Screening Early Modern Drama (Beyond Shakespeare) - Derek Jarman's Queer Contemporary Jacobean Aesthetic - Caravaggio and Edward II

chapter 1
Derek Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean

aesthetic: Caravaggio and Edward II
Jarman’s estate consisted of a fisherman’s hut in Dungeness, some

flowerbeds and some films. But they are films that still have power to
intrigue and fascinate. They are bold assaults on ‘decent’ film-making;
molotovs hurled at the dull beige skein of naturalism that enfolds and
suffocates us now.1
Alex Cox’s retrospective view of the legacy of Derek Jarman articulates the
central dynamic of Jarman’s work and its legacy: a combination of sim-
plicity and aggression, of peacefulness and radical activism. In Edward II
(1991), Jarman produced a film that was consciously queer in its testing of
norms, whether in terms of sexuality, genre, aesthetics, technology or
politics. While Edward II is the culmination of Jarman’s engagement with
the early modern period, Jarman’s influence on later filmmakers can only be
fully appreciated if we take account of the profound intertextuality of his
work, which links it not only to his own earlier Renaissance films and his
many life-writing texts and film scripts, but which also absorbs elements of
punk and European avant-garde cinema.
The development of Jarman’s distinctive queer contemporary Jacobean
style can be traced through the multiple texts produced by Jarman in the
1970s and 1980s. These survive as a series of published diaries, notes and
screenplays, as well as letters, handwritten and typewritten notes, scripts and
production materials scattered across several archives.2 They also survive in
the shape of Jarman’s ‘Renaissance’ feature films in this period: Jubilee
(1977), The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation (1985) and
Caravaggio (1986). I will begin by navigating between the first three of
these films and Jarman’s writing before pausing on Caravaggio, which marks
a turning-point in Jarman’s career and is the most important precursor to
Edward II. Jarman’s approach to filming the early modern past requires an
1
Alex Cox, ‘This Is Indecent’, The Guardian, 19 February 2004.
2
The BFI in London, the BDC in Exeter and Keith Collins’s private collection at Prospect Cottage.
20
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Derek Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic 21
understanding of the funding difficulties he faced as an independent British
filmmaker with a counter-cultural agenda, the growing awareness of AIDS-
related discrimination against homosexuals, the related rise of queer theory,
and the incorporation, in Jarman’s team, of performer Tilda Swinton and
designer Sandy Powell. In Caravaggio, Swinton’s feminist agenda begins to
penetrate Jarman’s vision, giving birth to the plural consciousness so strik-
ingly captured by Angus McBean’s 1987 portrait of the two artists on the
cover of this book.
Caravaggio thus paves the way for Edward II, which powerfully com-
bines Swinton’s Brechtian and queer theory-inflected performance of
gendered identity with Jarman’s political vision and autobiographical
expression. Edward II is intertextually connected to a range of Jarman’s
films and screenplays: his highly experimental The Last of England (1987)
and the published and unpublished screenplays for ‘28’, ‘Sod ’Em’ and
the musical ‘Pansy’, which span the period from 1986 to 1991. Jarman’s
shift of interest from Shakespeare to Marlowe via Caravaggio, from the
‘Elizabethan’ to the ‘Jacobean’, maps onto Jarman’s increasing, and polit-
ically inflected, interest in viewing the past through the eyes of the present,
using a literally preposterous approach to Marlowe’s text. Edward II
combines dissident sexuality and politics with the hijacking of early
modern pre-texts and figures and with formal innovations in filmmaking
that oppose mainstream cinematic practices while also setting themselves
apart from much of art cinema. It is this transgressive aesthetic in which
politics is wedded to form that constitutes the explosive substance of
Jarman’s legacy.
Derek Jarman’s avant-garde Renaissance: influences and attitudes

from the Slade to The Tempest (1979)
Jarman, whose preoccupation with the Renaissance started during his
formative years, combined his absorption in early modern culture with an
acutely contemporary sensibility.3 For his degree in English and History at
King’s College, London (1960 to 1963), Jarman read a number of early
modern plays, including Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and
Edward II.4 At the Slade School of Fine Art (1963 to 1967), he found himself
‘at the centre of a revolutionary art scene which both fuelled, and was fuelled
3
See Wymer, Jarman; Simons, ‘Elizabethan Texts’; and Hawkes, ‘The Shadow of This Time’.
4
Jarman’s copy of M. R. Ridley’s Marlowe’s Plays and Poems: PC, which he acquired while at King’s, has
all three plays ticked in the table of contents.
22 Screening Early Modern Drama
by, revolutions in popular music and sexual behaviour’.5 While concentrating
on painting and set design, including designs for Timon of Athens and Volpone,
Jarman took an involved interest in avant-garde theatre and European art-
house film. A production of Spurt of Blood in 1967, which he later described as
the ‘best piece of experimental theatre that I’ve ever seen’, exposed Jarman to
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.6 He also absorbed the cinematic influences of
Visconti and Pasolini, whom he saw as part of a long line of homosexual artists
that anchored on Shakespeare, Leonardo and Michelangelo and also included
Eisenstein and Murnau.7 Genet’s Chant d’amour (1950), with its fascination
with ‘rough trade’ masculinity and prison imagery, was particularly important
to Jarman.8 In Patroni Griffi, meanwhile, Jarman found an early model for
how to ‘depict a gay relationship’: the Italian’s Il Mare struck Jarman as ‘sexy,
its camera-work elegant and mannered’,9 and his Addio appears to have left a
trace in Edward II ’s abstract design, painterly cinematography and queer
emphasis.10 It is Sjöman’s Syskonbädd, however, which Jarman repeatedly
cited as a model and rare exemplar of a film that reveals ‘the potential of
actually doing films historically’.11
Jarman’s admiration of European avant-garde cinema was counterbal-
anced by his abhorrence of Anglo-American period films: ‘There is nothing
more excruciating than English Historical Drama, the stuff that is so
successful in America . . . in which British stage actors are given free reign
[sic] to display their artificial style in period settings.’12 Jarman not only
deplored ‘heritage’ films like Brideshead Revisited 13 and Chariots of Fire,14
but also Olivier’s Henry V, which he saw as ‘caught between the artificiality
of the medieval miniatures . . . and the damp naturalism of the Irish
countryside’. Only Kozintsev’s Shakespeare adaptations are exempt from
Jarman’s condemnation, since they avoid a clash between the setting and
Shakespeare’s language.15
Jarman’s resistance to the Anglo-American approach to period is obvious
in Jubilee (1977), his first Renaissance film, which ‘locat[es] a version of
punk in the English past’ to create ‘a genealogy of resistance for the present
moment’.16 In 1977, punk’s prime strategy of stylistic subversion was the
5 6
Wymer, Jarman, p. 21. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 84.
7 8
Simons, ‘Elizabethan Texts’, pp. 265–6. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 19.
9
Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 6.
10
Michael Wishart drew Jarman’s attention to Addio, and to Visconti’s 1961 Paris staging of ’Tis Pity, in
two stapled postcards, dated 26 June 1979: DJC Box 53.
11
Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 14; and Jarman quoted in Lippard, ‘Interview with Derek Jarman’,
p. 165.
12
Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 14. 13 1981, dir. Jarrold. 14 1981, dir. Hudson.
15
Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 186. 16 Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 50.
combination of ‘elements which had originally belonged to completely
different epochs’ and whose strategic deployment of everyday objects in
incongruous contexts (for example, the safety pin as a facial adornment) was
aimed at ‘interrupting the process of “normalization”’.17 Dick Hebdige
defines this stylistic welding together of disparate influences and objects as
bricolage, conflating Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological observations
with Max Ernst’s surrealism to theorise the punk subculture’s creation of
an ‘explosive junction’ that ‘attempted through “perturbation and defor-
mation” to disrupt and reorganize meaning’.18 Jubilee follows punk’s anar-
chic impulses in allowing the two Elizabethan periods to collide in such
an explosive junction. Jarman includes signifiers of the present in the
first Elizabethan period (for example, punk icon Helen Wallington-Lloyd
as Elizabeth’s dwarf lady-in-waiting) and signifiers of the past (for example,
Elizabeth’s crown jewel) in a present dominated by a gang of violent female
punks and media mogul Borgia Ginz.19 Ginz, played by blind dancer and
mime Jack Birkett, ends up commercialising the entire counter-culture
presented in the film, while Elizabeth and Doctor Dee sadly retreat to the
Elizabethan period. Meanwhile, the punks, played by punk stars(-to-be)
Adam Ant, Toyah Willcox and Jordan, become ‘Demons of Nostalgia’ as
they escape from the devastated, brutal urban landscape ‘to a dream
England of the past: the England of stately homes, which are the indispen-
sable prop for the English way of life’.20 Jubilee’s encounter between past
and present thus enables a reading of the present as a carnivalesque inversion
in which ‘all the positives are negated, turned on their heads’:21 framed,
though not contained, by the Elizabethan past, the present is engulfed in a
violent, often physically grotesque, release of popular festivity that starkly
reveals how the upturning of norms can simply replicate those norms more
crassly.
The critique, from the vantage point of Dr Dee’s Elizabethan counter-
culture, of how economic forces can co-opt and commercialise counter-
cultural movements such as punk, is central to Jarman’s Jubilee. Yet punk,
with its invitation to everyone to be creative and ignore the structures of
economic and cultural power that constrain individual creativity, was a
movement which gave public expression to some views Jarman had held for
many years. Jarman’s books attest repeatedly to his opposition to the
17
Hebdige, Subculture, pp. 18, 26. On punk’s bricolage, see also Fiske, Understanding Popular
Culture.
18
Hebdige, Subculture, p. 106. 19 Wymer, Jarman, p. 58.
20
Jarman, Dancing Ledge, pp. 164, 173. 21 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 170.
structures that governed filmmaking in the United Kingdom; even though
he did seek out funding from mainstream sources like the BFI and television
for his various films, he prided himself on his ability to make films on
exceptionally low budgets, letting the shape of the films be guided by the
shared artistic vision of his collaborators and his restricted means. This, he
insisted, was what ‘separate[d his] work from the British television and
features industry, where the people who make the films, directors and
technicians, are paid in an hierarchical order, and brought together for
money, not by a community of interest’.22 The smallness of Jarman’s
budget governed everything: from the people he worked with to choices
regarding costume, setting and technology.23 The Angelic Conversation, his
1985 feature film adaptation of fourteen of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is a good
example, as it was filmed for virtually nothing on Jarman’s Nizo Super-8
camera; the budget of £40,000 he secured from the BFI allowed him to
slow the film down so it could be extended to feature length, creating a
dream-like atmosphere; the money also paid for some additional effects and
a soundtrack as he transferred the film onto video before blowing it up to
35mm.24
For Jarman, advances in technology such as his first encounter with the
Nizo Super-8 camera in 1972 and ‘the invasion of video’ in 1983 represented
both a threat,25 in that ‘each advance in technology reinforces the grip of
central control and emasculates opposition’, and an opportunity, in that
such cheap technologies could be used by independent filmmakers ‘to
ensure that technology will promote greater independence and mobility.
This is the key battle in our culture . . . Our centralized culture mounts a
concerted attack on human expression.’26 As Jarman saw it, the challenge
for filmmakers was to resist the corporate pressures of ‘Organizations like
the BBC and the television companies’ and to continue to produce films
that resisted these institutions’ pressure to be ‘historic and “quaint”’.27
In his writing and his films, Jarman thus embraced what later theorists
were to recognise as punk cinema’s principal features: an emphasis on
individually produced ‘do-it-yourself’ microcinema integrating a good
dose of bricolage, collage and self-awareness, and a ‘constant resistance to
22
Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 197. On Jarman’s adherence to low-budget filmmaking, see also:
Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, p. 196; and Field, ‘Editorial’, 4.
23
See Jarman quoted in Lippard, ‘Interview with Derek Jarman’, p. 169.
24
Figure provided by producer James Mackay (Mackay, ‘Low-Budget British Production’, p. 56);
Wymer names a figure of £35,000 (Wymer, Jarman, p. 84).
25
See Jarman’s account in Dancing Ledge, p. 114; Wymer, based on Tony Peake’s biography, corrects
Jarman’s dating of the event from 1970 to 1972 (Wymer, Jarman, fns. 23, 34).
26
Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 219. 27 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 220.
capitalism’ and commodification.28 For Jarman’s Tempest, this did not
mean that he refused to use the £150,000 Executive Producer Don Boyd
managed to raise for the film, but that he worked with friends and acquain-
tances, who worked long hours on very modest pay, to create a film that
invoked the trappings of period drama in order to dismantle them before
our eyes.29 Jarman’s choice of location for the film is important: Stoneleigh
Abbey, with its Tudor elements and association with Jane Austen, is
‘emblematic of the heritage film, which has a nostalgic investment in the
lost glories of the imperialist past’.30 In order to dissociate himself from what
he would later describe as the ‘gloss’ and ‘frantic race into nostalgia’ of such
films,31 however, Jarman set his ‘punk heritage’ film in the Georgian wing of
the building that had been devastated by a fire in 1960, furnishing his
modern-dress Prospero’s study with his personal copies of seventeenth-
century alchemical texts.32 Significantly, Jarman once more drew on
present-day counter-cultural icons when he cast Toyah Willcox as
Miranda and Jack Birkett as Caliban. After a long search for the perfect
match, Jarman chose poet and magician Heathcote Williams to play
Prospero. As Don Boyd recalls, ‘the Shakespearean force [in Jarman’s
Tempest] was undoubtedly Heathcote’.33 Williams would go on to work
with Mike Figgis and Alex Cox, making him a key figure in contemporary
Jacobean film.
As is clear from notebooks dating from 1974 and 1976, Jarman’s initial
idea for The Tempest had been to present the entire play from the point of
view of a Prospero imprisoned in a ‘Renaissance palace’, whom the visitors
to his private Bedlam consider mad and who is attended by prison wardens
Stefano and Trinculo.34 The main figures – Miranda, Ferdinand, Caliban,
Ariel – were to be Prospero’s projections of aspects of himself and dressed in
costumes that were ‘Renaissance and very accurate’.35 The completed film is
very different: not only does Jarman end up embracing the play as poly-
phonic, relinquishing the notion that Prospero can control the meanings
generated by the dramatis personae, but this film also unmoors the play
28
Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 17; and Thompson, ‘Punk Cinema’, p. 23. See also Hebdige,
Subculture, pp. 102–6; and Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 50.
29
Figure contained in a letter from Mody Schreiber at Berwick Street Films ‘C’ to Michael Klinger, 24
July 1979: BDC DB 256.666.
30
Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 70. 31 ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10.
32
Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 67; and Jarman, Chroma, p. 75.
33
Don Boyd, message to the author, 7 May 2012.
34
For further discussion of the 1974 and 1976 notebooks, see Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children,
p. 197.
35
‘Notebook Aug. 75’: DJC Box 28.1.
from its Renaissance setting. As the production notes put it, ‘the film is not
set in the Elizabethan period of Shakespeare, nor is it modern. Rather it is
indistinct past, a conglomerate of many styles, emphasizing the timelessness
of the play.’36
The film’s celebration of historical and cultural diversity culminates in
the wedding masque for Miranda and Ferdinand, which integrates blues
singer Elisabeth Welch’s camp rendering of ‘Stormy Weather’. The scene
represents a significant convergence of the anarchic, violent chaos of Jubilee
with the classical control of Shakespeare’s playtext with its observance of the
unities of time and place. The costumes range from a pastiche of
Renaissance style (for the members of the court), rococo (Miranda and
Ferdinand), to the present (Ariel’s dinner jacket and bow tie, the sailors’
uniforms).37 The historical range is blended together in Welch’s extraordi-
nary Juno costume, which designer Yolanda Sonnabend describes as ‘an
Inigo Jones creation filtered through the movies’.38 Welch’s golden ruff,
headdress, gown and veil do indeed reconcile the essence of some of Jones’s
most famous masque designs for the Stuart court with the spirit of
Hollywood glamour, reminding us of the kinship between the early modern
theatre of illusions and film, which Jarman saw as ‘the wedding of light and
matter – an alchemical conjunction’.39 Here, for the first time in Jarman’s
cinema, the early modern period fully shapes and inhabits the present, using
the frame of the camera as the equivalent of Inigo Jones’s proscenium arch:
‘In The Tempest we paint pictures, frame each static shot and allow the play
to unfold in them as within a proscenium arch.’40
‘Years of distillation’:41Caravaggio (1986)

