parallels as “accidental” ( 197 ) in order to dispute the possibility that
Marlowe was the play’s author. - Gaveston’s fantasies here overlap with Eleazar’s: where Eleazar claims that Spain
condemns him for spending the “Revenues of the King of Spain” “on smooth boies, on
Masks and Revelling” ( 1. 1. 128 – 30 ), Gaveston anticipates that, once he is back in the king’s
embrace, he will “have wanton poets, pleasant wits,” “Italian masques,” “sweet speeches,
comedies, and pleasing shows” as well as pages “clad” “like sylvan nymphs,” a “lovely boy
in Dian’s shape,” and the like (Ed. II 1. 1. 50 , 54 – 55 , 57 , 60 ). - The nobles repeatedly condemn Gaveston as “base”; for examples, see Edward II
- 100 and 1. 4. 7.
- See my argument in Spectacles of Strangeness, 142 – 72 ; and Bredbeck, 48 – 86. See
also Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 ), 209 – 23 ; and Mario DiGangi, The Homo-
erotics of Early Modern Drama(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ). On the
complexity of the rhetoric of sexuality, see Madhavi Menon, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and
Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004 ). - On the unseeable nature of sodomy, see especially Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and
the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop 29 ( 1990 ): 1 – 19 ,
andHomosexuality in Renaissance England(London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982 ).
notes to pages 119–124 217