Thomas Nashe’s eulogy of 1 Henry VI in his Piers Penniless (1592) is well known as an early allusion to Shakespeare. Its tone and purport must, however, be modified by the recent proposition that Nashe himself wrote the first act of that play, to which Shakespeare may even have contributed no more than three scenes in the role of reviser (see Taylor). If the attribution is correct, it is to Nashe that we owe ‘Shakespeare’s’ sole explicit mention of Froissart (1H6 1.2.29–34; see p. 38). Alençon’s speech does more than allude to Froissart: it refers directly to the French campaigns of Edward III.

  Whether or not he wrote Alençon’s speech, Nashe is alone among the dramatists considered to give ample evidence of acquaintance with Froissart, whom he names several times. In Have with you to Saffron-Walden (1596), he insults Gabriel Harvey in these terms: ‘I haue prouided harping yrons to catch this great Whale; and this Gobin a grace ap Hannikin by Gods grace shall be met and combatted’ (Nashe, 3.31, 24–6). R.B. McKerrow’s note (Nashe, 5.126, n. 3) finds the form of the name ‘Gobin a grace’ likely to derive from Froissart in Berners’s version. Nashe’s knowledge, from Froissart, of a minor character in Edward III Sc. 6 brings him closer to the play. Lenten Stuff (Nashe, 3.187) tells an anecdote of Sir Walter Manny (the original of Salisbury in the passport episode of Edward III), in whom Nashe has an interest on account of the Kentish family of Mannys. McKerrow traces Manny’s vow to be first onshore in the invasion of France to Froissart, Book 1, Ch. 36, and the wearing of eye-patches in imitation of him to Ch. 28 (Nashe, 4.400).

  In February 1593 Nashe would appear to have visited the antiquary Robert Cotton (later Sir Robert), who owned one of the outstanding libraries of the period, at his house at Conington, Cambridgeshire (to which house he alludes in a pamphlet he apparently drafted while he was Cotton’s guest there, The Terrors of the Night (printed 1594; see Nicholl, 146–8)). Despite Cotton’s focus on manuscripts in cataloguing his library, it is more than likely that he owned a copy of Berners’s Froissart.76 That whoever planned Edward III must have had access to this book leaves open the questions of who might have done so, where and when. Circumstantial hints that Nashe could have done so in the spring of 1593 have therefore an intrinsic interest, and would be congruous with a view of Edward III that entailed hasty composition in theatrically uncomfortable conditions. The year 1593 was not a good one for Nashe. At the end of May Marlowe was murdered and by the autumn his own fortunes were at a low ebb in London:

  The death of his friends – Greene and Watson the previous autumn, and now Marlowe – press in on him, and behind them the relentless horror of the plague … With Christs Teares completed, he published no new work for three years … All in all, we can say that in summer 1593 Thomas Nashe hit bottom.

  (Nicholl, 168–70)

  Though Nashe was known in the 1590s as a playwright, his sole surviving play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, is of a peculiar kind, an allegorical show in mixed verse and prose designed for private performance before Archbishop Whitgift in October 1592 at his palace at Croydon. For statistical purposes, that is to say, Nashe offers little dramatic text and less than a whole play’s worth of verse. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one current survey of Elizabethan dramatic authorship, the Shakespeare Clinic at Claremont College, California, places Nashe very low in the list of likely authors of Edward III. This compels investigators to lay emphasis on what phraseology can be found in his prose publications to link him with an unattributed play. Marcus Dahl, researching phrasal (n-gram) links between Edward III and the works of playwrights of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods,77 scanned several of Nashe’s texts. Among these were his sole play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, with which he found seven links; Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (completed and sold by 8 September 1593), twenty-four links; The Unfortunate Traveller (completed by 7 June 1593), thirteen links; and the much shorter The Terrors of the Night (drafted in February 1593, amplified in February–March 1594), four links.78

