Royal Carnality and Illicit Desire in the English History Plays of the 1590s

According to Holinshed (in a passage translated from Polydore Vergil's Latin Historia Anglica), the garter that fell from a lady's leg, occasioning unwanted levity and provoking the king to found "so noble an order" from so "base and meane" a beginning, might have belonged to "some ladie with whom he was in loue"-a lady whom Holinshed in a marginal note identifies with "The countes of Salisburie. [...]determined to "enjoy her" ("I cannot beat / With reason and reproof fond love away" [2.1.292-93]), Edward springs his second trap by pressing her father, the Earl of Warwick, to swear rashly to do anything in his power to assuage the king's grief, even if the request should mean his death or loss of honor. [...]Edward forces Warwick to perform the "devil's office" (2.1.338)-i.e., to become pander to his own daughter, thereby wronging God, his own child, and his friend (the lady's absent husband) in order to keep the letter of his vow. John only reverses the order for Salisbury's death when his son Charles insists that to hang Salisbury and override his signature on the passport would "disgrace" his royal honor (4.5.73), even though the king attempts to argue that his son's "breach of faith" (4.5.87) would be excusable if it were done in obedience to a royal command. [...]the play absorbs the element of Edward' s sexual rapacity and his ultimate governance of it into a larger context-the potentially subversive issue of limitation on a monarch's power. [...]there is the obsessive fear of bastardy to which irregular sexual relationships may expose the members of royal families, even if only by gossip or vicious innuendo.