The Raigne of King Edward the Third, commonly shortened to Edward III, is an Elizabethan play printed anonymously in 1596, and probably partly written by William Shakespeare. It began to be included in publications of the complete works of Shakespeare only in the late 1990s. Scholars who have supported this attribution include Jonathan Bate, Edward Capell, Eliot Slater, Eric Sams, Giorgio Melchiori, and Brian Vickers. The play's co-author remains the subject of debate: suggestions have included Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele.
The play contains
several gibes at Scotland and the Scottish people, which has led
some critics to think that it is the work that incited George Nicholson, Queen
Elizabeth's agent in Edinburgh, to protest against the portrayal of
Scots on the London stage in a 1598 letter to William Cecil,
Lord Burghley. This could explain why the play was not included in the First
Folio of Shakespeare's works, which was published after the Scottish
King James had succeeded to the English throne in 1603.
Synopsis
King Edward III is
informed by the Count of Artois that he, Edward, was the true heir to
the previous king of France. A French ambassador arrives to insist that Edward
do homage to the new French king for his lands in Guyenne. Edward defies
him, insisting he will invade to enforce his rights. A messenger arrives to say
that the Scots are besieging a castle in the north of England. Edward decides
to deal with this problem first. The castle is being held by the
beautiful Countess of Salisbury, the wife of the Earl of Salisbury.
As Edward's army arrives, the rampaging Scots flee. Edward
immediately falls for the Countess, and proceeds to woo her for himself. She
rebuffs him, but he persists. In an attempted bluff, the Countess vows to take
the life of her husband if Edward will take the life of his wife. However, when
she sees that Edward finds the plan morally acceptable, she ultimately
threatens to take her own life if he does not stop his pursuit. Finally, Edward
expresses great shame, admits his fault and acquiesces. He dedicates himself to
use his energies to pursue his rights and duties as king.
In the second part of
the play, in several scenes reminiscent of Henry V, Edward joins
his army in France, fighting a war to claim the French throne. He and the
French king exchange arguments for their claims before the Battle of Crécy.
King Edward's son, Edward, the Black Prince, is knighted and sent into battle.
The king refuses to send help to his son when it appears that the young man's
life is in danger. Prince Edward proves himself in battle after defeating the
king of Bohemia. The English win the battle and the French flee to Poitiers.
Edward sends the prince to pursue them, while he besieges Calais.
In Poitiers the prince
finds himself outnumbered and apparently surrounded. The play switches between
the French and English camps, where the apparent hopelessness of the English
campaign is contrasted with the arrogance of the French. Prince Edward broods
on the morality of war before achieving victory in the Battle of Poitiers against
seemingly insurmountable odds. He captures the French king.
In Calais the citizens
realise they will have to surrender to King Edward. Edward demands that six of
the leading citizens be sent out to face punishment. Edward's wife, Queen
Philippa, arrives and persuades him to pardon them. Sir John Copland brings
Edward the king of the Scots, captured in battle, and a messenger informs
Edward that the English have secured Brittany. However, the successes are
undercut when news arrives that Prince Edward was facing certain defeat at
Poitiers. King Edward declares he will take revenge. Prince Edward arrives with
news of his victory, bringing with him the captured French king. The English
enter Calais in triumph.
Authorship
Edward III has only been accepted into the canon of plays
written by Shakespeare since the 1990s. In
1596, it was published anonymously, which was common practice in the 1590s (the
first Quarto editions of Titus Andronicus and Richard
III also appeared anonymously). Additionally, Elizabethan theatre
often paid professional writers of the time to perform minor additions and
emendations to problematic or overly brief scripts (the additions to the
popular but brief Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's own
additions on the unperformed Sir Thomas More being some of the
best known). No holographic manuscript of Edward III is
extant.
The principal arguments
against Shakespeare's authorship are its non-inclusion in the First
Folio of Shakespeare's plays in 1623 and being unmentioned in Francis
Meres's Palladis Tamia (1598), a work that lists many (but not
all) of Shakespeare's early plays. Some critics view the play as not up to the
quality of Shakespeare's ability, and they attribute passages resembling his
style to imitation or plagiarism. Despite
this, many critics have seen some passages as having an authentic Shakespearean
ring. In 1760, noted Shakespearean editor Edward Capell included the
play in his Prolusions; or, Select Pieces of Ancient Poetry, Compil'd
with great Care from their several Originals, and Offer'd to the Publicke as
Specimens of the Integrity that should be Found in the Editions of worthy
Authors, and concluded that it had been written by Shakespeare. However,
Capell's conclusion was, at the time, only supported by mostly German scholars.