  But co-authors of a play were not always or only writers of its dialogue; there was also the task of converting the chosen subject-matter into the tight form of a dramatic ‘plot’. If Nashe can be imagined searching Froissart in Robert Cotton’s library for material for a play about Edward III, he can also be credited with the discernment to see how the story of Sir Walter de Manny’s safe-conduct from Aiguillon to the north of France during the siege of Calais (Froissart, Ch. 135) could provide a counterpoise to the story of Edward and the Countess of Salisbury. Were Nashe to be further credited with a part in the writing, he would fit the role of the original creator of the Countess and passport episodes, later to be revised by Shakespeare, in the first instance radically. It will be apparent that the attempt to identify Nashe as a putative partner in writing Edward III is wholly conjectural, anchored to the few known facts of his familiarity with Froissart and perhaps by phrasal links with the verbal text of Edward III. If this hypothesis has any interest, then it may be in confronting the question how the selection of material from Froissart for Edward III came to be as it is and not otherwise. The fact that it is purely speculative may serve to illustrate the tantalizing gap that still yawns between the playtext that has survived and the attempt to locate it among what little is known of the writers and players who brought it into being.

  A conclusion in which nothing is concluded

  The authorship of Edward III remains speculative. External documentary evidence is still lacking. Some advance in understanding has been made by the analysis of the play in its earliest surviving form, and by theatrical experience of it, and conjecture can tell a story or stories compatible with that understanding. The circumstantial case for Shakespeare has sufficient dimensions to be persuasive, especially the relation of Edward III to Shakespeare’s early non-dramatic and dramatic writings. This places Shakespeare’s participation in the latter part of 1593 or the early part of 1594. His agenda, as reviser, would appear to have been to supply extra matter, in the form principally of the King’s attempted seduction of the Countess of Salisbury, and to rescue a derelict of the years of closure of the theatres and to revamp it for the prospective reopening in 1594.

  Less confidence can be placed in conjectures about the rest of the play. The indications of divided authorship, though emphatic, do not provide consistently firm lines of demarcation, nor of the number of other poets who might have been its other authors, among them that invisible contributor, the deviser of the plot. Its date remains hypothetical. It could be as early as 1590–2 or as late as 1593–4, though with some pointers, among them its relation to Marlowe’s Edward II and The Massacre at Paris, towards the later years. The case made by Vickers for Kyd as second author stands, and is open to endorsement, modification or rejection. That for Marlowe may seem broader, but is more abstruse, while the inclusion of Nashe is chiefly as a reminder of how much remains unknown, and probably unknowable. Any bid for Shakespeare or others, as Edward Capell stated in 1760, remains ‘conjecture only, and matter of opinion; and the reader must form one of his own, guided by what is now before him, and by what he shall meet with in perusal of the piece itself’.79

  EDWARD III IN PERFORMANCE

  Staging requirements

  Edward III contrasts strongly with other histories of the time80 in respect of its restricted cast-list and modest staging requirements. The nature of the text and the inscrutable obscurity of the quarto’s reference to performance, ‘sundrie times … about the Citie of London’, together suggest occasional staging at a variety of locations which supplied the bare minimum of an acting space, two or more entry doors and perhaps a viable window or balcony space ‘aloft’.81

  Although stipulated only at 3.0.1–3 and required for characters to meet on entering at 5.0.1–3, the use of two doors is implied by the sequence of entries and exits, as at the ends of Scs 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17. At the start of Sc. 2 and towards the end of Scs 5 and 10, the possibility of entry ‘aloft’ by the Countess and, less likely, the Third Frenchman and the French captain, offers an alternative means of negotiating the sequence of exit and entry. At 18.0.1–4, where a further door is required to represent the barred gates of besieged Calais, two groups, the King and Queen, and the six citizens of Calais, are given simultaneous entries.82 This ostensible demand for three doors is among cogent reasons for delaying the entry of the citizens, in the manner of the poor men in Sc. 10. The two entry SDs for the triumphant returns of Prince Edward from his victories at Crécy and Poitiers differ greatly. The first (8.60.1–4; see commentary nn.) is careful about the sequence of entries, with the possible implication of the flag-draped body of Bohemia being misidentified as the Prince for a brief moment before he follows it on. The later SD (18.186.1–2) is by comparison perfunctory, and incongruous with the events of Sc. 17 and the expectations set up there. The reappearance of Audley, silent and with no mention of his life-threatening injuries, and the absence of Prince Charles, accurate in terms of the chronicle narrative, are symptoms of some textual disparity between the scenes (see pp. 31, 33).

