A new revival of Christopher Marlowe's pioneering play about the 14th-Century King of England puts the spotlight back on his relationship with his male "favourite" Piers Gaveston.

This week, at its base in Stratford-upon Avon, the world-famous Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is opening a new production of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. Though this influential 16th-Century play about a beleaguered queer monarch is more than 430 years old, it still feels stingingly relevant. Marlowe depicted a king whose authority and ability to rule is fatally undermined by his relationship with another man. Modern-day UK monarchs hold only ceremonial power, but overt queerness in the British royal family remains vanishingly rare. Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a second cousin of King Charles III who is currently competing on US reality show The Traitors, is widely described as "the first openly gay royal".

Marlowe's play dramatises the struggles of Edward II, a real-life King of England who reigned from 1307 to 1327. A year after Edward II succeeded his father, Edward I, he married the King of France's daughter, Isabella, in an effort to strengthen Anglo-French relations. Queen Isabella bore Edward II four children, and became a formidable figure in her own right – she is sometimes called "the she-wolf of France". But Marlowe's play really hinges on the king's controversial relationship with his male "favourite", Piers Gaveston, and how this sparked a constitutional crisis that he never recovered from.

The playwright never says outright that the two men are lovers, but the queer subtext is hardly subtle. In one scene, after he is reunited with his favourite, Edward beseeches him to "kiss not my hand [but] embrace me, Gaveston, as I do thee". In another, Isabella bemoans the fact "the king regards me not, but [instead] dotes upon the love of Gaveston". Only a wilfully obtuse reader of Marlowe's text could miss the insinuation that these two men are more than just friends.

Ever since it was written, Marlowe's play has helped to cement the real-life Edward's debatable but not entirely misleading reputation as a "gay king". To put it simply, we can never know for certain whether Edward II had a romantic and/or sexual relationship with any of his male favourites. But when it was first performed in 1592, it paved the way for the monarch's queerness to be openly discussed by historians. "The earliest text we have accusing Edward of some kind of sexual transgression was written around the time Gaveston was murdered [in 1312]," historian Kit Heyam, author of The Reputation of Edward II, 1305-1697, tells the BBC. "It says that at the beginning of Edward's reign, there was 'much lechery habitually practised'."

In the parlance of the time, "lechery" was used to describe any kind of "sinful" sexual behaviour, according to the mores of the Catholic Church, which held religious authority in England at the time. "The text seems to be suggesting that this behaviour will stop now that Gaveston's dead, but it stops short of saying that the sexual transgression was actually between Gaveston and the king," Heyam says. In the centuries after Edward II's death, it became less risky for writers to insinuate that Edward II may have been sexually transgressive, but the invention of the printing press in the 15th Century cranked up the innuendo. "Writers would sensationalise their texts to make them more commercially appealing, so they started saying that Edward II was definitely sexually transgressive, and it was definitely the fault of his male favourites," Heyam says. "But Marlowe was the first person to join the dots, and say that Edward II was actually sleeping with them."

The actor and RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans, who portrays Edward II in the new production, believes that Marlowe's play still feels "radical" in 2025. His interest in reviving it was piqued by director Daniel Raggett, who posed a "provocative", hypothetical question that underlines the piece's enduring relevance: "What would happen if our current........

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