Caravaggio, the film that absorbed Jarman’s energies from 1978 until 1986,
creates a similarly ‘palimpsestic or layered historical space that includes
multiple temporalities’.42 But where The Tempest is carnivalesque in a
joyous, excessive festivity that includes the grotesque bodies of Sycorax,
Caliban, Stefano and Trinculo, Caravaggio, in moving beyond Shakespeare
36
‘The Tempest: Production Notes’: DJC Box 28.3.
37
See, also, Jarman’s comments in ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’ (DJC Box 10), where he states that ‘In the
Tempest the 300 odd years of the play’s existence became its period’, and in Dancing Ledge, where he
describes the costumes as ‘a chronology of the 350 years of the play’s existence, like the patina on old
bronze’ (p. 196).
38
Sonnabend, ‘Fabric of This Vision’, p. 78. 39 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 188.
40
Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 194. For a discussion of Jones’s experimentation with the proscenium arch,
see Peacock, ‘Ornament’.
41
Jarman, The Last of England, p. 68. 42 Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 67.
2 ‘An Inigo Jones creation’: Elisabeth Welch in Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979).
Film still, BFI.
and focussing on the Renaissance in visual arts, aligns itself more readily
with the control and sparseness of the classical register. Jarman’s notes on
the film once more offer a crucial insight into his preoccupation with how to
convey period in this film: ‘I am obsessed by the interpretation of the past.
hands [sic] across time’, he wrote into his 1985 ‘Caravaggio Book’ before
describing the continuity between Caravaggio’s painting and his own film
as just such an example of hands reaching across time:
How to present the present past. . . . For Caravaggio, the past was matter of
fact it lived in his own back yard . . . I sat obsessively with the paintings in
cheap reproduction. [H]ow and why did he put this or that here or there.
Thank you Michele Caravaggio for your precision. [Y]our reticence. [A]nd
your concentration on small gestures.43
It is this sense of a dialogue between two visual artists and of Jarman’s

absorption in Caravaggio’s art as a proto-filmic style guide that was to help
Jarman, with the assistance of his long-term design collaborator
Christopher Hobbs and cinematographer Gabriel Beristain, to model the
film’s look – in terms of the painterly, textured, yet minimalist sets and the
43
‘A Question of Time’ in ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10.
striking lighting effects – on Caravaggio’s paintings. The film’s austere mise-
en-scène and chiaroscuro lighting, often using a shaft of light coming from
the top left of the frame to replicate the light source from a top left window
in Caravaggio’s studio, combined with Hobbs’s recreation of Caravaggio’s
paintings and Jarman’s tableaux vivants of Caravaggio’s models for those
paintings, result in a deeply felt sense of period authenticity that is the
stronger for the obvious artificiality of the devices employed.44
One of these devices is the use of a studio set for all scenes. As a result,
throughout the film, the spectator is always, at some level, aware of the
distance between the thing represented and the means of the representation,
of the present lens through which the past is viewed. Using Caravaggio’s
inclusion of figures in contemporary dress in his classical paintings as a
justification for its own embrace of anachronisms, Caravaggio notoriously
combines a typewriter, gold solar calculator, a truck and a motorbike with
props that Jarman specified should be ‘in “period”’.45 Meanwhile, the
costumes, inspired by the look of Italian Neorealist films by Visconti,
Rossellini and de Sica, are ‘roughly in the ambience of an Italy before the
last war began’.46 The one exception is the sequence set at a masked ball,
which constitutes the film’s principal carnivalesque point of release and
which ‘should be in period so at the center of the film is a recreation of the
1600’s’.47
The mixing of periods is accompanied by a disruption of linear narrative:
the film starts with the dying Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) and then flashes
back to various points in his life. Not only is the order of those flashbacks
not strictly chronological, but the flashbacks even include scenes in which
Caravaggio is not present. Even though the return to Caravaggio’s death
bed at the end implies that all the meanings of the film can be stabilised in
relation to that single point of reference, it is impossible to accept the
flashbacks’ point of view as that of Caravaggio.
In such an eclectic film, authenticity cannot be situated in the detailed
recreation of period detail, however much Jarman and his designer
Christopher Hobbs were avoiding ‘carelessness’ in their introduction of
anachronisms.48 Instead, authenticity resides in the overall aesthetic, to
which the consistency of the set and lighting lend remarkable unity. That
aesthetic is based on what David Robinson, who visited the set of
44
On Gabriel Beristain’s lighting, see ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10; and Jarman, Jarman’s
Caravaggio, p. 22.
45
‘Caravaggio May 85’: DJC Box 6.
46
‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10; see also Jarman, Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 82.
47
‘Caravaggio May 85’: DJC Box 6. 48 Christopher Hobbs, Interview, Caravaggio (BFI, DVD).
Caravaggio, termed the ‘creative scholarship’ of Jarman’s team.49 The term
is apt because of the stress on creativity that distinguishes Jarman’s approach
from that of heritage cinema’s adherence to period and, more often than
not, to pre-existing literary plots. In the absence of a literary or coherent
biographical text on which to base the film, Jarman offers what is assertively
a reading of Caravaggio’s artworks. The figures represented in the paintings
lend themselves to Jarman’s construction of a biography for Caravaggio that
is, at the same time, an autobiography of Jarman.50 Certainly, the finished
film, with its tangle of homoerotic and heteroerotic attractions, invites a
reading of the film as a portrait of the homosexual artist as a young man.
To think of the film as primarily concerned with an autobiographical
expression of Jarman’s erotic preoccupations, however, would be limiting.
For one, it is a film that repeatedly invites the viewer to understand its
portrayal of the early modern art scene as a comment on the ideological
regulation of art in the 1980s. Caravaggio was kept on hold for several years
before the BFI, with Colin MacCabe as executive producer, finally found a
budget for it. Meanwhile, the filmmakers of the much-vaunted ‘renaissance’
of the British cinema in the early 1980s managed to secure large budgets for
films (like Jarman’s pet-hate Chariots of Fire), which Jarman condemned for
their ‘phoney production values’ and for their desire to create ‘an American
product here, and convince them [Americans] it was British’.51
Disappointed by the failure of Channel 4 to deliver on its initial promise
to provide funding for films representing minority standpoints and by the
channel’s personally bruising withdrawal from a co-production deal for
Caravaggio (although in the end it was Channel 4’s money that funded
the film via the BFI),52 Jarman recognised a direct connection between arts
funding past and present: ‘The feature film is the nearest equivalent to a
large renaissance altarpiece. [F]ilm the chief chan[n]el of information and
the mirror in which we see our lives is as jealously controlled by capital as the
altarpiece was by the Church.’53 It is not for nothing that the Pope’s line
‘Revolutionary gestures in art are a great help . . .. Keeps the quo in the
status’ survived consecutive rearrangements of the script and found its way
49
David Robinson, ‘A Painterly Eye for the Details: David Robinson Visits the Set of Caravaggio, the
New Film by Director Derek Jarman’, The Times, 16 October 1985, press cutting: DJC Box 7.
50
Jarman, Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 132.
51
Jarman, The Last of England, p. 112. ‘1st draft Caravaggio Book, Nov ’85’: DJC Box 11.
52
See Jarman’s account of ‘The Tedious Tale of Channel 4’ in The Last of England, pp. 85–90; for a less
biased account, see Dickinson, ‘The Encounter with Channel 4’.
53
‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10.
into the film itself, where it brutally undercuts Caravaggio’s efforts to
change his society through his art.
However much Caravaggio ostensibly negates the power of art to alter the
status quo, arguably such a change is precisely what Jarman was pursuing ever
more actively in the 1980s. As Jarman was working on Caravaggio, he was
evidently impressed by Laura Mulvey’s cinematic work, which attempted to
translate some of the theoretical thinking of her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema’ of 1975 into screen practice.54 During that decade, too,
Jarman’s lover Ken Butler, who would become Jarman’s assistant director on
Edward II, brought Jarman into contact with queer theory. Butler was
studying English at the University of Sussex during the heyday of Jonathan
Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s work on sexual dissidence and attended Michel
Foucault’s seminars in Berkeley, excitedly telling Jarman about those semi-
nars in his correspondence.55 The theories of Foucault, whose History of
Sexuality and Archaeology of Knowledge Jarman owned,56 evidently rubbed
off onto Jarman, who began to think about the politics of gender and
sexuality in relation to film. Jarman is clearly taking on board Foucault’s
thinking in The History of Sexuality when he writes of Caravaggio’s society:
It’s difficult to know how the seventeenth century understood physical
homosexuality. . . . The laws of the Church certainly forbade what it called
‘sodomy’ . . . The term ‘homosexual’ which identifies and ostracizes a group
because of their desires and inclinations, is a nineteenth-century clinical
invention, c. 1860.57
However receptive to Foucault’s notion that homosexuality is an invention