  No large stage properties are required, although if available a royal throne or ‘state’ might be used in Sc. 1, the only peacetime scene set at court, and an ‘arbour’ in Sc. 2 (see 2.227n.), as well as some form of seating, on stools or a bench, there and at 4.114–31. Business defined by SDs includes the knighting of Prince Edward at 8.89–91, with the bloody sword with which he has killed the King of Bohemia, but other investitures, the promotion of Artois to the Earldom of Richmond (1.4) and the knighting of Copeland (18.94), are clearly implied. Weapons are required as the necessary properties of a military action, most frequently swords (1.108 SD, 8.88 SD), but also the coat-armour, helmet, shield and lance with which the Prince of Wales is formally armed (6.178.1–2). The lance returns, broken, at 8.60.1–2, signifying the Prince’s success in battle. Of the other properties, the most conspicuous are crowns (most explicitly at 18.192–6, but presumably worn by kings throughout) and a coronet (9.0.1, 18.100). The absence of the crown of Scotland from Sc. 18 is an omission as conspicuous as the awkward fact that King David, though given an entry SD, neither speaks nor is addressed in the dialogue (see p. 21). Smaller hand-properties are food and drink (4.114–16), purses for rewards, pen and ink, and books and documents.

  SDs demanding sound effects are conspicuous, not only for the spectacular ‘battle heard afar off’ and ‘Shot’ at 4.116 and 122 (cf. the sea fight conveyed by offstage sounds in both quarto and folio texts of 2H6 4.1.0.1), or the even more exotic ‘A clamour of ravens’ (13.18), but for successive demands for a ‘horn’ announcing a messenger (1.50), or a ‘Drum’ (3.0.3) or ‘trumpets’ (17.17.1), also implied in SDs for the military signals ‘Alarum’, 7.0.1, 14.0.1 and 15.0.1, or ‘Retreat’, 4.131, 8.4, 56 and 17.0.3 and once for the royal ‘flourish’, to herald in the victorious Prince Edward at 18.175.1. That the formal demand for trumpets and drums is incomplete can be deduced from the dialogue. Where explicit reference is made to hearing or commanding offstage drums (3.46, 4.38, 5.74) or trumpets (3.21, 8.56, 13.54, 18.186), editorial SDs may safely supplement those of Q. Elsewhere it is unclear whether or not flourishes for the entry or exit of royalty should be automatically supplied, always a question in plays where kings, queens and princes play major roles. Of the sound effects, only the shot may suggest performance in a permanent playhouse, the others depending on portable resources.

  Appendix 2 offers a possible minimum casting of Edward III of thirteen men and two boys, a size of company recognizably suited to several plays of the early 1590s, among them the repertoire of Pembroke’s Men (see Proudfoot, Reign, 159–60).83 With 745 lines, the role of King Edward more than doubles the length of Prince Edward’s with 278 or King John’s with 272. After that only the Countess of Salisbury has more than two hundred (214), the rest falling beneath Warwick’s 112. All these figures, except for King John and to a lesser extent Prince Edward, owe the size of their roles to the Countess episode, while the Countess does not appear outside these scenes and Warwick only does so in Sc. 1, unannounced. These facts add to the evidence for that episode as having grown beyond its proportionate place in the action. The role of King Edward is disproportionately large in the first of the play’s three movements (Scs 1–3), shrinking progressively through the second and third (Scs 4–8 and 9–18). The King plays a part whose two aspects, amatory and military, do not in all respects cohere. The role has thus become more problematic for actors in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century traditions that privilege consistency of character over local effect. Among minor roles, the longest include the speakers of the play’s conspicuous narrative ‘messengers’ speeches’, Salisbury (92 lines) and the Mariner (66 lines) at the top of the list. Audley (90 lines) and Charles (88 lines) stand out from the other English and French attendant lords. The remaining roles have fewer than sixty lines each, Artois first (57 lines), then Lodwick (46), while Derby, though the senior English lord, speaks less than his peers with 44 lines (although he may have lost 1.98–100 to Warwick: see p. 62). The distinction between major and subsidiary roles is sharp. Only eight characters appear throughout: King Edward, Prince Edward, Derby, Audley and Artois from Scs 1 to 18, King John and his two sons from Scs 4 to 18. One or more of them appears in every scene except Scs 5 and 9. For a play about war, Edward III is unusually focused on the leaders rather than the led. Star-casting of King Edward is usual, but the role has shrunk by the end to a prominence second to his son (allowing, as Rintoul, 80, notes, twenty-five minutes rest in the Green Room for the King between Scs 10 and 18).

