Ironies of Kingship Essay Sample
A good swayer is supposed to take his state and maintain his land united but Edward II prefers to blow clip and bask himself with his adulators. Edward II is introduced to the audience as a ‘pliant king’ . a pleasance searcher who prefers to split his land than hold his lover Gaveston exiled from the land. Later in the drama. his orders are disregarded by the Lords and a civil war within the land of England ensues. By the terminal of the drama we see the male monarch at his most tragic. holding lost everything including his friends. his lover Gaveston. his land and holding been betrayed by his ain married woman. Isabella.
The drama Edward II reaches its emotional flood tide in Act V. Scene I. It is in this scene that the king’s image as an irresponsible and weak individual undergoes a entire transmutation. and he emerges before the audience as a tragic figure in his apprehension of the ineptitude of a male monarch stripped of power merely like the King in King Lear. Historically Edward II might non hold shown this sort of tragic apprehension of life. It is here that 1 has to look for the poet in the playwright who expressed the Renaissance anxiousness for the weakness of the human existences before Time. In the context of the play. nevertheless. the apprehension of the futility of human enterprise is related to another personal fact of the male monarch ; in fact. he lost the desire to populate after Gaveston’s decease. who was half his ego. In other words. the male monarch is under the control of death-instinct. With this he has besides lost the desire for gaudery and pleasance. and what he cares for now are his sense of honor. treachery. confederacy and anxiousness for the hereafter of his boy. His refusal to give up the Crown to the Bishop of Winchester is a symbolic overture to withstand Mortimer’s authorization. And this is necessary for the playwright besides in change by reversaling the sway of understanding of the audience in the king’s favor.
The male monarch rises above the ordinary degree when he expresses his apprehension of the tragic state of affairs of a male monarch staying in imprisonment in his ain land and still staying the titular caput of the land. This sort of state of affairs forces him to understand the calamity of power or the sarcasm of kingship:
“I wear the Crown. but am controlled by them By Mortimer. and my unconstant queen…”
Though it is instead ironical that he expects stability from the queen whom he disregarded every bit long as he had Gaveston by his side. the audience tends to bury that and sympathize with him in his predicament. They may fall under the influence of the king’s emotional disapprobation of the queen. who “spot my bridal bed with opprobrium. ” In the following minute. nevertheless. he breaks in cold irony when he asks the Bishop of Winchester whether he must vacate to “make usurping Mortimer a king” . It is clear now that his head is being frequented by a assortment of tempers.
For the king the state of affairs is more hapless as he cares now for his boy. who. harmonizing to him. is “a lamb encompassed by wolves” . In arrant weakness and defeat he bursts out in cussing Mortimer. But shortly recovers saneness and remarks on the calamity of his state of affairs:
“…weigh how stalwart I can digest
To lose my Crown and land without a cause…”