of the late nineteenth century that cannot be projected back onto the early
modern period, Jarman also found it impossible not to see Caravaggio as a
homosexual in the modern sense of the term. In a diary entry, Jarman
qualifies Foucault’s view by stating: ‘however the world of manners might
change sexuality is constant’.58
This resistance to Foucault is not naïve. As Jarman wrote in his final
diary: ‘It is not possible to look at works through the eyes of the past, only
the present, and no one coming to Michelangelo or Shakespeare should
ignore this unveiling. Civilisation is same sex.’59 The point is not historical
54
In a handwritten note on Caravaggio’s industrial context, Jarman lists Mulvey’s films in a list of BFI-
produced films that ‘any producer in a less blinkered country would be proud of’. ‘CONTEXT
TWO’, in ‘1st Draft of Caravaggio Book, Nov 85’: DJC Box 11.
55
Letter from Ken Butler to Derek Jarman dated 25 April 1983: DJC Box 53.
56
The date 1986 is inscribed in Jarman’s hand on the flyleaves of the books: PC.
57
Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 21. 58 ‘Caravaggio June–July [1985]’: DJC Box 7.
59
Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 176.
accuracy, but a politically motivated need to insist on the contribution
formulations of same-sex desire have made to Western civilisation. In
Caravaggio, Jarman succeeds in reconciling these two opposing views of
his subject: the painter who starts off being identified as heterosexual as he is
treated as a ‘rough trade’ object of desire for an early modern English tourist
matures into a homosexual identity, which is queered once more by
Caravaggio’s attraction to his model Lena. To see Jarman’s Caravaggio as
‘bisexual’ would be to miss the point: Caravaggio, rather, is queer, not
bound by the oppositions between sexual orientations imposed by
nineteenth-century legislation.
It is Jarman’s immersion in 1980s queer studies which makes his collab-
oration with Sandy Powell and Tilda Swinton so significant. When Jarman
cast Tilda Swinton in the part of Lena, he took on a relatively unknown,
openly feminist performer who had just left the safety of the RSC in order to
find better ways of expressing her ideas. Sandy Powell, too, was a newcomer
to film whose politics and vision were to prove influential and who was to
remain a crucial collaborator and friend for the remainder of Jarman’s life,
designing the costumes for The Last of England (1987), Edward II and
Wittgenstein (1993). Powell’s designs were to be crucial ingredients in the
presentation of transgressive bodies and sexualities in key films of the fin-de-
siècle, working with Sally Potter on Orlando (1992), Neil Jordan on the
notoriously gender-bending The Crying Game (1992) and Interview with the
Vampire (1994), and, as we will see, Mike Figgis on Miss Julie (1999).
Powell’s costumes and Swinton’s performance enabled Jarman to develop
his preoccupation with the representation of the female body that is often
ignored in readings of his work that concentrate on Jarman’s portrayals of
the male body as an object of same-sex desire.
This preoccupation is already visible in an early note on The Tempest in
which Jarman saw Miranda as a possible projection issuing from Prospero’s
mind: ‘Miranda might or might not appear if she does she is an icon maybe
she is the painting a sort of Gioconda to which Prospero talks.’60 In the
event, Jarman, in using Toyah Willcox for the part, produced a Miranda of
extraordinary earthiness. In her one semi-nude scene, Miranda’s washing
ritual is interrupted by Caliban, prompting an angry outburst that aligns her
body with that of the film’s grotesque nude Sycorax rather than the
Gioconda’s classically contained body. For Willcox, playing Miranda was
an opportunity to present ‘a woman against what I called the Farrah Fawcett
60
‘Notebook Aug. 75’: DJC Box 28.1.
Majors syndrome’, using a body that did not fit the Hollywood template to
portray ‘the essence of femininity’ in a girl who is free from culturally
imposed gender roles.61
The Gioconda’s body with its inscrutable facial expression, however,
which may be talked to but which does not answer back, continued to
trouble Jarman to the extent that, in 1980, he produced a script for an
unrealised short film titled ‘The Smile on the Mona Lisa’. Jarman’s script
pictures the sitter for the painting as a plain, talkative, English banker’s
widow whose mouth is impossible to paint because of her incessant chatter.
When, one day, her beautiful pageboy arrives to tell Leonardo da Vinci that
she cannot sit for the painting because of her flu, Leonardo has oral sex with
him and then paints ‘the boys [sic] satisfied smile on his mistress’ face’.
Leonardo then instructs the boy to ‘[t]ell the Signora to lie in bed and rest
the portrait is finished from the imagination and the smile well the smile is
perfection.’62 The inscrutable perfect smile that has iconic status is achieved
by projecting the beauty and sexiness of the boy onto the shapeless plainness
of the widow.
Caravaggio, too, is concerned with the problem of how to translate female
plainness into sexually attractive beauty and to use the imagination to blend
a male and a female body into a single embodiment of love. Tellingly, the
first Caravaggio painting in the film is the ‘Medusa’, for which Caravaggio
used a male model to paint a female icon. Conversely, Jarman chose a
woman, Dawn Archibald, to pose as the provocative Cupid of Caravaggio’s
‘Amor Vincit Omnia’: gender distinctions are thus blurred no less than is
sexual orientation. The film’s trajectory traces both Caravaggio’s sexual
enthralment with his model Ranuccio (Sean Bean), a wrestler he picks up
after a fight in a bar, and his growing idolisation of Ranuccio’s girlfriend
Lena (Tilda Swinton) who, in the course of the film, is transformed from a
dirty street girl smoking roll-ups in a grubby headscarf to Caravaggio’s
stunningly beautiful ‘Mary Magdalene’ and, after her death, into his
Virgin Mary for ‘The Death of the Virgin’. In his DVD commentary,
Gabriel Beristain provides an account of how changes in make-up and
lighting were aimed at showing how Lena is made ever more glamorous
as an effect of Caravaggio’s favour: the change, he implies, is due to the
external agency of Caravaggio the painter, Jarman the filmmaker and the
61
Toyah Willcox and Peter Middleton (cinematographer), Commentary, The Tempest, dir. Derek
Jarman (Second Sight Films Ltd, 2004, DVD).
62
‘The Smile on the Mona Lisa / High Renaissance – the Tale of Mona Lisa’: DJC Box 43
(unpunctuated in the original).
cinematographer and make-up artists who applied themselves to transform-
ing Swinton’s passive body.63
Just as crucial to effecting Swinton’s astonishing transformation into an
icon of femininity, however, are her costumes and performance: in stark
contrast with Lena’s drab post-war Italian costumes at the beginning of the
film, Powell’s design for Lena’s masked ball gown is ‘larger than life’,
literally increasing Swinton’s visual presence in the film. The sheer size of
the gown, and its elaborate gold embroidery, ensure that the gaze that, up to
this point, is invited to rest on beautifully oiled and lit male torsos now
comes to rest on a body wrapped in multiple layers of gorgeous fabrics. On
receipt of the gown, Lena kisses Caravaggio and then, holding the gown in
front of her, literally upstages Ranuccio by stepping onto a plinth in front of
him. In her next appearance, Lena is wearing the enormous gown, backlit
by an open window, and holding up a hand mirror in the iconic pose of
Vanity. She pulls off her headscarf, for the first time revealing her lush
amber hair, and then defiantly turns her head towards the camera, steadily
holding the gaze of the viewer.64 With no diegetic viewer present, Lena’s
gaze acknowledges the presence of the camera that is capturing her image
and announces her agency in presenting herself to be gazed at. Lena
switches from the narcissism of gazing at herself to meeting the gaze of
the camera. The creator of this image is not Caravaggio, but Swinton-as-
Lena daring Jarman-as-viewer to look at her.
The deliberateness of the moment and the time and care invested in it
invite us to read this image as the turning-point in the film in which
Swinton’s Lena, by offering herself to the cinematic gaze, engages directly
with Laura Mulvey’s theorisation of the woman as an object of the gaze,
characterised by her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ in mainstream narrative film.65
In a film that insists so strongly on the nude male body as the privileged
object of the gaze in defiance of conventional cinema, the assertiveness of
Swinton’s performance, combined with the exaggerated costume,
demands that we see her fully dressed body as pleasurable, while insisting
that we do so on her own terms, not those of conventional narrative
cinema. This is reflected in the diegesis: after this scene, Lena begins to
dictate the conditions of her availability as an object of visual and sensual
63
Beristain’s commentary, Special Features, Caravaggio (BFI, DVD).
64
Jarman’s Caravaggio scripts this moment as: ‘LENA, dressed in her glittering gown, admires herself in
a hand mirror. She pulls off her scarf and lets her golden hair fall out slowly as, with a look of triumph
and determination, she turns to face the camera’ (p. 84). See also Dillon, Jarman and Lyric Film,
pp. 146–7, for a reading of this image as an exploration of vanity and narcissism.
65
Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, pp. 21–2.
3 Vanity: Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986). Film still, BFI.
pleasure. ‘Virgins are expensive’, she hisses at Caravaggio during the masked
ball at which she disappears with a Cardinal. Pregnant, she patiently sits for
Caravaggio’s ‘Mary Magdalene’ and refuses to break her pose even when
invited to do so. As Caravaggio tells Ranuccio of Lena’s pregnancy, she enters
the room with two bodyguards, flaunting her beauty in the golden glow of
the lighting while insisting on her unavailability for either man since she is
now the Cardinal’s mistress. With Lena thus increasingly attractive and in
control of the pleasures she conveys, Caravaggio drowns her ‘like Ophelia’.66
In a series of interviews with Lizbeth Goodman in 1989, Swinton
complains that mainstream theatre and ‘the “classic plays” are by
men, about men, or about things that mean something to men but
don’t necessarily mean the same thing, or any thing, to women’,
implying a connection between her assertively feminist politics and
her decision to leave the RSC and work outside a canon in which
‘very few women characters . . . actually determine their own
66
Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 102.
4 In control: Tilda Swinton surrounded by ‘bodyguards’ in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio

(1986). Screengrab.
destinies’.67 Hamlet is Swinton’s main example of such male-centred drama

that ‘bears no real relevance to [her] life at all’.68 Swinton recalls that her
input into Jarman’s films was principally ‘about casting visual images, and
specifically, because that’s what we have been interested in, it’s been about
casting recognizable images and then subverting them, in whatever ways
seemed appropriate’.69 Crucially, Swinton compares the character of Lena
to her improvised performance of the bride in The Last of England who,
having gone through the ‘typical bride-like torture, wherein she is having to
pose for the photographer, over and over again, for a series of artificially
posed photographs’, ends up taking a pair of enormous scissors to her
wedding dress while performing a crazed dance of liberation. Swinton
comments: ‘What’s unusual about this film is that she is finally allowed
to rebel (whereas, in Caravaggio, she dies).’70 For Swinton, Lena’s Ophelia-
like drowning represents the fatal stifling of a woman’s rebellious appropria-
tion of the right to control the gaze and direct it onto herself, to rebel against
traditions that entrap women in passive poses that render them vulnerable.
The period Jarman described as ‘years of distillation’ thus resulted in a film
that brings together key elements that shape Jarman’s work on Edward II: a
portrayal of sexual dissidence informed by queer and feminist theory and
politics that extends its critique of normativity to defy the conventions of
67 68
Goodman, ‘Subverting Images’, 218. Goodman, ‘Subverting Images’, 219.
69 70
Goodman, ‘Subverting Images’, 218. Goodman, ‘Subverting Images’, 218.
mainstream narrative cinema.71 Crucially, the excesses that characterised Jubilee
and The Tempest are replaced by the ‘concentration on small gestures’ for which
Jarman thanked Caravaggio. The sparseness of mise-en-scène of Caravaggio’s
paintings, the beauty of the saturated colours in sharply contrasted lighting, the
early modern painter’s anachronisms and the stillness of his figures become part
and parcel of a painterly approach to cinema that marries meaning to form.
Equally important, Caravaggio brings together a team of collaborators –
Hobbs, Powell, Swinton – who worked with Jarman on creating visual images
that, while catering to the visual pleasures critiqued by Mulvey in mainstream
cinema, resist the sexual politics of that cinema. The bodies of Caravaggio speak
of alternative ways of looking and being looked at, of desiring and being
desired, grounding their queerness in the early modern period while insisting
that, as Jarman puts it, ‘The past is present.’72
‘The Swan of Avon dies a syncopated death’: section 28

