King edward iii, p.6
King Edward III, page 6
Painter
William Painter included the story of King Edward III and the Countess of Salisbury in his English story collection, The Palace of Pleasure (1566, 1575), in a substantially reduced and modified version of Matteo Bandello’s telling of it in his Novelle (Lucca, 1554). Painter’s cautionary preface reminds his readers that his version departs in many ways from the historical record, notably in making Edward a widower and thus allowing for marriage as the eventual outcome (Melchiori, 36–7). It is unquestionable that Edward III depends on Painter (first cited as a source in Capell’s Prolusions). The early stages of Sc. 2 (1–166), though following Froissart’s brief account of the siege of the Countess’s castle, incorporate from Painter the Earl of Warwick as the Countess’s father. From 167 and the first speech of Lodwick (the counterpart to Painter’s ‘Secretary’, who also acts as go-between), Painter informs the text. Edward’s and Lodwick’s inconclusive effort to write a love poem has its analogy in Edward’s love letter in Painter. The first solitary encounter between the King and the Countess, 360–442, appears in a skeletal form in Froissart but its language also reveals some consultation of Painter (see LNn. on 2.360–2, 363–5, 372–4, 433–6, 437–40, comparing Froissart and Painter). The rest of Sc. 2 and Sc. 3 have only Painter as their major source.
Painter supplies the main phases of the action in a series of confrontations. Sc. 2 stages three of these between Edward and the Countess (360–442), Edward and Warwick (459–512), and Warwick and his daughter (533–625). The exploitation of Painter’s narrative enables these three characters to be presented at moments of critical moral perplexity and cross-purpose. The King’s wilful shedding of restraint in the exercise of his power (443–58), the predicament of Warwick in having unwittingly sworn to follow Edward’s orders to act as pander to his daughter (513–34) and the consternation of the Countess at her father’s apparent defection from the moral values he has taught her (578–95) bring each in turn to extremes of emotion in the course of Sc. 2. Sc. 3 moves from Edward’s self-absorption, revealed to his peers (as in Painter), to the final climactic confrontation between him and the resolute Countess, who now begs for death rather than dishonour (3.118–96). Painter’s Countess plucks ‘a sharpe knife, which she had vnder her kirtle’ (sig. 3V1r), and threatens suicide. In Edward III she also threatens to kill herself with a ‘sharp-pointed knife’ (182), but this is only one of two knives, and the other is given to Edward so that he may follow suit in a double suicide. The effect is to raise the stakes, heightening the dramatic impact and engaging the audience in a way unequalled elsewhere in the play, which explains why the ‘Countess scenes’ have been seen as the main source for the success of Edward III (see Appendix 1). The impossibility of adopting Painter’s resolution of the crisis through marriage (as both the play’s characters are married and neither is widowed) accommodates the primacy of the military action, by allowing Edward to come to his senses and return to the serious business of war.
Theatrical context
In adapting its action from chronicle narrative Edward III was influenced by a number of earlier historical plays. Closest in theme, perhaps, to Edward III, and boasting a title that could equally fit it, is the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry V (a Queen’s Men’s play, written c. 1587–8; printed 1598).41 It survives only in a reduced and garbled state. Shakespeare’s Henry V is generally agreed to be indebted to it: its influence on Edward III is also plausible. It includes a siege (Harfleur) and a pitched battle (Agincourt) and embassies by three heralds. It could at least have served as a model for a play concerning a king and his son, who became a hero of the wars in France.
The famous victories of a celebrated hero are also at the centre of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the structural and stylistic influence of which is everywhere in the serious drama of the late 1580s and early 1590s. Edward III did not escape. The vindictive violence of King Edward after his imagined loss of his son (18.164–75) is a speech clearly modelled on Tamburlaine’s lament for Zenocrate (2Tam, 3.2); and despite the chain of bloody battles around which both plays revolve, Marlowe’s example contributed to Edward III the scrupulous avoidance of onstage fighting. However, where the second part of Tamburlaine allows for Tamburlaine himself to come under the shadow of the final limit to his power, the inevitability of death, Edward III closes on supreme triumph – shadowed only by historical hindsight.
