blur together here. In the end, the play condemns the nobles—and particu-
larly the Younger Mortimer—for displacing the demarcated “others” only
finally to replace them. When the tragic wheel comes full circle, Mortimer has
committed adultery with the English queen, usurped the reign as self-
proclaimed protector of the prince, and authorized the murder of the deposed
but nonetheless legitimate king. It is Mortimer, then, who takes, must take,
the final fall, with Edward III claiming his rightful place on the English
throne and restoring his father’s legitimacy. In this play, to banish all the
sodomites would be to banish all the world, at least the world of England,
where sexual and political favor lose their distinction in the name and play of
power.
In Lust’s Dominion, then, the incorporation of Edward IIcreates a
provocative overlay of England onto Spain, sodomite onto Moor—one that
plays against the peculiarities of type and emphasizes resemblances where
characters within the dramatic fictions mark difference. In Marlowe, because
the contested difference, sodomitical desire, is itself invisible, the unsettling
resemblances between Gaveston, Spenser, the king, and the peers are therefore
easier to see.^15 In Lust’s Dominion, however, although it is not Eleazar’s
“gloomy” complexion but his “lascivious” activity that explicitly prompts the
call for banishment, that complexion nonetheless sets him visibly apart—
making his lust especially suspect as an innate racial trait, a sign of a deviant
identity not just a deviant behavior, and making his relocation to a domain of
“Indian slaves” appear somehow uniquely appropriate ( 3. 2. 1500 ). Yet in sug-
gesting a parallel between Eleazar and Gaveston, Lust’s Dominioneffectively
denaturalizes such discrimination, prompting us to think across the bounds
of race, to recognize that the “treasons” of the Moor are equally characteristic
of the Spanish (as of the English). The subtitle, after all, declares the Spanish
queen “lascivious,” presenting her and not the Moor as the representative of
“lust’s dominion,” and, we quickly see, the Spanish king and cardinal promi-
nently share the fault. The point is not, then, that Spain’s incorporation of the
Moor signs its corruption, but that the Moor’s corruption is already, perva-
sively (though not necessarily uniquely) Spain’s. If the Moor is to Spain what
the sodomite is to England, even if his “treasons” “need no tryal,” the attempts
to write him out of the country into a separable race, in another sense, do. For
in both plays to “subscribe” to exile is not only to undermine monarchical au-
thority (Ed. II 1. 4. 53 ); it is also to impose a geographic distance when ideolog-
ical difference will not hold.
It is not the intertextual parallel alone that unsettles the ideological
124 chapter five