and the gestation of Edward II
The sense that we can only access the past through the lens of the present is
crucial to Jarman’s work on Edward II. Marlowe’s play became increasingly
important to Jarman as, on 18 December 1986, at the height of the Thatcher
era, Conservative Peer Lord Halsbury tabled a bill that took issue with the
tolerant attitude towards homosexuality in local governments, setting out
clear battle lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by suggesting that heterosexuals
will be ‘pushed off the pavement [by homosexuals] if we give them the
chance’.73 At the Conservative Party Conference in 1987, Margaret
Thatcher built on Halsbury’s bill with her references to ‘extremist teachers’
who ensured that ‘[c]hildren who need to be taught to respect traditional
moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.’74
By 1988, the essence of Lord Halsbury’s thinking was distilled into Section
28 of the Local Government Act, forbidding the ‘promotion of homosexuality’
by local governments.75 Four days after Lord Halsbury tabled his bill, on 22
December 1986, Jarman was diagnosed as a bearer of the HIV virus. Jarman
thought himself ‘fortunate to be forewarned so that one can wind one’s life
up in an orderly fashion’.76
71
Jarman, The Last of England, p. 61. 72 Jarman, The Last of England, p. 175.
73
Official Report, House of Lords, 18 December 1986, col. 310, quoted in Smith, ‘Imaginary
Inclusion’, 63.
74
Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Party’, 9 October 1987. Thatcher Archive: CCOPR 664/
87, http://tinyurl.com/73yafmk.
75
Smith, ‘Imaginary Inclusion’, 60, 63. 76 Jarman, The Last of England, p. 17.
Jarman had filmed The Last of England, a devastating assessment of the
state of the nation, earlier that year.77 Without any funding available to
begin with, he had built on the ‘punk’ approach of The Angelic
Conversation, filming with his Super-8 camera and asking his friends to
improvise their contributions in the absence of a screenplay. James Mackay,
who had been responsible for the project development in Caravaggio and
who co-produced The Last of England, describes how with Hobbs, Terry,
Swinton and Powell by his side, Jarman ‘had essentially devised an alter-
native system of film-making’ in terms of technology (combining Super-8,
video and 35mm film) and approach (an improvised treatment of an idea).78
As the multiple impact of an intensification of state-sanctioned homopho-
bia and his HIV diagnosis hit home, The Last of England was in post-
production. It was now that, through Simon Fisher-Turner’s soundtrack
and the editing, a narrative of sorts was shaped to hold the disparate
elements of the film together.
As Nigel Terry, in a voice instantly recognisable from the voice-overs in
Caravaggio, intones ‘outside in the leaden hail, the Swan of Avon dies a
syncopated death’, a young man tramples the canvas of Caravaggio’s ‘Amor
vincit omnia’ (the prop painted by Christopher Hobbs for Caravaggio); later
sequences lead up to the execution of Spencer Leigh, Caravaggio’s
Jerusaleme, who is mourned by Tilda Swinton’s bride. Jarman thus pastes
together images and texts that speak of the annihilation of the careless,
cheekily transgressive love of Caravaggio’s Renaissance, the demise of
Shakespeare, and the devastation of countryside and people. Only
Swinton’s bride embodies a feeble hope for a future in which the fabrics
of oppression that lead to Lena’s death in Caravaggio can be as literally rent
as she can hack away at her wedding dress.79 Framing this view of an
England from which the population seeks to exile itself (‘The Last of
England’ refers to Ford Madox Brown’s painting depicting emigrants
leaving the white cliffs of Dover behind) are shots of Jarman at his desk in
1986 and home videos of Jarman with his sister and mother at various points
of his childhood. If Alan Sinfield is right in arguing that for homosexuals,
the ‘diasporic sense of separation and loss’ often ‘attach[es] to aspects of the
(heterosexual) culture of our childhood, where we are no longer “at home”’,
then these tender images of childhood games Jarman includes in his film
77
On The Last of England as a ‘state-of-the-nation’ film, see Hill, British Cinema, pp. 153–61.
78
Mackay, ‘Low-Budget British Production’, p. 57.
79
See Hill’s excellent reading (British Cinema, pp. 158–9). See also Jarman, The Last of England,
pp. 205–7.
combine his sense of desolation at the devastations of the present with
nostalgia for a pre-sexual time and place, a home, an England, from which
one need not seek to escape.80
The aggression of The Last of England’s editing and the new focus on the
family provided in the inclusion of home video footage are also evident in
Jarman’s other immediate artistic response to the proposed bill and the news
of his HIV status: if the published copyright date is to be trusted, then the
screenplay of ‘28’ that represents Jarman’s first treatment of Marlowe’s
Edward II might date from 1986.81 The script is the first of a series of
interrelated draft screenplays loosely related to Marlowe’s tragedy that speak
of the intensity and speed with which Jarman, as he wound up his life,
interwove his political activism with his creative work.82 Together, the
screenplays permit us to gain a much more nuanced understanding than
has hitherto been possible of Jarman’s thinking about Edward II and its
place in present-day culture and political debates. They show a long
evolution from the early 1960s when Jarman, as a student at King’s, had
marked up homoerotic passages but also paid attention to Isabella’s desire
for her husband and Edward’s wilfulness in setting Gaveston above foreign
policy.83 ‘28’ and ‘Sod ’Em’, Jarman’s angry scripts of the late 1980s, by
contrast, disregard Isabella and foreign policy altogether, until Swinton’s
Isabella reclaims her share of the limelight in Jarman’s 1991 film. By mid
1991, however, Isabella has disappeared again, making way for a surprisingly
carnivalesque final spin on Marlowe’s tragedy in Jarman’s script for the
musical ‘Pansy’.
‘28’ imagines a near-future world in which Section 28 of the Local
Government Act has been introduced as ‘the first of many similar acts of
legislation restricting human rights’.84 On the Index of criminal elements is
‘Derek Jarman, with an identifying number, and the words “Orders to
Eliminate,” culminating with Christopher Marlowe, with similar text’.85
Presiding over this brave new world is ‘Prime Minister, Margaret Reaper,
known as grim’, a barely disguised representation of Margaret Thatcher,
who is assisted by blind chief of police Cesspit Charlie. Their fascist regime
targets homosexuals, carriers of HIV, adulterous wives, Labour supporters
80
Sinfield, Gay and After, p. 30. 81 Copyright date for ‘Sod ’Em’ in Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 185.
82
‘28’ is a truncated draft of ‘Sod ’Em’, which survives as a typescript in the BDC (DB), as a near-
identical typescript dated ‘Feb. 1989’ (PC), and as the screenplay published posthumously in Jarman,
Up in the Air. In 1988–9, the material bifurcates into the film Edward II (1991) and ‘Pansy’. The
Shooting Script of Edward II (the basis of the published screenplay Queer Edward II) and two scripts
for ‘Pansy’ survive in PC.
83
Annotations in Jarman’s copy of Ridley (pp. 240, 246): PC. 84 ‘28’ (6): DJC Box 43.9.
85
‘28’ (6): DJC Box 43.9.
and, above all, the young actor Edward, for whom a warrant for arrest has
been issued following his performance of the king in Marlowe’s banned
Edward II. Edward’s father, who also appears as homophobic Edward I, is a
military man very reminiscent of Jarman’s own father. Edward’s lover
Johnny/Gaveston is also the Prince in the soap opera ‘The Family’, which
keeps ‘Mr. and Mrs. average [sic]’ happy with scenes of royal escapism.86
Sequence 1 shows Edward naked and shivering in a dungeon. It is his
voice-over narration we hear throughout the film, commenting on the state
of the nation and blending his own experiences of repression with those of
Edward II. Against the background of ‘a series of views of Great Britain,
filmed in the manner of The Last of England, of castles, cathedrals, wild
desolate landscapes, the white cliffs themselves, everything charged and
burning in an orange light’, Edward’s narration, supported by ‘a complex
soundtrack which like that in The Last of England will tell much of the
story’, holds together the disparate visual elements of the film.87 Vignettes
of life under Reaper are intercut with images of Nazi book-burning and
concentration camps, footage of wreath-laying at the Cenotaph and critical
moments in Edward’s life: childhood home videos, a row with his father
who vows to destroy Edward’s relationship with Johnny, the under-the-
counter acquisition of a copy of Marlowe’s Edward II, the brutal raid on the
bookshop stocking illicit copies of Plato, Shakespeare and Marlowe.88
Then, suddenly, Edward is crowned King and Johnny speaks Gaveston’s
opening monologue in Marlowe’s Edward II. The screenplay hurtles to a
precipitated conclusion with ‘Mrs. Smith’ stoned by her neighbours for her
adultery, the Archbishop of Canterbury thanking God for the 20,000
stonings of adulterous wives, God exclaiming ‘Fucking mess’, and a choir
of serious little children singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.89 The screen-
play does not use all of its dramatis personae: ‘Brittania [sic], an abseiling
lesbian heroine’ and her friend ‘Venus, a fifties style heroine’ who ‘sings
filthy songs in the bath’ do not feature in the action, but their virtual
presence speaks eloquently of the connections between ‘28’ and Jubilee,
with its punk rendering of ‘Rule Britannia’ by Jordan’s character Amyl
Nitrate.
Described by Jarman as a film that ‘veers from tragedy to comedy, from
comedy to farce’, ‘28’ is significant for the ways in which, from its inception,
Jarman’s project to work on Edward II combines the most important
strands of his lifelong engagement with the Renaissance to make a forceful
86 87 88
‘28’ (1–2): DJC Box 43.9. ‘28’ (4): DJC Box 43.9. ‘28’ (11): DJC Box 43.9.
89
‘28’ (14): DJC Box 43.9.
political statement about the present. The breadth of reference and anarchic
energy of Jubilee and The Last of England are brought together here with
Caravaggio’s emphasis on a single destiny. The film’s viewpoint is that of
Edward, Jarman and the wider homosexual community in the 1980s.
Explicit comparisons to the visuals and soundtrack of The Last of England
in the script suggest that Jarman was thinking of this film as another ‘punk’,
low-budget production using a combination of Super-8 and home video
footage. Orange, the dominant colour in The Last of England, is the light in
‘28’ that symbolises the burning of books and the ‘charge’ of a country
devastated by the right-wing economic and social policies of its leaders and
the complacency of its people.90
Crucially, in view of how the project was to develop into Edward II, ‘28’
builds on the retrospective technique of Caravaggio in narrating the events
from the vantage point of Edward in the dungeon awaiting his execution.
The film thus offers what Catherine Silverstone describes as ‘a traumatic
flash forward in relation to the time of its writing, where trauma in the
present is the ground upon which that which has not yet happened is
imagined as having happened’. Her term ‘proleptic traumatic response’
neatly sums up the temporal contradictions of a screenplay in which the
early modern past and the political present are projected into the future,
where they merge into a single fact of timeless alienation and oppression.91
Edward cites Old English poetry (three lines from The Exeter Book’s ‘The
Wanderer’, a tale of the warrior’s exile, loneliness and grief) while the visuals
show desolate views of present-day Britain; Gaveston’s soliloquy from Act 1
Scene 1 of Marlowe’s play is sandwiched between a view of the ‘burning
pages of Marlowe’s Edward II’ in an incinerator and Prime Minister
Margaret Reaper being made-up for a television address. Under the pressure
of the proposed homophobic legislation and its creation of ‘a monotonous
monoculture’ that leads to the withering of ‘all opposition and plurality’,
temporal diversity, too, has withered and past and present oppressions are
indistinguishable.92
‘Sod ’Em’, the next iteration of the script which seems to have been
written within a few months of ‘28’, builds on ‘28’ by adding fifty-five new
sequences to the early screenplay’s nineteen sequences.93 In ‘Sod ’Em’,
Jarman also introduces a new character, General Genocide, who heads the
90
The link between economy and repression is evident in Prime Minister Reaper’s insistence on the
cost-effectiveness of the stoning of adulterous wives.
91
Silverstone, Shakespeare, p. 85. 92 ‘28’ (8): DJC Box 43.9.
93
I concentrate here on the version of ‘Sod ’Em’ published in Jarman, Up in the Air, which differs very
little from the BDC and PC typescripts. The largest variant is the introduction of a sequence titled
‘SAS (for “Straight and Sexist”)’, an appellation that clarifies the link
between homophobia and sexism and identifies both with the military
backbone of the government. Homophobic repression has become even
more extreme in this screenplay: Reaper and Cesspit discuss the cost-
effectiveness of hanging, drawing and quartering and Johnny/Gaveston is
tortured on a medieval rack before being shot by a firing squad. The
complicity of the Arts in the extermination of homosexuals is implied by
the notion that executions should be accompanied by music (the ‘choir of
clean children’ plays a prominent role). Jarman specifically targets the film
industry in his vision of film studio sets being used as shooting ranges in
which the army can practise with ‘HIV condemned’ ‘volunteers’ who are
interned in Pontins holiday camps. God, on the other hand, has clearly
joined the queer opposition, since s/he appears as ‘a bearded lady in an
enormous scarlet ballgown’, who has a sympathetic ear for the petition on
behalf of Edward and Johnny made by Wilde, Shakespeare, Marlowe and
Byron.94 Sequence 67, ‘Berkeley Castle’, returns us to the dungeon of the
film’s beginning, where Edward and his executioner speak Marlowe’s
dialogue from Act 5 Scene 6, right to Edward’s final line. Although it
remains unclear whether the film is meant to show the moment of
Edward’s death, Margaret Reaper’s statement, in the following scene, ‘I’ve
shoved a poker up that faggot’s arse’, leaves the viewer in no doubt about
what has happened. As Reaper is crowned ‘First of England Queen,
Dictator and Defender of the Faith’ and Edward and Johnny linger in
purgatory, God finally has Reaper thrown in the Jaws of Hell and resurrects
Edward and Johnny, who are back in their squat, where they kiss over a cup
of tea.95
The film Jarman describes as ‘a violent cut-up collage of that time’ is thus
suspended between two Marlovian moments: the opening monologue of
Gaveston’s repeal towards the beginning (Sequence 11) and Edward’s death
scene near the end (Sequence 67).96 Marlowe’s Edward II, which makes its
first physical appearance in response to Edward’s reflection ‘And I thought,
how can I represent all this?’, provides the narrative arc that unites the
fragments of time. Through Edward’s statement ‘Time was scattered, the
past and the future, the future, past and present, our lives erased by the great
‘The Liberals Man the Walls of the Ghetto’ that slots into the middle of sequence 55 of the published
script (p. 214). It features a Channel 4 Announcer, who introduces the screening of the Derek Jarman
film ‘Hadrian and Antinuous’, which the ‘faint-hearted’ might find ‘offensive’ because of its
homoeroticism. ‘Sod ’Em’, Bill Douglas Centre: DBC 490, no pagination; ‘Sod ’Em’, PC, no
pagination; and Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, p. 224.
94
Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, pp. 198, 199, 205. 95 Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, p. 222.
96
Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, p. 185.
dictator’, ‘Sod ’Em’ pins the responsibility for the dissolution of lives and
times, which already marked ‘28’, squarely on Margaret Reaper.97
Remarkably, after years of using Shakespeare as his ‘best weapon’, and in
a screenplay in which Marlowe and Shakespeare rub shoulders in God’s
queer heaven, Jarman associates the destructive force of Reaper with
Shakespeare.98 As Edward is cornered by the SAS, a newscaster announces:
. . . Now Reaper fills the fields of Blighty,
Blessed by the Lord Almighty,
She cuts the national cake
Misquoting, Francis Augustine and Paul,
Those times, she said were out of joint,
And killed a mouse to prove the point
The fires she unleash’d ran quickly through the nation
Turning old city streets to rubble . . .99
The blurring of the battle lines in the doggerel’s association of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet with the forces of oppression is symptomatic of Jarman’s changing
attitude towards Shakespeare and Marlowe in these years. The syncopated
death of the ‘Swan of Avon’ proclaimed in The Last of England that was
accompanied by the trampling of Caravaggio’s provocatively careless Cupid
represents the elegiac mourning of the obliteration, by the jagged rhythms
of the present, of a ‘Shakespearean’, gentle, free and forgiving conception of
the Renaissance. As Jarman’s fight against Section 28 intensified and he
began to distance himself from other prominent homosexuals who opted to
work with the Conservative Government, however, he increasingly identi-
fied Shakespeare with the cultural and political establishment.100 When Ian
McKellen accepted a knighthood and an invitation to Downing Street,
Jarman publicly expressed his indignation.101 OutRage!, the activist group
Jarman was working with, opposed such assimilationist politics, employing
aggressive tactics that ‘challenge[d] homophobia and political discrimina-
tion in a retaliatory fashion’.102 Significantly, Jarman mapped the divide
97
Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, pp. 194, 222.
98
Derek Jarman. Interview by Cynthia Kee, London Magazine, press cutting pasted into ‘Caravaggio
June–July [1985]’: DJC Box 7.
99
Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, pp. 119–20.
100
On Jarman’s change in attitude, see also: Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, p. 182; and
Wymer, Jarman, p. 143.
101
See discussions of the knighthood controversy in: Barratt, Ian McKellen, pp. 149–51; Del Re, Jarman,
p. 83; Friedman, ‘Horror, Homosexuality, and Homiciphilia’, 574–9; Peake, Jarman, pp. 464–6; and
Wymer, Jarman, p. 143. I discuss the relationship between McKellen and Jarman and their two films
of Edward II in detail in Chapter 4.
102
Richardson, Queer Cinema, p. 39.
between his own radical political views and McKellen’s willingness to talk to
the Conservatives onto the opposition between Shakespeare and Marlowe:
‘I suspect if Elizabeth I was dishing out knighthoods, Shakespeare would
have been at the front door with a begging bowl, Marlowe would have run a
mile.’103 By the time he filmed Edward II and wrote the polemical accom-
panying screenplay, Queer Edward II, which he dedicated to ‘the repeal of all
anti-gay laws, particularly Section 28’, Jarman was ready to endorse A. L.
Rowse’s view of Shakespeare as ‘a conservative’ and of Marlowe as ‘much
more radical’.104 What Marlowe enabled Jarman to do is to approach the
Renaissance no longer as a time of sexual liberation (which is how he
repeatedly imagined fifteenth-century Florence),105 but as the origin of a
history of sexual and political repression he identified with Jacobean
England. Not for nothing does Jarman describe Nigel Terry’s coinage of
Mortimer’s insult ‘girlboy’ as ‘Jacobean’.106 His Edward II, he came to
realise in 1990, was growing ‘increasingly Jacobean, sexy, and violent’.107
Jarman’s diary entry recording his reaction to the first screening of the
completed film reads: ‘Marlowe the mirror in which Shakespeare finds
himself’.108
This period thus sees the emergence of an opposition of Marlowe as a
radical, violent and sexy ‘Jacobean’ playwright, whose plays act as catalysts
for a political engagement in the present day, with a more conservative,
gentle (if not quite genteel) ‘Elizabethan’ Shakespeare, whose political edge
is dulled. This opposition is fundamental. It underpins not only the popular
conception of Marlowe as, anachronistically, a dramatist with a ‘Jacobean’
mind-set that aligns him with the Jacobean dramatists’ reputed ‘transgres-
sion, dissidence, and desire’,109 but it also was to inform the thinking of
Jarman’s most prominent successors. It is here that Jarman’s queer
Renaissance begins to be ‘contemporary Jacobean’ in its welding together
of past and present politics and histories of repression and transgression. It is
Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic in Edward II that makes it
such a powerful model for subsequent filmmakers (and, arguably, stage
directors), giving their work with early modern drama a distinctly counter-
Shakespearean angle that is bound up with oppositional aesthetics and
approaches to filmmaking.
103
Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 162. 104 Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 112.
105 106
See, e.g. his section on Ficino in Chroma, pp. 57–8. Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 142.
107
Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 293. 108 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 30.
109
Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, p. 80.
Derek Jarman’s queer Edward II: (preposterously) looking through