More significant influence is apparent from Marlowe’s final two plays, whose historical subjects impinge directly on the matter of Edward III. The last speaker in his Edward II is the young Edward III, newly established on his throne by the overthrow of his mother, Queen Isabel, and her lover, Mortimer. The romanticized history of Edward III shrinks in comparison with the raw power of Edward II, and its agenda is of reassurance, not challenge. The continuity of action from Edward II in Edward III appears to be confined to its opening scene, until it is recognized that a principle of contrast could take the interrelation of the two plays much further. Edward II ends his play in his coffin, humiliated and murdered. Among the causes of his downfall is his addiction to the company of male favourites, the sexual nature of his attachment implied both by his Queen (cf., e.g., E2, 1.2.49–54, 1.4.150–1) and, horrifically, by the notorious manner of his murder, hinted at rather than fully staged in the surviving text. Other humiliations include his defeat by the Scots under Robert Bruce, father of King David II, at Bannockburn; the uprising of his nobles and murder of his favourite, Gaveston; the reliance of his rebellious subject Mortimer on aid from France and Flanders; the infidelity of his Queen, Isabel; and the temporary defection of his brother, the Earl of Kent. The contrast could hardly be more pointed. The humiliation in Edward III is of the kings of France and Scotland, both onstage as Edward’s prisoners at the end of the play, after their routs at Poitiers and Neville’s Cross – King David captured by a mere commoner. Edward III is heterosexual – to a fault – but his name and fame are defended, in the face of his unruly passions of lust and vindictiveness, by two loyal ladies, the Countess of Salisbury and Queen Philippa. His mother’s former delinquencies are forgotten, as is her survival well into her son’s reign, so that Isabel signifies only as the source of Edward’s lineal claim to the French throne. His nobles too display total solidarity in their loyalty, a trio of positive voices from which only Audley emerges as a character of any individuality, in the role of Prince Edward’s venerable tutor in military virtue and stoic philosophy (contrasting with the corrupting influence on Edward II of Baldock). Only King John of France suffers from the disloyalty and defection of a former supporter, Robert of Artois.
Marlowe’s other play of 1592–3, The Massacre at Paris, is linked through its political rather than tragic agenda to Edward III, whose first scene starts with a clumsy exposition to King Edward of what he already knows. Spectators familiar with The Massacre must soon have recognized in the story of the succession of the house of Valois in 1327 the mirror image of the extinction of the same house in 1589, when the death of a third childless brother precipitated a dynastic struggle. This time the winner would be Henry of Navarre, France’s great king Henry IV, whose fortunes and whose rise to the title of King Marlowe’s play dramatizes.
The use of multiple sources, the radical reshaping of history and the incorporation of extraneous episodes, historical or fictional, are techniques also familiar in the three parts of Henry VI. Part 1 similarly takes its subject from the Hundred Years War. Edward III might have been planned as the counterpart of 1 Henry VI in a diptych of English defeat and victory.42 But where 1 Henry VI ends with forebodings of the coming civil war in England, Edward III (like Ocland, ‘heroical and of good instruction’) concludes with a prophecy of future English conquest and victory, against all comers – with Spain and Turkey named as examples (18.233). On the common assumption that Henslowe’s play ‘harey the vj’ is 1 Henry VI, its great success in the spring of 1592 was celebrated by Thomas Nashe in Piers Penniless in the autumn of that year (Nashe, 1.212–13, and see p. 85).
1 Henry VI shares many parallels of incident and character with Edward III: ‘Each play incorporates an important episode concerning a (fictitious) Countess; each dramatizes siege warfare; each features a heroic boy warrior … Both plays show awareness of the current war in France’ (Proudfoot, ‘Wars’, 94). It stages the disastrous end of the war, bringing within its action the deaths of Lord Talbot and his son John as a final and tragic event signifying England’s loss of its French territories. The English siege of Orléans is raised, by a woman warrior, Joan of Arc, while two other women, the fictional Countess of Auvergne and Margaret, daughter of Regnier, King of Naples, conspire against English arms and royalty. The whole disaster stems from the early death of Henry V and the succession of his son in infancy as Henry VI, which provokes faction among the English nobility and military commanders. It introduces a ‘fictitious capture and retaking of Rouen’, enhancing the play’s topicality ‘between August, 1591 and April, 1592’ (Bullough, 3.25). It freely adapts chronology, most apparently in drawing the defeat and death of Talbot in 1453 into an action that ended some twenty years earlier.