In recent years,
professional Shakespeare scholars have increasingly reviewed the work with a
new eye, and have concluded that some passages are as sophisticated as any of
Shakespeare's early histories, especially King John and
the Henry VI plays. In addition, passages in the play are
direct quotes from Shakespeare's sonnets, most notably the line
"lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds" (sonnet 94) and the
phrase "scarlet ornaments", used in sonnet 142.
Stylistic analysis
has also produced evidence that at least some scenes were written by
Shakespeare. In the Textual
Companion to the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, Gary
Taylor states that "of all the non-canonical plays, Edward
III has the strongest claim to inclusion in the Complete Works" (the
play was subsequently edited by William Montgomery and included in the second
edition of the Oxford Complete Works, 2005). The first major
publishing house to produce an edition of the play was Yale University Press,
in 1996; Cambridge University Press published an edition two years
later as part of its New Cambridge Shakespeare series. Since then, an
edition of the Riverside Shakespeare has included the play, as has
the Arden Shakespeare in its Third Series (2017). The Oxford Shakespeare series has
published an edition.
Giorgio Melchiori,
editor of the New Cambridge edition, asserts that the play's disappearance from
the canon is probably due to a 1598 protest at the play's portrayal of the
Scottish. According to Melchiori, scholars have often assumed that this play,
the title of which was not stated in the letter of 15 April 1598 from George
Nicolson (Elizabeth I's Edinburgh agent) to Lord Burghley noting
the public unrest, was a comedy (one that does not survive), but the play's
portrayal of Scots is so virulent that it is likely that the play was
banned—officially or unofficially—and left forgotten by Heminges and Condell.
The events and monarchs
in the play would, along with the two history tetralogies1 and Henry
VIII, extend Shakespeare's chronicle to include all the monarchs from Edward
III to Shakespeare's near-contemporary Henry VIII. Some scholars,
notably Eric Sams, have argued that the play is entirely by
Shakespeare, but today, scholarly opinion is divided, with many researchers
asserting that the play is an early collaborative work, of which Shakespeare
wrote only a few scenes.
In 2009, Brian
Vickers published the results of a computer analysis using a program
designed to detect plagiarism, which suggests that 40% of the play was written
by Shakespeare with the other scenes written by Thomas Kyd (1558–1594). John Jowett and Richard Proudfoot and Nicola
Bennett, while not rejecting the possibility of Kyd's authorship, find that the
evidence is insufficient. Citing Jowett's Shakespeare and the Text Proudfoot
and Bennett identify multiple assumptions made in the attribution, crediting
the first three to Jowett: that Kyd's known oeuvre (consisting of
only The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and an
English translation of French playwright Robert Garnier's Cornélie)
is a sufficient body of evidence for comparison, that "rarity"
of n-gram patterns is definable and doubtlessly characteristic, and
that scenes within collaborative plays are always by one author acting alone.
Proudfoot and Bennett add to these that selection bias prejudges outcome,
making the methodology only somewhat more sophisticated than "parallel
passage" strategies of old despite the inclusion of more text in the
analysis. They cite in-progress work by Martin Mueller to digitally analyse 548
plays published between 1562 and 1662 for n-grams, but also note that some
playwrights and plays of the era are known only by their names, that anonymous
plays could be written by authors whose work is unknown to scholars of drama of
the period, and that there was a dramatic increase in the publication of plays
starting in 1593, when the practice became normalized for successful plays.
Based on Mueller's work, the top ten plays with n-gram links to Edward
III range from 6% to 4%:
- Henry VI, Part 3 (Shakespeare)
- Edward II (Marlowe)
- Henry VI, Part 1 (Shakespeare, possibly
with Thomas Nashe, Kyd, and/or Marlowe)
- Alphonsus, King of
Aragon (Robert
Greene)
- Richard III (Shakespeare)
- Tamburlaine,
Part 1 (Marlowe)
- King John (Shakespeare)
- A Knack to Know a Knave (anonymous)
- Tamburlaine, Part 2 (Marlowe)
- The Massacre at Paris (Marlowe)
This suggests to them
that genre is more significant than author.
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