the eyes of the present
Jarman’s work on ‘Sod ’Em’ clearly paved the way for Edward II. Yet the film
signals a radical shift in the filmmaker’s approach to the material, as he
focussed his attention on Marlowe’s play and dropped the frame narrative
of Margaret Reaper’s England and her ‘Straight and Sexist’ police state.
Aspects of that frame remain present in the inflated attention Jarman gives
to Nigel Terry’s SAS-uniformed Mortimer and Tilda Swinton’s Isabella, as
well as to the middle-aged women of the homophobic ‘Chorus of Nobility’,
who seem to have borrowed their handbags and blouses from Margaret
Thatcher’s wardrobe. The scripts for Edward II use Marlowe’s verse, yet
combine a remarkably close adherence to his words with a willingness to cut,
shuffle and update. A comparison of the Shooting Script (PC) with Briggs’s
edition of Edward II, which Jarman began to mark up after September 1988
(the date on the flyleaf), reveals the care with which he repeatedly revisited the
play, gradually paring it down until he arrived at the extreme economy of the
dialogue in the film. The Shooting Script, too, bears multiple traces of
deletions and, less frequently, insertions. Keith Collins remembers that
these took place throughout the filming process, as some performers shed
more lines and Swinton asked for deleted lines to be reinserted.110 ‘Cut the
dialogue / too much of it’, Jarman agitatedly jotted in the margin of Sequence
73, the scene in which Isabella and Mortimer jostle for space on Edward’s
throne – and cut nine of Mortimer’s lines.
Although the pared-down film includes images and sounds that reference
the medieval period of Edward’s reign – Simon Fisher-Turner’s ‘medieval’
soundtrack, the armoured body of Edward I lying in state, the throne – the
action of the film firmly takes place in the present. In the published
screenplay, Queer Edward II, Jarman explains his approach to ‘period’ and
to the Marlovian text in a way that, once more, explicitly sets him in
opposition to the Shakespeare industry:
The image is the image, and the word, oh don’t muck around with that, in
the beginning was the word.
Filmed history is always a misinterpretation. The past is the past, as you
try to make material out of it, things slip even further away. ‘Costume drama’
is such a delusion based on a collective amnesia, ignorance and furnishing
fabrics. (Lurex for an Oscar). Vulgarity like this started with Olivier’s ‘Henry
V’ and deteriorated ever after.
110
Keith Collins, personal interview, 23 June 2012.
Social realism is as fictitious as the BBC news which has just one man’s
point of view. Like my film.
Does this answer the question: ‘Why are you doing it in modern dress?’
Our ‘Edward’ as closely resembles the past as any ‘costume drama’ (which is
not a great claim).111
By the time Andrew Tiernan’s Northern working-class Gaveston, cradling a

mug in his hand, concludes his statement about ‘the multitude, that are but
sparks / Raked up in embers of their poverty’ with the exclamation ‘Fuck
them!’, the viewer is keyed into the film’s dissident heritage attitude and its
ability to present several simultaneous temporalities: an early modern play,
the medieval reign of Edward II and the abusive present.112
Uniting all three periods is the overall aesthetic of the film which, in the
manner of Caravaggio, combines Christopher Hobbs’s set design and Ian
Wilson’s cinematography to create a timeless space of stone walls, inter-
sected by shafts of light that suggest different localities and moods. All
scenes are shot in the studio, with the four big blocks of textured stone walls
that make up the flexible set arranged in different positions to create various
prison-like environments. This allows Jarman to pay tribute to the prison
setting and erotic fascination with criminality of Genet’s Un chant d’am-
our.113 It also returns Jarman to the idea of the early modern play as a
physical and mental prison which he toyed with in the early Tempest
screenplays. Within that grim, grey environment, Jarman, often using
Caravaggesque lighting from the top left of the frame, creates a sensual
feast of colours with the help of Sandy Powell’s lush costumes for Isabella
and the court musicians, adopting what Rosalind Galt describes as an
‘aesthetic of visual plenitude’ that goes against the grain of avant-garde
British filmmaking in the same period.114 The unity of space and lighting
allows Jarman to exercise ‘classical’ control over his sensually excessive
material even as it threatens to burst the seams of Marlowe’s tragedy with
images of grotesque violence and the insertion of extradiegetic material that
insistently binds the individual experience of Edward to Jarman’s own
111
Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 86.
112
1.1.20–21. See Julianne Pidduck for a reading of Jarman’s work as deploying the ‘oppositional period
aesthetic’ associated with ‘Queer Costume Drama’ (Pidduck, Contemporary Costume Film, pp. 139,
145).
113
See also Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, p. 213 and, especially, David Garner’s discussion of
Genet’s influence on Jarman and the way ‘Prison is a privileged space of desire in Edward II’, with
Lightborn evoking boiler-suited figures in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Fassbinder’s Genet-
adaptation Querelle de Brest (Garner, ‘Perverse Law’, p. 39).
114
Galt, Pretty, p. 78. Galt is writing about Jarman’s Super-8 films; her observation applies equally to
Jarman’s use of rich colours in Edward II.
historical moment: a homoerotic nude rugby scrum, OutRage! demonstra-
tors fighting against riot police, the fusillade of three lesbian women
(modelled on Goya’s ‘El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid’),115 musical and
dance interludes bringing in extraneous performers.
The timelessness of set and lighting is reinforced by Jarman’s restructur-
ing of the plot into a sequence of episodes that disrupt the emphasis on
continuity which remained mostly uncontested in early 1990s mainstream
cinema. Even though the budget of £750,000 that Working Title, the
production company, had managed to raise for the film was by far the
largest budget Jarman had ever disposed of, it was too small to allow him to
rival Sjöman’s Syskonbädd in its narrative continuity and attention to
period.116 As Jarman said: ‘I don’t think we could have done Edward II
[like Sjöman’s film]. We didn’t have the resources. . . . I always said the
budget was the aesthetic.’117 Once more, Jarman was forced to fall back on
his experiences with punk filmmaking, using a mixture of professional
actors and friends as performers and letting Christopher Hobbs convert
pepper mills into an oversized chess set. Most importantly, he relinquished
linear storytelling because ‘the cost of narrative makes it prohibitive –
essentially narrative is an exercise in censorship because of that’.118
Instead, Jarman used the technique he had trialled in Caravaggio and
imagined for ‘28’ and ‘Sod ’Em’, starting the film from the vantage point
of Edward in the dungeon approaching the moment of his death and
remembering key episodes in his life.
Edward II’s back-to-front structure anticipates the approach to the play
that was to become dominant in academic discussions of Marlowe: reading
the play ‘backwards’, as it were, from the vantage point of Edward’s
sodomitical murder. In doing so, he employs an approach that is literally
preposterous, in the rhetorical sense of the term, in that it reverses the
relations between that which should come before and that which should
follow after. As Jonathan Goldberg interprets the rhetorical figure and I will
explain in detail when discussing Mike Figgis’s prominent use of this figure
in Hotel in my next chapter, the preposterous signals a transgression of
spatial decorum that implies a similar transgression of sexual decorum.119 By
starting the film with a scene that recognisably belongs to the end of the
play, Jarman translates into his narrative form the transgression of sexual
115
A photocopy of Goya’s painting is pasted into the Shooting Script of Edward II: PC.
116
Wymer, Jarman, p. 145. There is disagreement over the figure: Jarman puts the figure at £850,000
(Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 34).
117
Lippard, ‘Interview with Derek Jarman’, p. 165. 118 Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 110.
119
Goldberg, Sodometries, p. 4.
norms that is the subject matter of his film. The ‘proleptic traumatic
response’ of the earlier screenplays is transformed into a retrospective,
preposterous traumatic response in which Marlowe’s 400-year-old play
provides some of the answers to the questions posed by current political
conflicts.
Comparison with Branagh’s Henry V, filmed just two years beforehand,
or even with Jarman’s own War Requiem (also 1989), which set Britten’s
mass to devastating visuals of trench warfare, loss and grief, makes it clear
that Jarman’s Edward II is not interested in representing a nation at war in
the manner of the chronicle history play. This point is made explicitly in the
Press Book for the film, which uses the ‘fact’ of Marlowe’s homosexuality to
explain the difference between Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s historiography:
Marlowe . . . wrote a very different sort of history play to Shakespeare’s semi-
official accounts of the rise of the Tudor dynasty: namely the story of a king
whose love for his favourite might have involved what Marlowe’s contem-
poraries regarded as an abominable vice, but who attains full tragic stature
nonetheless.
‘What’s so interesting about EDWARD II’, Derek Jarman says, ‘is it
touches on areas that still aggravate people, unlike “Henry V” for
example.’120
Instead of recreating period detail and proceeding in the linear manner of
Branagh’s Henry V, the film uses the final encounter between Edward and
his executioner as a framing device that authorises and then regularly
penetrates the chronological progression of the plot. The frame itself is
gradually infiltrated by the plot, so that, for example, we find Steven
Waddington’s Edward abjectly offering his crown not to Mortimer (Nigel
Terry), but to Lightborn (Keith Collins, credited as Kevin Collins). The
dungeon becomes a psychic landscape in which Edward and Lightborn
experience despondency, hope and an erotic interdependence that gradually
supplants Edward’s attachment to Gaveston. The film preposterously filters
the play through the lens of Edward’s death-by-sodomy so as to zero in on
the sodomitical relationships between Edward and Gaveston/Lightborn. In
Edward’s murder, the play’s political and sexual conflicts are conflated:
‘anus’, proclaims one of Greg Taylor’s slogans in Queer Edward II, ‘– the last
place the government . . . should be poking its nose’.121
The battle lines between the sexual dissidents who support Edward and
the faction combining Isabella, Mortimer and the caricatured Tory MPs
seem very clearly demarcated: in a reversal of Lord Halsbury’s speech to the
120 121
BDC item 67736: Edward II Press Book (1991), pp. vi–vii. Jarman, Queer Edward II, pp. 80–2.
House of Lords, the ‘us’ of the film is sexually dissident; the ‘them’ the
heterosexual norm. The loving relationship between Edward and Gaveston,
who are shown cuddling in a warm orange light, is contrasted with a coldly
lit, asexual bedroom scene in which Isabella, with a face mask on and
cucumber slices over her eyes, lies on the bed while Mortimer reads a
book about the Gulf War. Two further scenes show that Mortimer’s
heterosexuality is most happily expressed through masochistic submission
to prostitutes. It is therefore tempting to find that the film stages a carnival-
esque, ‘heterophobic’ and misogynistic inversion in which ‘[h]eterosexual-
ity is vilified . . . in much the same way homosexuality has been throughout
much of the cinema’s history.’122 Such polarising readings preposterously let
the sodomitical murder determine all the meanings generated by the film.
Edward II as a whole, however, forbids such a polarising approach while
courting it throughout. The film’s portrayal of homosexuality as ‘the
eruption of excess, of jouissance’ that, as Michael O’Pray recognises, frac-
tures the ‘repressive, supposedly “rational” law of heterosexuality’, does not
preclude a critical look at individual homosexual characters that disturbs the
spectator’s uncritical identification with their viewpoints.123 In particular,
Jarman is quite reconciled to the idea that Andrew Tiernan’s thuggish
Gaveston is repulsive in his sexual humiliation of the Archbishop and
‘very alienating’ in his mock-seduction of Isabella.124 ‘Not all gay men are
attractive’, he comments on the latter scene, ‘I am not going to make this an
easy ride. Marlowe didn’t.’125 The binary oppositions set up by the film and
the screenplay are symptoms of the either/or mentality that Jarman so
effectively queers in Caravaggio and sets out to disturb again in
Edward II. Key to this is understanding Jarman’s resistance to the term
‘gay’, which he thought reductive in its binary opposition with ‘straight’,
and his preference for the more capacious term ‘queer’. As theorised by
Michael Warner, ‘queer’ involves not just sexual dissidence but a general
‘resistance to regimes of the normal’:
The preference for ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive
impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or
simple political-interest-representation . . . ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by
122
Friedman, ‘Horror, Homosexuality, and Homiciphilia’, 580; and Arroyo, ‘Death, Desire and
Identity’, p. 82. See also Chedgzoy for an account of how ‘Jarman . . . considers the carnivalesque
use of strategic inversion to be a useful way of prompting people to reconsider assumptions which are
normally so taken-for-granted that they effectively become invisible’ (Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer
Children, p. 208).
123
O’Pray, ‘Edward II’, 188. 124 Annotation to Sequence 23 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC.
125
Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 46. See also p. 20.
defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual . . . The
insistence on ‘queer’ . . . has the effect of pointing out a wide field of
normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence.126
Jarman shows the influence of Foucault’s thinking and of queer theory in