In 2 Henry VI, an even more radical anachronism draws on accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in the staging of Cade’s rebellion (itself the subject of The Life and Death of Jack Straw (1594)), while the important role of York’s three sons in Part 3 motivates their introduction late in Part 2. Prophecies control audience expectations (a feature of all three parts of Henry VI and Richard III), as they do in Edward III (see 5.38–43 and 11.68–73). In 3 Henry VI, the clearest signs of manipulation of chronicle narrative are the visible symmetries of action and character that reflect the fluctuations of civil war and shape King Henry and Richard of Gloucester as the antagonists whose final encounter draws the play to its conclusion with the murder of Henry by Richard in the Tower after the Yorkist victory at Tewkesbury.
These are among the respects in which Edward III can be seen as growing from the same soil as Shakespeare’s earliest histories. The first to point out the affinity, perhaps specifically with 1 Henry VI, was Richard Farmer, in 1767: ‘I have no doubt but Henry the sixth had the same Author with Edward the third, which hath been recovered to the world in Mr. Capell’s Prolusions’ (Farmer, 199).
Although Edward III shows affinities with all three parts of Henry VI (and also with Richard III: see pp. 75–6), it is as notable for contrast. Where they build a sequence, it stands alone. Where they engage with the dynastic disputes of the mid-fifteenth century, it stages its king, not as the founder of dynasties, but still as a young man, at the top of his military career and reaching his moment of greatest influence over the destinies of nations.
AN APPROACH TO AUTHORSHIP
This section of the introduction aims to demonstrate the collaborative authorship of Edward III on the evidence of metrical and phrasal analysis, to present a range of indicators of Shakespeare’s participation in it and to introduce briefly the main other claimants, but without attempting to draw purportedly conclusive lines of demarcation between sharply defined areas of the text. It does not engage with controversy about the relative value and reliability of different ‘non-traditional’ methods of authorship attribution, if only because they show no signs of producing agreed results. In 2008 Patrick Juola, a prominent theorist, wrote that ‘There are too many mediocre solutions, and not enough that are both good and principled’.43
The attempt to determine who wrote Edward III presents a stiff challenge, as the text itself – all that we have – is simultaneously the best and the worst of evidence: the best in that it bears in every line the traces of the mind and hand of its single or multiple author/s, and is – at least in parts – a play of some theatrical power and literary distinction; the worst in that it can be called to testify only in a series of hypothetical cases constructed by successive generations of interested parties, scholars prominent among them. The long history of controversy about the authorship of Edward III, which comprises a large part of all publication relating to it, is impossible to scrutinize within the limits of a single edition, but can be surveyed in several published summaries.44
One of the aims of the commentary notes in this edition is to demonstrate the kinds of verbal connection that link Edward III with the surviving minority of plays of its time (primarily the years 1585–95, but extending to 1616, when Shakespeare died). The significance of such information is not self-evident, and interpretation is further complicated by two unfortunate circumstances. The first is that, of the professional playwrights who are likeliest candidates for its authorship, most, apart from Shakespeare, either died between 1592 and 1596 (Robert Greene in September 1592, Marlowe in May 1593, Kyd in 1594, Peele in 1596) or moved away from the playhouses and playwriting (Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe), with the result that, unlike Shakespeare, they left no extensive canon of dramatic works later in date than 1593–4 with which we might compare Edward III. The second is that the printing of plays in London became usual only after 1593 and that only two of the playwrights of the early 1590s were published in early collected editions which established canons, Shakespeare in 1623 and John Lyly in 1636. Among the surviving printed plays of the other writers, not all even bear the names of their authors. Such celebrated plays as Tamburlaine or The Spanish Tragedy were printed anonymously, the attribution of the former to Marlowe and the latter to Kyd depending on fortuitous evidence, while, despite continuing attempts to attach it to Kyd or (in part) Shakespeare, so remarkable a play as The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham in Kent (1592) remains resolutely anonymous.45
Nonetheless, two broad conclusions seem inescapable: the language of Edward III is firmly located within the stylistic norms of professional playwriting between 1587 and 1595; and its verbal links with the canonical works of Shakespeare, in their extent and variety, amply demonstrate his intimacy with and depth of knowledge of the play. As Kenneth Muir proposed, in what remains the most engaging and readable introduction to the play and its problems,
If Shakespeare had no hand in the play he was at least intimately acquainted with it, more intimately than with any known Elizabethan play. One theory which would cover all the facts … is that Shakespeare, as in Pericles, was hastily revising a play by another dramatist, certain scenes being entirely rewritten, and the remainder being left with comparatively few alterations.
