both Isabella and Mortimer are – or, at least, become – sodomites.20 Such a label may seem unlikely in the case of Isabella, the king’s legal wife and the woman who embodies the bond between England and France and thus serves to underwrite the social order that sodomy threatens, but over the course of the play she changes from being a wronged wife to being instrumental in bringing about a civil war that results in her husband’s murder and, temporarily, the concentration of royal power in the person of her lover Mortimer, who, as a noble, has no title to rule England.