statements such as: ‘We have academics who dispute Shakespeare was gay.
Well, he wasn’t – that term hadn’t been invented and the either/or ghetto
with it. He was much more likely to be queer, which includes all of us.’127
When Simon Callow responded to Jarman’s Edward II ‘as a gay man’,
Jarman irritably wrote in his diary that he did not make the film ‘for “gay
men”, I made it for queers’.128 The screenplay’s provocative title Queer
Edward II ‘highlights, in a direct and aggressive manner, the film’s affinities
with contemporary queer theory’.129 Significantly, Jarman co-authored the
book with Tilda Swinton and Ken Butler, that is, with two collaborators
who were immersed in feminist performance practice and queer theory.130 It
is during the collaborative process of shooting the film, it seems, that
Jarman changed Isabella’s question, ‘Is it not strange, that he is thus
bewitched?’ to ‘Is it not queer . . .’, so as to draw attention to the word
and its implications.131
In an open address to Jarman written in 2002, Swinton recalls that at the
time of their collaboration, ‘There was a fashion for a thing called “normal”
and there was a plague abroad called “perversion”.’132 Her address makes it
clear that the normality in question is not just sexual, but political, cultural
and artistic, and that it involves what Jarman himself referred to as ‘normal
film’.133 Swinton remembers how it irked the inhabitants of ‘Planet
Jarmania’ to see themselves marginalised as ‘the arthouse’, a designation
they resisted because it sounded ‘disparaging’ and implied ‘that there was
only ever one mainstream’. Jarman’s ‘internationalist brigade. Decidedly
pre-industrial. A little loud, a lot louche. Not always in the best possible
taste’, in Swinton’s description, is a point of resistance to the normative
regimes of compulsory heterosexuality and the sex/gender system as much
as to the ‘dead hand of Good Taste’ that dominates the cultural sphere.
Jarman’s queer cinema, she implies, offers an alternative normality, a view
126
Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, p. xxvi. 127 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 161.
128
Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 59. 129 Cartelli, ‘Queer Edward II’, p. 213.
130
Stephen McBride, who appeared in The Garden, is listed as a further co-author.
131
Insertion in Jarman’s hand in Sequence 19, equivalent to 1.2.55 in Marlowe’s tragedy, where the line
belongs to Mortimer (Shooting Script, Edward II: PC). See Armstrong’s and Del Re’s comments on
the substitution (Armstrong, ‘More Jiggery than Pokery’, p. 148; and Del Re, Jarman, p. 83).
132
Swinton, ‘No Known Address’, p. 11.
133
Quoted in Lippard, ‘Interview with Derek Jarman’, p. 161.
of the arthouse-as-mainstream that upsets the hegemony of a cinema driven
by the availability of funding that is linked to the ability ‘to be identified as
national product’.134 The stress Swinton puts on the word ‘queer’ in
Edward II draws attention to a challenge to normality that goes far beyond
the sexual in involving the disruption of narrative continuity associated with
‘normal film’, the erosion of the boundaries of an individual work of art, and
the dissolution of the separation of past from present, of film from context,
of fiction from autobiography.
In its rejection of the either/or logic of the binary oppositions that
underpin ‘normality’, Jarman’s Edward II builds on the dynamic tension
between opposing views that makes up the fabric of Marlowe’s tragedy. As
Muriel Bradbrook pointed out long ago, Edward II is full of instances of a
type of antithesis in which one character’s statement is modified by another
character’s reply, with the substitution of just one or two words turning the
initial statement on its head.135 Thus, for example, the definition of treason –
and therefore of what constitutes rightful government – is questioned in this
stichomythic exchange:
king edward Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer!
mortimer sr. Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston!136
Similarly, an exchange between Isabella and Gaveston juxtaposes the two
definitions of ‘lord’, and through that word, a whole nexus of sexual and
courtly power relations that stand in an unresolved tension throughout the
play:
queen [to Gaveston] Villain, ’tis thou that rob’st me of my lord.
gaveston Madam, ’tis you that rob me of my lord.137
Evidently, Jarman was struck by the balance of these lines, since he marked
them up in the copy of the play he worked on as a student. Lancaster’s
confused statement ‘In no respect can contraries be true’ pinpoints how the
play repeatedly weighs up opposite viewpoints that both have a claim to be
‘true’.138
The play’s ability to sustain multiple ‘truths’ is also evident in the
tragedy’s frequent deployment of conditional statements: ‘if’ is a key word
that allows two realities to live alongside each other. Edward’s repeated
assertion ‘If I be king’139 implies the possibility of its opposite, just as his
death is already implied in his declaration ‘if I live’.140 By the end of the play,
134
Swinton, ‘No Known Address’, pp. 11, 13.
135
Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions, p. 93. See also Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil, pp. 177–8.
136
1.4.20–1. 137 1.4.160–1. 138 1.4.249. 139 1.4.105, 3.1.135. 140 2.2.96–7, 5.1.111.
as Tom Pettit observes, Edward’s death-by-spit in the sewer marks the
monarch himself as a figure who is ‘ambivalent (he may belong to one
category or another); he is liminal (situated athwart the boundary between
two categories); he is interstitial (falling into the gap between categories).
However we term it, Edward is not merely problematic in relation to
categories, he problematizes categorization.’141 The punishment that
marks Edward as the other against which the heterosexual norm defines
itself is also a punishment that queerly highlights the problematic nature of
such binary categorisation.
The most obvious way in which Jarman challenges a reading of the film
as centred on the protagonist’s death-by-sodomy, and therefore as locked
into the oppositional, binary logic of ‘normality’, is by resisting the closure
of that act and following the scene with an alternative ending, in which
Lightborn throws the poker into the dungeon’s pool before kissing Edward.
In the Shooting Script, the threat of death that hangs over the unexpected
redemptive kiss is visualised starkly: on the page facing the dialogue, Jarman
has pasted a large, jaggedly cut-out and crumpled square of paper painted
black.142 For Colin MacCabe, ‘With this kiss a whole history of homopho-
bia and violence is annulled, a whole new history becomes possible.’143 Yet
this annulment is not complete, nor is it overturned, as Wymer suggests, by
the fact that ‘the climactic anal rape and murder of Edward . . . lasts longer
and has considerably more impact than the brief loving kiss which displaces
it’: both endings are kept in play, neither is privileged to the exclusion of the
other.144 This is the more significant since Jarman was in hospital on the day
the gruesome murder of Edward was to be shot, so that the scene was
directed by Ken Butler.145
Not only did Jarman keep Butler’s footage, but he gave it the attention
needed in the editing and the synchronisation of the soundtrack to con-
dense into this scene the emotional complexity of ‘Sod ’Em’, with its
incongruous juxtaposition of the horror of Edward’s execution with the
singing of the ‘CHOIR OF CLEAN CHILDREN’, followed by the
petitions to God that result in the resurrection of Edward and Johnny/
Gaveston. In Edward II, the only sound that can be heard as four men in
studded leather jackets force the struggling Edward down onto a table and
Lightborn approaches with a red-hot poker is an extradiegetic choir of
141
Pettit, ‘Skreaming Like a Pigge’, 98.
142
Page opposite Sequence 79 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC.
143
MacCabe, ‘Post-National European Cinema’, p. 153. 144 Wymer, Jarman, p. 149.
145
children singing ‘resurrexit’ (he is risen). The moment of the poker’s
insertion is marked by a close-up of Edward’s contorted face; his scream
pierces through the voices of the children. The rupture in the soundtrack
reproduces the physical assault and provokes the type of visceral response in
the viewer advocated by Artaud.146 Here, the formal control and joyous
promise of resurrection of the children’s Latin chant is ruptured by
Edward’s scream. His pain becomes the viewer’s pain, breaking through
the boundary separating audience from spectacle before engulfing the
spectator and the image of Edward’s slumped body in the total silence of
death.
The shot and its accompanying silence is maintained just long enough to
accept the finality of that ending before a cut returns us to the image of
Edward sleeping on the floor of his dungeon, raising his head at the sound of
an opening door. Edward looks towards a light on the left of the frame; the
next shot shows Lightborn entering in a shaft of light from the right of the
frame as Edward addresses him with ‘These looks of thine can harbor
naught but death; / I see my tragedy written in thy brows.’147 The sequence
is unsettling not just because we see Edward fearing for his life when we
have just accepted the finality of his death, but also because the spatial
organisation of the characters and light in the adjoining shots seems, briefly,
impossible. The second, happy, conclusion of this scene does not simply
supplant the first, tragic conclusion; rather, each alternative is readable as a
dream from the point of view of its other, each equally offered to the viewer
as both ‘true’ and impossible: contraries can indeed be true.
Equally true and impossible is the way the film, through its prominent
use of orange and red light in the scene of the murder, allows a reading of
even that horrible moment as one of love and hope. Throughout the film,
Jarman uses the glow of Lightborn’s fire, coupled with the gentle presence
of Keith Collins’s Lightborn – the casting of the man Jarman on his death
bed described as his ‘true love’ is certainly telling – as a source of warmth
and comfort for Edward.148 At one point, Jarman imagined Lightborn using
his furnace to prepare a cup of tea, bringing the harmonious domesticity
of ‘Sod ’Em’’s final sequence into Edward II.149 The warmth of Lightborn’s
fire contrasts with the icy rain into which the exiled Gaveston is thrust and
with the cold shafts of blue light that often give Isabella’s face a bluish tint
146
See Janet Clare on the links between Marlowe’s dramaturgy and Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’
(Clare, ‘Marlowe’s Theatre of Cruelty’, p. 87).
147
5.5.72–3. 148 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 387.
149
Sequence 18, Shooting Schedule of 5 March 1991 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC.
that aligns her with ‘Sod ’Em’’s blue-blooded Margaret Reaper. Orange is
the light of Edward and Gaveston’s moment of tender intimacy before the
latter’s banishment, and it recalls how Jarman imagined England’s ‘wild and
desolate landscapes’ in ‘28’ and ‘Sod ’Em’ ‘burning in an orange light’ that
itself evoked the fires burning in The Last of England. The deep red radiating
from Lightborn’s stove during the execution is both hellish and comforting,
the scene both an execution and an erotic fantasy that can be resolved by
awakening to a kiss. Looking back to ‘Sod ’Em’ once more, possibly the
closest equivalent to the fire imagery and the nexus of pleasure and pain in
this scene is not Sequence 67, ‘BERKELEY CASTLE’, but Sequence 70, ‘A
PURGATORY IN BORROWED TIME’, in which Edward and Johnny/
Gaveston meet in purgatory (the cleansing fires in the liminal space between
heaven and hell) to reflect on the erasure of their lives and the crumbling of
civilisation.
Swinton, Powell and Lennox: deconstructing gender

