King Edward III – William Shakespeare & others, c. 1594 ★★½

Making a Case for Number 39

William Shakespeare is commonly credited with having written 38 plays, many if not most regarded as classics to this day. Why not make room for another?

The answer is an easy no if the play is not up to the standard one expects from the Bard of Avon. Much of the time this patriotism pageant unspools, the result is uneven, as more sensitive members of academia put it. But then you find yourself catching sparks of true genius and wit that, if not exclusive to Shakespeare, ring with his singular voice.

Did Shakespeare lend a hand? The evidence suggests a qualified yes.

The play opens at the dawning of the Hundred-Years’ War, an epic conflagration between England and France. The title character is being told by the French nobleman Artois that he, Edward, is the rightful king of France, “the lineal watchman of our peace” whom duty calls to claim his throne. After a French emissary arrives to haughtily demand Edward pay homage to France’s King John, Edward decides to visit the land across the Channel:

KING EDWARD

Dare he command a fealty in me?
Tell him the Crown that he usurps is mine,
And where he sets his foot, he ought to kneel.
Tis not a petty Dukedom that I claim,
But all the whole Dominions of the Realm;
Which if with grudging he refuse to yield,
I'll take away those borrowed plumes of his,
And send him naked to the wilderness. [Scene i, lines 79-86]

King Edward III ruled Great Britain from 1327-1377, a stable reign in an unstable time that saw his kingdom beset by both the Hundred-Years' War and the Black Plague. The play focuses on his early, more successful time on the throne. Image from http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/plantagenet_7.htm.

Following through on that vow is pretty much the whole plot of Edward III, except for a long adulterous interlude with a Scot-besieged noblewoman which is believed by many to be Shakespeare’s major contribution to the play. The rest concerns Edward’s easy conquest of France, an even-easier offstage conquest of the Scots, and the glorious emergence in battle of his son, Prince Edward, known to his father as Ned but fated to go down in history as the Black Prince.

The Arden Shakespeare edition I read makes a strong case for judging Shakespeare at least partially responsible for the officially uncredited Edward III. Editors Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett note commonalities in both language and themes to known Shakespeare works from the early part of his career, specifically Richard III (in both cases the royal title characters address the audience about their untoward objectives) and The Two Gentlemen Of Verona (where scheming Proteus, like adulterous Edward, undergoes a sudden change of heart.)

A memorable phrase from Shakespeare’s then-unpublished Sonnet 94, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” appears in Scene ii of Edward III. Other Shakespearean echoes also occur in the play.

Proudfoot and Bennett posit the play was written initially by someone else, and later revised by Shakespeare. Specifically Scenes ii and iii, involving Edward’s attempted seduction of the Countess of Salisbury, are advanced as entirely Shakespearean inventions, as the business of these two scenes, how Edward tries unsuccessfully but persistently to pressure the married Countess for sex, is scarcely referenced in the rest of the play, and rely upon different source materials.

One possible collaborator identified by Proudfoot and Bennett is Thomas Nashe, above, a poet often brought up as a possible co-author in other Shakespeare plays. Other co-writer candidates they mention, George Peele, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe, have the disadvantage of all being dead by 1594. Image from http://www.greatthoughtstreasury.com/author/thomas-nashe.

“On the evidence, a revision of Edward III in 1593-4 was undertaken that entailed the replacement and expansion…of a lost earlier version of the Countess episode,” Proudfoot and Bennett explain. “It seems highly plausible that the reviser was Shakespeare.”

Proudfoot and Bennett also suggest Shakespeare’s hand in Scene xii, where young Ned the Black Prince bravely sallies forth against the legions of France. “Death’s name is much more mighty than his deeds,” he declares [xii, l.40]. Here the language as well as the action depicted soars to the level of Shakespeare’s most up-tempo history play, Henry V:

AUDLEY

To die is all as common as to live:

The one in choice the other holds in chase;

For, from the instant we begin to live,

We do pursue and hunt the time to die:

First bud we, then we blow, and after seed,

Then, presently, we fall; and, as a shade

Follows the body, so we follow death.

If, then, we hunt for death, why do we fear it? [xii, l.134-141]

Rhiannon Lattimer, left, as Ned the Black Prince, with Ben Forer as King Edward III in a 2016 New Jersey production of the play by the Hudson Shakespeare Company. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_III_(play).

I found Proudfoot and Bennett’s claim convincing, even more so after reading Edward III for myself. While I’m no Shakespeare scholar, merely a buff, I felt the Bard’s presence in scenes ii and iii especially, and his absence just about everywhere else.

