The fact that the general public still regards Marlowe as a pioneer for the acceptance of same-sex love, especially in connection with Edward II, is due in part to director Derek Jarman, although he did not intend it to be so. He had already made a much acclaimed film in 1986 with Caravaggio, which has nothing to do with the life and work of the painter. Edward II (1991) is a worthy successor in this respect. It is not often that a director explains his motivation as clearly as Jarman did with regard to this work.
"How to make a film of a gay love affair and get it commissioned. Find a dusty old play and violate it.”1
He wanted to make a movie about being gay in Britain in the early 1990s, he didn’t want to make a film of Marlowe’s drama.2 On 24 May 1988, a Local Authorities Funding Act came into force in England, which had a clause that became known as Section 28. It states that public authorities may not deliberately promote homosexuality, nor teach acceptance of this way of life. (This law was only abolished again in 2003). This was the first government intimidation of the expression of one’s sexuality that British citizens had experienced since the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967. The film was made in this climate. Jarman’s aim was not to show that Marlowe was gay. Rather, the film was intended to provide evidence of the oppression of homosexuals across epochs in human history. From the medieval Edward II, to the modern day Marlowe, to the present day Jarman, an arc was drawn under which history, drama and the personal were blended into a manifesto of the cruelties that society has been inflicting on people with different sexual preferences for centuries. This hardly had anything to do with the play itself. Jarman depicted a power struggle between groupings that were not created by power-political interest but sexual preference. The enemy is clearly the Thatcher government, whose politics are referred to in several quotations.3
Jarman sincerely believed that Marlowe should count himself lucky for the changes his play had undergone in the film, for they had saved the drama.4 But perhaps Jarman simply did not like Marlowe’s and Caravaggio’s works and therefore made bad movies about them.