Significantly, the film does not end with either of its alternative destinies for
Edward, but projects itself out of the psychological realism that governs
Steven Waddington’s performance throughout the film and into an expres-
sionistic image that suggests the consequences the sexual and political
battles of the film have had for young Edward III. The boy king is played
by 11-year-old Jody Graber, a witness figure Jarman used in several films and
personally identified with.150 In Edward II, little Edward is an important
character whose allegiance to both his normatively heterosexual mother and
his dissident homosexual father complicates audience responses to him and
his parents, as he repeatedly moves between camps and starts to combine his
mother’s fashion accessories with the martial toys with which Gaveston has
taught him to play. Throughout the film, young Edward’s ‘questions,
perceptions, and experiments in gender displacement speak eloquently on
behalf of subjects and sexualities still in the process of formation’.151 In the
film’s final moments, Edward III, wearing his mother’s signature earrings,
make-up and teetering high heels, dances on top of a cage containing
Mortimer and Isabella, who are both covered in white dust.
Tchaikovsky’s ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ on the soundtrack empha-
sises the marionette-like quality of the scene, in which an unseen puppeteer
150
In an interview, Jarman explained: ‘There is an element of young Edward being me, but everyone
identifies with the child and he is the same child in all my films’ (O’Pray, ‘Edward II’, 11).
151
Cartelli, ‘Queer Edward II’, p. 220.
seems to guide the motions of his figures. In the context of the debates
about Section 28, which centred on the detrimental influence on children of
their potential confrontation with homosexual subject matter and role
models, the scene invokes such puppet-like cultural determinism only to
mock it.152 The boy’s transgressive cross-dressing is clearly inspired not by
his homosexual father and his partner, whose gender performances are
masculine even as their desires are same-sex, but by the exaggerated femi-
ninity of his heterosexual mother.
As played by Tilda Swinton and costumed by Sandy Powell, Queen
Isabella becomes a potent figure of sartorial extravagance and feminine
masquerade.153 A preposterous reading that starts not with the sodomitical
murder but with the image of the dust-covered, mad-looking Isabella sitting
in a cage while her son peers down at her through the bars, allows us to see
Isabella as always already destined, by forces greater than herself, to act out
this final image of deranged femininity. A cross between mad, flower-
obsessed Ophelia with loose hair and a catatonic reincarnation of the
bride of The Last of England, who is rendered unable to tear her way out
of the structures and conventions that encase her, Tilda Swinton’s Isabella
in this last scene is a tragic figure whose humiliation compounds the tragedy
of Edward II. The ending suggests that this is a film that interrogates the
mental structures that lock Isabella into the prison of her sex-gender matrix
as much as it attacks the political and social structures that oppress the
sexually dissident Edward and his companions. Swinton’s Brechtian per-
formance, with its critical distance of performer from character, permits us
to see the construction of normative femininity at work; Swinton fore-
grounds, and thus undermines, the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of the woman in
narrative cinema.154 For Roberta Barker, Swinton’s Isabella functions ‘as a
figure of phantasmatic excess . . . [she] is not a “natural woman” but a
commodity, a constructed figure so determined by cultural images of
femininity that she becomes a parody of them’.155
Key to this construction are Sandy Powell’s costumes, which, like Lena’s
masked ball gown in Caravaggio, draw the spectator’s gaze away from the
152
Martin Quinn-Meyler looks at young Edward in the context of Section 28 and concludes that
‘Jarman’s prince Edward is an emergent, oppositional queer who suggests that existing efforts at
compulsory heterosexist education are not only unacceptable, but also ultimately futile’ (‘Opposing
“Heterosoc”’, p. 126).
153
Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, pp. 211–12.
154
See the superb readings of Swinton’s performance by: Talvacchia, ‘Historical Phallicy’; Chedgzoy,
Shakespeare’s Queer Children; Richardson, The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman; and, most recently,
Barker, Early Modern Tragedy.
155
Barker, Early Modern Tragedy, p. 129.
5 Queer youth: Tilda Swinton, Jody Graber and Nigel Terry in Derek Jarman’s
Edward II (1991). Film still, BFI.
spectacle of the nude male bodies Jarman’s camera often privileges, making
it rest on Isabella’s glamorous figure. Powell, who had just designed the
eclectic costumes for Gerard Murphy’s RSC production of Edward II in
1990, created a whole range of gowns in rich colours (gold, green, blue, red)
that enable Swinton’s ‘look’ in the film to reference a multitude of
Hollywood stars and political figures. In the Press Book, Swinton lists an
extraordinary number of templates for her performance that makes it
impossible to pinpoint a single dominant model.156 This resistance to
identification, it becomes apparent in the screenplay, was precisely what
Swinton was aiming for: when her collaborators identified her with various
female icons, ‘Tilda said as long as they don’t all agree on the reference –
she’s happy.’157 By exceeding referentiality, Swinton’s Isabella queers, and
thus empties of signification, dominant cultural understandings of
156
‘“As for the influences for Isabella,” [Swinton] explains, “they would have to include such people as
Audrey Hepburn, Jean Shrimpton, Princess Grace, The Princess of Wales, Ivana Trump, Jackie
Onassis, Margaret Thatcher and the Empress Wu.”’ BDC item 67736: Edward II Press Book (1991),
p. xii.
157
femininity that insist on the necessary and stable connection between
biological sex, gendered behaviour, sartorial style and sexual orientation.
How central Swinton is to her character’s generation of meanings, and to
the film as a whole, is evident from her prominent involvement in the
writing of the screenplay, where her contributions are signed ‘IR’ for
‘Isabella Regina’.158 Commenting on the image of Isabella in the cage,
Jarman pointed out how Swinton had insisted on having ‘the dead flowers
in her hands’: the iconographic detail that enables a reading of Isabella here
as connected to the Ophelia imagery of Caravaggio and the bride of Last of
England originates not with Jarman, but with Swinton.159 A letter Swinton
wrote to Jarman on 30 June 1987 sheds further light on the thinking that
underpins her performances. It reveals how her work as a feminist performer
complemented Jarman’s work as a queer filmmaker:
I’m having all sorts of thoughts about Performance . . .
I’m thinking so obsessively about what the difference is between being a
woman filmed and being a man – not that I’m interested here in the eye of
the filmmaker (another kettle of fish ALTOGETHER) but more HOW TO
BEHAVE. Not what is chosen, but what is GIVEN OUT. And what I as a
woman . . .
What I give that men don’t / can’t – and what I can give that other women
don’t / can’t.
My hunch is – a new kind of REALNESS, RAW . . . I think what I’m on
about is – if we can tap what . . . are the ESSENCES that we want / that we
believe are worth putting on a screen, then we’ll be on to something so
fundamentally thrilling . . .160
The letter bears witness to the intensity of Swinton’s thinking about the
specific contribution she, as a performer, can make to a film, a contribution
she explicitly differentiates from Jarman’s ‘eye of the filmmaker’ while
uniting their respective work in the emphatic ‘we’ who choose what essences
are worth putting on a screen.
Swinton’s letter chimes with Barker’s observations about the reticence of
her performance and the way she seems to filter the character’s emotions so
as to only let the viewer access those signs of selfhood she is willing to make
accessible. Isabella’s first appearance in the film, as she silently straddles
Edward in bed and goes through the motions of heterosexual seduction, is
not ‘horrific’, as MacCabe sees it, because of her inability to arouse the king,
but because, as Barker recognises, ‘her face refuses to mirror the emotional
158
See also the testimonials by members of the production team on the DVD Commentary. Edward II,
dir. Derek Jarman (Second Sight Films Ltd, 2010), DVD.
159
Quoted in O’Pray, ‘Edward II’, 11. 160 Letter from Tilda Swinton to Derek Jarman: DJC Box 53.
reactions spoken by her body’.161 The mechanical manner of the attempted
seduction aligns her with the prostitutes who go through the motions of an
S&M ritual for Mortimer’s benefit: Isabella is going through the motions of
marital duty in a manner that mimics – and mocks – the playtext’s insist-
ence on her submissive attitude to her ‘lord’. Her dispassionate composure
in this sequence is only made more emphatic by the artful disarray of her
hair and the contrast with the excessively emotional response of Edward,
who bangs his head against the wall that traps both of them in their
impossible heterosexual bond.
If the shell-like emptiness of Swinton’s facial expression is troubling in
this scene, it is trumped by her rendering of the queen’s monologue in
Marlowe’s Act 1 Scene 4, which Jarman cuts in two and preposterously
inverts so as to present us first with the entirely silent spectacle of how ‘the
sister of the King of France / Sits wringing of her hands and beats her breast’
before, in a separate scene, allowing her to speak the lines that justify the
spectacle of emotion.162 The physical expression of emotion, which
becomes mere spectacle, is mechanically disconnected from the intellectual
and emotional processes that might justify the emotion. As Isabella kneels,
with little Edward by her side, and wrings her hands while a tear beautifully
trickles down one cheek, the running commentary provided by the Chorus
of Nobility who observe her presents her as an object to be looked at,
admired and pitied. The theatrical mise-en-scène of the shot, however, in
which Isabella is facing the viewer in the foreground while the nobles enter
from behind, while a Caravaggesque shaft of lighting lights Isabella’s and
young Edward’s faces from the top left, troubles our understanding of the
looking relations in the scene: from where the nobles stand, it is impossible
for them to see Isabella emoting; her performance of distress is therefore
patently aimed outside the diegesis. It is our empathy, not that of the
nobles, that the performance transparently solicits.
The scene is matched by the even more disturbing later sequence in
which Isabella recites the monologue of Act 1 Scene 4. The run-up to that
moment sees the queen in a simple white shift surrounded by four seams-
tresses; the scene shows us ‘the steps taken to produce the garments that will
emanate her visual splendour later on’.163 Edward breaks into this all-female
sphere and, having dismissed the seamstresses, accuses Isabella of adultery
with Mortimer, grabbing her neck and forcing it down in a gesture that
asserts his power. What is remarkable, in view of the way the queen’s simple
161
MacCabe, ‘Jarman’s Renaissance Cinema’, 506; and Barker, Early Modern Tragedy, p. 116.
162
1.4.187–8. 163 Talvacchia, ‘Historical Phallicy’, 123.
6 Isabella: Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991). Screengrab,

