promising Mendoza, who lusts after her, that she will “reward” his “love”
( 2. 1. 788 – 90 ) and Eleazar, that she will kill Mendoza. Though Philip says
nothing, the cardinal pretends to “lay by [his] / Hostile intendments, and re-
turn again / To the fair circle of obedience” for “love” of his “Country”
( 2. 1. 798 – 800 ). Even so, the unseating of the Moor remains the precarious
proposition that can make or break the state.
Remarkably here, even in the face of a Moor whose transgressions are all
“too plain,” a local exile appears as a vexed, not natural, solution. To be sure,
lustful ambitions drive both the king’s resistance to the order and the cardi-
nal’s acquiescence to its repeal. But if Alvero’s loyalty to Eleazar does not raise
questions about the advisability of banning the Moor from court, the politi-
cal chaos that results from such an attempt does. Indeed, in creating a space
to represent the crisis of banishment, the play distorts the history at its base:
it disrupts the otherwise smooth transition between Philip II (who died in
1598 ) and Philip III (who succeeded immediately), filling in the gap with the
controversy over Eleazar and creating what one editor has called “a mere
nightmare,” a “frantic perversion of history.”^8 If the result is to incriminate
Spain as “lust’s dominion,” we should not take its perversions therefore to be
unique, a sign that what is imaginable there would not be believed in En-
gland. For within the invented space between the death of Philip II and the
accession of Philip III, the play suggestively invokes the precedent of Mar-
lowe’s Edward II(ca. 1590 ), where the forced exile of the English king’s “min-
ion,” Gaveston, catalyzes similar controversy and catastrophe (Ed. II 1. 4. 87 ).^9
ThoughEdward IIseems to have been “publiquely acted” only sporadically,
starting in 1592 , the text was published in 1594 and reprinted in 1598 , just be-
fore Lust’s Dominionwas likely to have come out.^10 And while there is no
guarantee that the spectators would have seen Marlowe’s play, Lust’s Domin-
ionis nonetheless saturated with parallels in plot and language, which critics
have noticed though not theorized and which quietly insist that the prospect
of banishment (like the dominion of lust) is neither peculiar to the Spanish
Moor’s tragedy nor simply cued or warranted by the Spanish Moor.^11
Like Eleazar, Gaveston is “minion” to a royal head of state and is heavily
persecuted for his sodomitical transgressions. Gaveston’s story starts, in fact,
with a prior exile. As the play opens, he is just returning—and reading Ed-
ward II’s letter commanding that he return—to England from his native
France, where he has been ousted by the previous king (Edward I) for a ques-
tionable erotic attachment to the then crown prince.^12 It will not be long after
the reunion between Gaveston and Edward II before the English peers accuse
122 chapter five