(Shakespeare as Collaborator (1960), 30)
The case for collaboration:
metrical and phrasal analysis
Feminine endings
Among arguments for division of authorship, much has been made of various contrasts between Scs 2, 3 and 12 and the rest of the play. A difference frequently cited is the variable incidence of ‘feminine endings’, verse lines ending with an unstressed eleventh syllable.46
In representing the metrical facts and their reduction to percentages in Table 1, the radical difference in length of the scenes of Edward III, ranging from 10 lines to 625, needs to be allowed for. In order to bring them nearer some kind of parity, the shortest scenes (fewer than 40 lines), 7, 14, 15 and 16, are listed both separately and as two groups, relating to the battles of Crécy (7–8) and Poitiers (14–16), respectively. At the other extreme, what is printed in this edition as the very long Sc. 2 is subdivided in Table 1, lines 1–166 (Capell’s Act 1, Sc. 2) becoming 2a, with the rest divided at the first entry of the Countess, giving lines 167–349, the scene between Lodwick and the King, as 2b, and lines 350–625, the scenes involving the King, the Countess and Warwick, as 2c. In computing the incidence of feminine endings, some words which in final position can be scanned either as monosyllabic or disyllabic – flower, heaven, hour, fire, ire and spirit, to which may be added a few more longer words ending in -ire, e.g., desire, require – are omitted from the count. A minority of the feminine endings takes the form of unstressed monosyllables, described here, following the precedent of MacDonald P. Jackson, as ‘monosyllabic’ feminine endings.47 These are totalled in a separate column in Table 1. Table 1 is arranged in descending order of percentage incidence of minimum counts of feminine endings.
This table does not demarcate two clearly separate areas of text such as might be attributable to two collaborating authors with differing metrical habits and reflexes. Rather it offers three areas, defined by variation in the incidence and character of their feminine endings.
At the bottom of the percentage scale stand eight scenes – 1, 4–8, 17, 18 – linked with each other not only by metre but by the fact that all derive from the chronicle narrative of Edward III’s wars in France. These scenes are based primarily on Froissart. Equally clear at the top of the scale are the scenes conventionally associated with Shakespeare, 2c and 3, which bring the episode of the King’s pursuit of the Countess of Salisbury to its climax, standing very high; Sc. 12, Prince Edward on the morning before Poitiers, lies not far behind. Scs 2c and 3 are the scenes that depend most heavily on Painter’s version of the Countess episode (although it also provides some material for Sc. 2b, where Lodwick makes his first appearance, and for the introduction of the Earl of Warwick into Scs 1 and 2a).
The surprises come in the middle of the table. Discounting the short Sc. 14, which slips easily into the top section if combined with Scs 15 and 16 as a single scene of the battle of Poitiers, there remain the first two sections of Sc. 2, which cover the start of the action at Roxborough Castle, up to the point of the first private entry of the Countess to the King; three quasi-historical scenes (9, 11 and 13) relating to Brittany and to the build-up to the battle of Poitiers, all three of which contain sections devoted to the fictional activities of the Earl of Salisbury (9.13–43, 11.1–56, 13.56–126); and Sc. 10, which sets up the action of Sc. 18 by initiating the siege of Calais and reporting the capture of David II at Neville’s Cross. On the evidence of the table, Scs 2a and 2b belong in the same section as 9, 11 and 13, the three scenes that cover the Earl of Salisbury’s quest for and use of a passport to pass through French territories en route from Brittany to Calais (all, that is to say, except 2b, include the two episodic stories unique to Froissart, Chs 76 and 135). The incidence of feminine endings in these scenes, between 6.3% and 8.24%, differentiates them from the top group, while the presence in each of at least one ‘monosyllabic’ feminine ending sets them apart from all scenes below them in the table.