Edward III is not a great play. It holds together alright, but it reads like what it no doubt was at the time, a tubthumping exercise aimed at British popular appeal in a period when the country’s most recent activities involving France had not got nearly so well (they had been evicted from their last French holding in Calais a generation before.)

The story itself is fairly rudimentary; its execution perfunctory. Shakespeare’s role may have been to pump up the drama on behalf of a specific production of the play. You see the patches, anyway. Scenes ii and iii, involving Edward and the Countess, not only exist in near-complete isolation to the rest of the play, but in terms of length take up nearly a third of the play’s total lines. It makes for an odd interlude of lust in a play concerned mostly with political will to power.

Little performed for centuries, Edward III has seen a modern revival in recent years. Above, Drew Reeves played Edward in a 2017 production at the Shakespeare Tavern Playhouse in Atlanta, Georgia. Image from http://nique.net/entertainment/2017/09/29/unattributed-play-edward-explores-history/.

Ah, but perhaps there is some thematic link. Proudfoot and Bennett note the idea of a king attempting to enforce his rank to do wrong ties into the very Shakespearean notion of just rule. This idea is enforced not only by Edward’s complete (if not entirely convincing) change of heart in scene iii, but by other play elements as well.

Later, we see French King John attempt to force his son Charles to violate a pledge of safe conduct he has made to one of Edward III’s subjects. “What canst thou promise that I cannot break?” [xiii, l.81] he demands. But Charles, in a rare moment of humanity afforded to the play’s French characters, successfully convinces his father otherwise.

Another character best explains the moral limits of royal authority:

VILLIERS

In all things that uprightly he commands:

But either to persuade or threaten me,

Not to perform the covenant of my word,

Is lawless, and I need not to obey. [xi, l.31-34]

Edward III and the Countess of Salisbury, as depicted in a 1901 Albert Chevallier Tayler painting. The story of Edward's attempted seduction of her, while sourced indirectly, is fairly unique to the play. Image from http://www.artnet.com/artists/albert-chevallier-tayler/edward-iii-and-countess-of-salisbury-initiating-ZENIpKXk4l8Jxp-mzWcfRA2. 

This idea is introduced in the Countess scenes. The Countess of Salisbury is depicted as a loyal subject of Edward III, but her devotion is put to the test when Edward takes a carnal interest in her. Here, the play becomes more subtle as duty and honor become different concepts entirely; the Countess must find a way to thread the needle. She ingenuously does this by suggesting first that Edward agree to kill her husband and his wife, and, when Edward agrees, pulls out a knife and offers to kill herself to protect both of them from committing a grave sin.

KING EDWARD III

Thy opposition is beyond our Law.

COUNTESS OF SALISBURY

So is your desire: If the law

Can hinder you to execute the one,

Let it forbid you to attempt the other.

I cannot think you love me as you say,

Unless you do make good what you have sworn. [iii, l.136-145]

And that settles that. Edward sees past his lust, disavows his adulterous designs, and commits himself to war against France: “Even by that power I swear, that gives me now/The power to be ashamed of my self…” [iii, l.186-187]

Elsewhere, the play is pretty rote. We get a bit of humor involving the vicious but gormless Scots, who plot to ravish the Countess until Edward arrives to chase them away. The Countess’s acid comments about the Scots’ “wild, uncivil, skipping gigs” and their indecipherable brogues certainly amuse, and may have been the cause for the play to have been left off Shakespeare’s First Folio. That was published in 1623, when England was ruled by the Scotsman James I.

The title page of the first known published version of King Edward III offers no hint as to the author. This was published in 1596, by which times as you can read it had already been performed "sundrie times" in London. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_III_(play). 

The extensive notes in the Arden Shakespeare edition note incidences of mixed metaphor and of repetition of sentiment that feel clumsy for one normally as focused and economical as the Bard.

There are also odd passages like one where King Edward refuses to aid Ned, beset by a large number of foemen: “…we have more sons/Than one, to comfort our declining age.” [viii, l.23-24]

Even Henry VI, Part I, a play Shakespeare wrote with collaborators, and a very flawed one, offers more in the way of incident, including actual combat scenes and a shifting flow of fortune feeding a sense of earned victory. Edward III is entirely a talking-head production of seemingly preordained triumph, with the action only described taking place between or around scenes. The only suspense we get in it involves the virtue of the Countess.

But as an exploration of political power as it was seen in the late 1500s, most specifically in the Countess scenes, Edward III has something quite positive to say, and worth our attention. It’s not a great play, but as a candidate for Number 39 in the Shakespearean canonical list of plays, it has much to recommend it.