with permission of Universal Pictures.
shift and isolation from her women code her as vulnerable, is the control she
continues to exercise over her facial expression. Only her voice trembles as
she rejects the accusation. Left entirely alone, Isabella stands, sways a little,
and then dramatically drops on her knees to deliver her soliloquy. As Barker
describes it:
Swinton delivers this soliloquy in a long, static take and in extremely tight
close-up . . . [Her] facial expression hardly changes; she delivers her lines very
slowly and almost without inflection. Isabella’s words express longing to be
something other than what she is, or even to be a socially acceptable nothing
(a corpse) rather than a socially anomalous nothing (a rejected wife). Swinton
bodies forth an Isabella who is almost literally nothing; left alone, she seems
denuded of emotion, of reaction, of identity itself.164
If it had not been for a stock failure, the nothingness might have been more
alarming still: the Shooting Script contains sixteen more lines than made it
into the film (five in the typescript; eleven added by hand), into which
Jarman wrote: ‘We had to reshoot this for a stock fault. Thank God[.] The
longest take was nearly four minutes – of huge long pauses.’165
Queer Edward II contains an intriguing reference to another scene that
failed to be included in the film because Swinton had pushed her
164
Barker, Early Modern Tragedy, p. 118.
165
Sequence 36 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC. See also the description in Queer Edward II, p. 74.
performance of nothingness beyond the boundaries of what even Jarman
thought acceptable. The screenplay specified that: ‘The Queen, distraught
with jealousy, hangs over the edge of the bed’ while saying ‘I love him more /
Than he can Gaveston – would he loved me / But half so much. / But half so
much / Were I treble blessed.’ Here is what Jarman says Swinton did:
Tilda cut the lines . . . She lay with her hair over the edge of the bed, did
nothing. Action. Mesmerised I watched, nothing happened, perhaps she
would move, I’d better not say cut, perhaps she was building up to an
outburst of genius which I might ruin. So I waited and waited, and Ian
[Wilson, the cinematographer] looked at me, and I at him, and Tilda didn’t
move. I said ‘cut’ quite gingerly, and the longest static take ended on the
cutting room floor.166
Going back to Swinton’s letter and to her comments to Goodman about her
reluctance to perform in ‘the classical repertoire in mainstream theatres’, the
emotional void of these almost impossibly static sequences seems absolutely
their point: at the moment when the eye of the filmmaker gives her the
scopophilic attention ‘normal’ cinema gives its heroines, allowing her to
stop the forward momentum of the narrative in its tracks by focussing on
Swinton’s physical beauty and her pitiable vulnerability, the performer
withholds her character’s emotions and even her words. What she, as a
woman, as a performer, can give out that others can’t or don’t, is the raw
and quite shocking emptiness of a character whose emotions and entire
existence are disconnected from any essence. Or, to put it another way, of a
character whose essence is that she is a plot function rather than a three-
dimensional figure, like Waddington’s Edward or a figure like Hamlet,
whose thoughts trigger emotions that are readable through facial expression.
Instead of tearing up a wedding dress like the bride in The Last of England,
Swinton dismantles the fabric of Marlowe’s play by emphasising its depend-
ence on a construction of femininity that is entirely determined by the
needs of the three-dimensional male characters who dominate the play.
What Swinton bodies forth is that Isabella, like Ophelia, is always already
‘nothing’, a cipher in a play whose focus is as male-centred as is that of
Hamlet. It is no wonder, therefore, that in her final appearance in the film,
Swinton chose to present Isabella as a catatonic dust-covered Ophelia in a
cage.
Swinton’s mask-like performance, which is as divorced from emotion
when she is laughing with Mortimer, digging her teeth into Kent’s neck to
166
drink his blood, or seducing Lightborn into carrying out her husband’s
murder, both undermines the coherence of the ‘classic’ text and is what
enables the projection onto her blank face of the meanings needed to
generate Edward’s tragedy. Swinton’s blankness also connects her to the
other prominent blank-faced performer in the film: Annie Lennox, who
appears as Edward bids Gaveston goodbye to perform Cole Porter’s ‘Ev’ry
Time We Say Goodbye’, while the men dance in hospital pyjamas that
reference Jarman’s repeated hospital visits during the period of filming.167
Lennox was already in Jarman’s mind for the role of Lena as he was casting
Caravaggio; this was quite possibly motivated by the fact that the singer had
pulled a major publicity stunt at the Grammy Award ceremony in 1984,
where she appeared in drag as Elvis Presley to sing the Eurythmics hit ‘Sweet
Dreams (Are Made of This)’.168 The performance established Lennox as ‘a
distinctly androgynous figure in British and American popular culture’, a
woman whose camp sensibility made her adopt a ‘code of appearance and
behaviour that mocks and ironizes gender norms’ in much the same manner
in which Swinton set about deconstructing iconographic representations of
gender in her film work.169
Embedded within Jarman’s Edward II, Lennox’s performance of Cole
Porter’s song complements Swinton’s performance of Isabella. Lennox’s
androgynous persona – stressed here in her combination of a cropped
platinum-blonde haircut and trouser suit with strong eye make-up and
lipstick – acts as a reminder that, as Marlowe scripted Isabella and Jarman
thought of casting her in his film, she was going to be played by a boy.170
More so, Lennox doubles Swinton in that she, too, acts as a blank figure
onto which viewers and filmmaker can project their personal and cultural
memories. Like Swinton, Lennox reconciles the emotionally charged con-
tent of her song (the lyric ‘every time I say goodbye I die a little’, as Ellis
recognises, extradiegetically ‘register[s] the cumulative effects of AIDS
deaths on the community’ while referring to the impending separation of
the lovers in the diegesis) with a bland facial expression.171 In Queer
Edward II, Jarman makes no secret of the fact that Lennox’s cameo in the
film is connected to her performance, in 1990, of the same song for the
AIDS benefit album ‘red, hot + blue’, for which Lennox asked him to direct
167
At one point, Andrew Tiernan (Gaveston) was meant to wear Jarman’s own hospital pyjamas, which
were a gift from Swinton (Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 62).
168
Lennox’s name is mentioned and then crossed out in the ‘Notes on the leading players’ in
‘Caravaggio May 85’: DJC Box 6.
169
Piggford, ‘Who’s That Girl?’, p. 284. See also Gamble, Feminism and Postfeminism, pp. 237–8.
170
Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 233. 171 Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 216.
7 ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’: Annie Lennox and Derek Jarman in ‘red,
hot + blue’ (1991). Screengrab.
the music video.172 When Jarman was hospitalised and could not direct the
video, Lennox paid tribute to the filmmaker by singing the song as home
movies of Jarman’s childhood were projected onto her face and body.173
These home movies not only reference the filmmaker himself, but also
bring a much wider intertextual network into play, since they are recognis-
ably the same videos of Jarman and his sister Gaye playing on the beach and
in their mother’s garden as those Jarman included in The Last of England,
where they act as a nostalgic reminder of a heterosexual home from which
Jarman’s sexuality has exiled him. More significantly yet, one of the home
movies appears to be the same footage Jarman wanted to include in ‘28’ and
‘Sod ’Em’, as the ‘IMAGE: HAPPY FAMILIES [Home movie of EDWARD
aged six, playing in a garden]’. There, the image of young Edward/Jarman
was to be accompanied by a voice-over explaining: ‘It never occurred to me,
172
Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 62; and Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 220.
173
Annie Lennox, ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’, dir. Ed Lachman. red, hot + blue: A Benefit for AIDS
Research & Relief. Special 2-disc edn (King Cole, Inc and Shout! Factory LLC, 2006). See Talvacchia,
‘Historical Phallicy’, 117.
when I felt the first stirrings of my sexuality at six, that there could be any
other land than that of REPRESSION.’174 It is this story of the discovery of
sexuality and the simultaneous discovery of repression that is told through
Annie Lennox’s performance in the ‘red, hot + blue’ video. There, the lyrics
‘How strange the change from major to minor’ cue a switch from an earlier
home movie, showing a very young Derek and Gaye happily paddling in the
sea naked, to an image of the children aged about six, still playing together
but now both ostentatiously wearing bright red swimming pants. The
‘change from major to minor’ in the Cole Porter lyrics represents a fall
from innocence into sexual awareness and repression that is played across
the queer face and body of Annie Lennox. In the video’s self-referentiality,
this fall into sexual knowledge is compounded by the knowledge of how
gender and sexual roles are encoded in representation.
Lennox’s performance of the same song in Edward II, lit by a spotlight
that recalls the light of the projector in the music video, explodes the frame
of the film by importing not only, as Ellis has it, Lennox and Jarman’s AIDS
activism and ‘the autobiographical dimension of Jarman’s own experience
with AIDS’, but also the filmmaker’s reflection on sexuality, childhood,
repression and the state of the British nation across several films and texts.175
Through Lennox’s performance, Jarman succeeds in dismantling some of
the most normative binary oppositions in early 1990s culture and society:
the binary opposition of genders as well as the opposition between ‘main-
stream’ entertainment and ‘arthouse’ cinema. In its intertextual referential-
ity, the song erodes the boundaries of the individual work of art and artist
and unites film and context, fiction and autobiography, past and present.
In this queerest and most pleasurable moment in Edward II, Jarman’s
integration of Lennox’s tribute to him demands that the viewer remember
the filmmaker’s gradual death from a disease of the late twentieth century,
remember his films and his childhood, and beyond that, remember the lives
of Christopher Marlowe and King Edward II. The layered citationality of
this moment transcends the limits of the film, bringing past and present
into play and enabling Edward II, and through him, Marlowe’s ‘dusty old
play’, to enter the spotlight and dance centre stage once more.176 It is largely
thanks to the crossover appeal of Jarman’s Edward II, an appeal facilitated
by the inclusion of mainstream pop icon Lennox in Jarman’s queer con-
temporary Jacobean film, that the play has left its place in the archive and
forcefully re-entered the canon of works that, in Assmann’s terms, are part
174
Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, p. 192. 175 Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 215.
176
Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. ii.
of the active repertoire of culture. Conflating queer and feminist politics and
offering the hope of escape from repression in Lennox’s exit into a ray of
light, the farewell sequence encapsulates the essence of Jarman’s queer
nostalgic engagement with the Renaissance. It is this joyful rupturing of
cultural, sexual and cinematic norms that constitutes the assault ‘on
“decent” film-making; molotovs hurled at the dull beige skein of natural-
ism’ that Alex Cox described as Jarman’s legacy for independent filmmakers
who look at the early modern past through the camera lenses of the
present.177
Coda: ‘to the future’

When I travelled to Prospect Cottage, I did not expect that the ‘workbook’
Keith Collins had promised to show me would actually be the gilded
Shooting Script that is featured in Jarman’s hands on two photographs in
Queer Edward II.178 Nor did I expect, when I opened that book, to find
evidence of the extent to which Jarman had hesitated over how to end his
film. In the film, a shot tracks over the immobile figures of the OutRage!
protesters while a final voice-over by Edward hauntingly speaks:
But what are Kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?
I know not, but of this I am assured,
That death ends all, and I can die but once.
Come death, and with thy fingers close my eyes,
Or if I live let me forget myself.
The voice comes from beyond the grave and puts a final mournful spin on
the tragedy, denying it, at the very end, the promise of redemption held by
Lightborn’s kiss and the victory of queerness symbolised by young Edward
III’s dance on the cage containing Isabella and Mortimer. In the Shooting
Script, however, it is young Edward III who is imagined as speaking these
lines, ‘with a book, as if he has been reading the story’. Additional hand-
written notes show uncertainty about further elements of the mise-en-scène
and the positioning of the scene: ‘mothers dress’, reads a note in black ink;
‘poker after this’ is added in blue biro, while at the bottom of the page,
Jarman cryptically wrote in red: ‘add this scene as original as well monks
robe crucifix and scull [sic]’.179 As imagined and reimagined by Jarman,
177
Alex Cox, ‘This Is Indecent’, The Guardian, 19 February 2004.
178
Jarman, Queer Edward II, pp. 74, 93. 179 Sequence 81 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC.
Edward II is a tragedy of the past read by the queer young ruler of the
country.
If, when travelling to Prospect Cottage, I had not expected to find an
alternative ending in the Shooting Script, I was even less prepared to find
that Edward II did in fact not represent the end of Jarman’s engagement
with the material of ‘28’ at all, but that he returned to it once he had
completed his film. The first traces of what was to become the script of the
musical ‘Pansy’ appear in two scripts of ‘Sod ’Em’ from 1989.180 In its fullest
incarnation, dated August 1991, ‘Pansy’ recycles the tragic material of ‘28’
and ‘Sod ’Em’ in the mode of a satirical comedy. While it ostensibly excises
the Marlovian material that was at the centre of the earlier drafts, Edward II
remains spectrally present not only because Marlowe continues to feature in
a list of banned books and to ‘poker your arse’ is part of the homophobic
repertoire of a gang of bullies, but more so because ‘Pansy’ seems to pick up
where Edward II ends, continuing the story of young Edward III.181
The film tells the story of Pansy, the son of an unsympathetic hetero-
sexual mother (Lady Homophobia, played by a pantomime dame, married
to the closeted Lord Kincorra), through whose biography Jarman wished to
‘[chart] the progress of law reform from 1953 to the present’ and show how
‘the Queer Nation are still second class citizens in our society’.182 Pansy
grows up in the 1960s and is bullied at school, from where he is rescued by
his abseiling fairy godmother, the black bus conductor Stormin’ Norma (a
reincarnation of Britannia, the ‘abseiling lesbian heroine’ in ‘28’). In the
1980s, Margaret Reaper is at the helm of the government, Cesspit Charlie is
in charge of the Police and Archbishop Caring heads the Anglican Church; a
new contagious disease spreads through the country and homosexuals are
persecuted. With his lover Homobonus, Pansy joins the group of political
activists who take on the ‘middle-roaders’, the gay men who propose to
work with the government. The middle-roaders’ representative in the
script is Sir Thespian Knight, a merciless lampooning of the freshly
knighted Sir Ian McKellen. When a young drug addict dies of the new
disease, Sir Thespian Knight’s blithe proclamation ‘To be or not to be /
That is the question’ once more associates Shakespeare with the forces of
Conservatism.183 On the side of radical Marlowe, Pansy speaks the words
that merge Jarman’s own biography with that of Edward in ‘28’, words that
180
‘Sod ’Em – Novel’ is dated ‘Feb. 1989’; ‘PANSY in Sod ’Em’ is annotated in the hand of David Lewis
(attribution by Keith Collins), with whom Jarman was working in 1989.
181
‘Pansy’ screenplay pasted into ‘Pansy’ workbook (8, 31): PC.
182
Handwritten note, reverse of ‘Pansy’ workbook, September 1991, no pagination. PC.
183
‘Pansy’ screenplay pasted into ‘Pansy’ workbook (30): PC.
are evoked by Annie Lennox’s song in Edward II: ‘It never occurred to me,
from the moment I felt the first stirrings of my sexuality at six, that there
could be any other land than that of THE REPRESSION.’184 This time,
however, Jarman does not let his protagonist suffer Edward’s ignoble end,
but makes Stormin’ Norma rescue Pansy. They crucify Reaper, who has had
Homobonus executed, and Norma crowns Pansy king of a realm now
dedicated to ‘sexual freedom’.185 In his last stab at writing the ending of
Edward II, Jarman thus imagined a conclusion in which the political order
is changed for good. The last, hopeful, words of the screenplay are the
young king’s: ‘To the future.’186
184
185
186

Screening Early Modern Drama (Beyond Shakespeare) - Derek Jarman's Queer Contemporary Jacobean Aesthetic - Caravaggio and Edward II

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chapter 1

Derek Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean

Jarman’s estate consisted of a ﬁsherman’s hut in Dungeness, some

Derek Jarman’s avant-garde Renaissance: influences and attitudes

‘Years of distillation’:41Caravaggio (1986)

It is this sense of a dialogue between two visual artists and of Jarman’s

However receptive to Foucault’s notion that homosexuality is an invention

4 In control: Tilda Swinton surrounded by ‘bodyguards’ in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio

destinies’.67 Hamlet is Swinton’s main example of such male-centred drama

‘The Swan of Avon dies a syncopated death’: section 28

Derek Jarman’s queer Edward II: (preposterously) looking through

By the time Andrew Tiernan’s Northern working-class Gaveston, cradling a

Jarman shows the inﬂuence of Foucault’s thinking and of queer theory in

Swinton, Powell and Lennox: deconstructing gender

6 Isabella: Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991). Screengrab,

Coda: ‘to the future’

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