'Skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt': vernacular topoi in the carnivalesque martyrdom of Edward II

Abstract

Matching the literary and rhetorical topoi of medieval Latin and neoclassical literature, early European traditional culture deployed narrative, iconographic and dramatic formulas which effectively 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 sufferings 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 filth) in interstitial environments (carnival, sewers, manuscript margins). Their presence reinforces, even as it is triggered by, Edward's own liminality in relation to a number of categories, and is compatible with recent suggestions linking Marlowe's play to the sufferings of Christ developed in Baroque religiosity.