  Early performance

  Edward III (1596) is one of only two plays printed during the 1590s with reference to public performance but without naming a playhouse or playing company (Greg, 1.140). The other is A Knack to Know an Honest Man (1596; Greg, 1.139), printed by Thomas Scarlet for Cuthbert Burby as part of the same job as Edward III (see p. 115). Henslowe’s Diary records performances of Knack to Know an Honest Man by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose from 22 October 1594 to 16 April 1596 (Foakes & Rickert, 25–36, 341). No equivalent record survives of early performances of Edward III to identify what company may have performed it, in what playhouse or on what dates. The shared formula on the title-pages of Edward III and Knack to Know an Honest Man, ‘As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London’, is at the same time more specific than ‘publiquely played’ (R. Wilson, Three Ladies of London (1584)), ‘publiquely acted’ (Marlowe, Edward II (1594), Pembroke’s Men), ‘sundrie times publiquely acted’ (Fair Em (1593), Strange’s Men), ‘sundry times acted’ (The Taming of a Shrew (1594), Pembroke’s Men), or ‘As it was playde’ (Titus Andronicus (1594), Pembroke’s, Derby’s and Sussex’s Men, and Greene, Friar Bacon (1594), Queen’s Men); and more ambiguous than such other title-page formulae of the 1590s as ‘Vpon Stages in the Citie of London’ (Marlowe, Tamburlaine (1590), Admiral’s Men), ‘in the honourable Citie of London’ (The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591), Queen’s Men), ‘As it hath beene publiquely plaide in London’ (Thomas Lodge, Wounds of Civil War (1594), Admiral’s Men).84 The absence of Edward III from Henslowe’s records of the Admiral’s Men and circumstantial evidence from later dates leave a strong presumption that the play belonged to the other London company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, perhaps by inheritance from one of its predecessors, Lord Strange’s, the Earl of Derby’s or the Earl of Pembroke’s Men.

  A cryptic allusion to possible public performance at the Globe is found in a letter from John Holles, dated from Haughton in Nottinghamshire, 26 January 1619, to his son John in London.85 Urging John to regular attendance at the court of Star-chamber and other courts of law, he contrasts the learning to be acquired in those ‘playhouses’ with that to be gained from historical plays at the Globe: ‘what have we to do with the globe’, which tells tales of ‘Alexander, Augustus, Caesar, Cato and Scipio, those crowns, and Commonwealths: and sumtyms speaks of Edward the I and 3rd and Harry the 5t: we live by another rule, … and must haunt the playhouses I have before mentioned, and no other, if we shal endevor to do well.’86 The same John Holles is among those who left written records of their presence at the Globe in 1624 to see Middleton’s A Game at Chess.87 In his office as a Member of Parliament, Holles, who was an infrequent playgoer, would have been in London in 1599 and at later dates until 1612, but his references are too oblique to be cited as clear evidence for Globe performances of Edward III.

  The earliest explicit references to performance of a play about Edward III are in Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors, 1612:

  What English Prince should hee behold the true portrature of that [f]amous King Edward the third, foraging France, taking so great a King captiue in his owne country, quartering the English Lyons with the French Flower-delyce, … would not bee suddenly Inflam’d with so royall a spectacle, being made apt and fit for the like atchieuement. So of Henry the fift.

  (sig. B4r)

  Confirmation of direct reference to Edward III takes the form of Heywood’s inclusion of ‘the Countesse of Salisbury’ in a list of chaste women, offered as examples for the audience to be ‘by vs [the actors] extolled, and encouraged in their vertues’ (sig. G1v). Though published in 1612, Heywood’s defence of the theatre may have been written some years earlier, so that no Jacobean revival is implied. Possible circumstantial confirmation of the play’s presence in the repertory of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, of which Shakespeare was a leading member by the end of 1594, lies in ‘Alls Perce’, a play commissioned by Henslowe for the Admiral’s Men late in 1597. Martin Wiggins conjectures that its subject was Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III’s declining years, and that it aimed to challenge the rival company’s Edward III (see Appendix 1, pp. 394–5).