Other evidence for the popularity of Edward III, Thomas Deloney’s ballad of ‘King Edward III and the Countess of Salisbury’ and the play’s full representation in John Bodenham’s Bel-vedére, 1600 (see Appendix 1, pp. 395–6), is more likely to stem from its publication in 1596 and reprint in 1599 than from performance. No evidence is known for a revival between the 1590s and the late nineteenth century (but see pp. 21, 395).

  When the play did resurface in performance it was in the truncated form of Love’s Constancy. An Episode in the play of ‘Edward the third’, William Poel’s adaptation of the episode of the King and Countess as an independent one-act play first performed in 1890 and revived in 1897 and 1911 (see Speaight, 73, 122–3, 190). Later, Poel’s playlet was revived for his centenary in 1952 (Speaight, 123). In 1961 John Barton included the scene between the King and Lodwick in a popular theatrical anthology of Shakespeare’s histories, entitled The Hollow Crown (first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on 19 March and published in 1962 as The Hollow Crown, An Entertainment by and about the Kings and Queens of England, where the much abbreviated scene occupies pp. 21–3). Excerpts from Edward III later figured in a radio series of English histories, the BBC’s twenty-six-part Vivat Rex in 1977, where the ‘third and fourth parts heavily cut selections, mainly from the countess scenes and the Crécy and Poitiers sequences’ (Proudfoot, Reign, 152).

  Performances after the 1980s

  Curiosity about Edward III, including that of theatrical companies, was aroused by the new readiness of scholarship from the 1980s onwards to accept the evidence for Shakespeare’s participation in collaborative authorship – an acceptance central to the reconfiguration of his works in the influential Oxford Shakespeare (Oxf, 257–83). A number of full modern productions of the play are on record since 1986, when it received twenty-six performances at the Globe Playhouse of the Shakespeare Society of America in Los Angeles, directed by Dick Dotterer (see Metz, 41, for an account of this successful production). Further transatlantic productions followed: in Toronto, directed by Clarissa Hurley, on 18–22 and 25–8 October 2000, at the Studio Theatre, in association with a conference on Shakespeare: Authorship and the Canon, held on 20–1 October and organized by The Graduate Centre for Study of Drama of the University of Toronto; and in New York, from 28 March to 14 April 2001, by Hope Theatre, directed by Heather Anne McAllister and Kelly McAllister (who also played King Edward) at Mint Space, when the play was advertised as ‘not the typical story of the man who would be King, but rather the King who would be a man. This is Shakespeare at his best with battles, the supernatural, lust, sacrifice, nobility and honor, and the struggle to do the right thing.’

  The first professional production in the UK was directed by Toby Robertson at Theatr Clwyd and performed, from 26 June to 25 July 1987, in repertory with a cross-cast production of Henry V. Publication of Melchiori’s edition for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1998), as well as translations into Italian, German, Japanese, Spanish, Romanian and French, ensured further professional productions of the play.88 The most notable were directed by Frank-Patrick Steckel, in his own German translation, in Cologne from 19 September 1999; by Anthony Clark for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), using a text freshly prepared from the first quarto by Roger Warren, in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 10 April to 14 September 2002, and subsequently at the Gielgud Theatre, London, from 5 December 2002 to 25 January 2003, in a repertoire of seven Elizabethan and Jacobean plays; and by Alexandru Tocilescu, using the prize-winning Romanian translation by George Volceanov, whose production of Edward III received thirty-nine performances in the Grand Auditorium of the National Theatre of Bucharest between 26 January 2008 and 23 May 2009 (subsequently touring, in a shortened version, reduced to two hours, in Bulgaria and Greece).89 The Romanian production was claimed to have been seen by more than 40,000 spectators in the course of its run, a record to set beside the 10,000 spectators of 1 Henry VI in the spring and summer of 1592 boasted of by Nashe (Nashe, 1.212; see p. 85).

  In addition, there have been several public readings of Edward III: at the Bear Garden Museum Theatre, London, on 21 February 1999, as ‘by Shakespeare and others’ (with Sam West as King Edward and Amanda Root as the Countess of Salisbury); twice, with different casts, as explorations of the play by the RSC, on 10 September 1999 at the The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon (with Malcolm Storry as King Edward), and on 9 April 2001 at the Barbican Theatre, London (with David Troughton as King Edward); and in Madrid on 5 July 2005, at the Teatro Español de Madrid, in the translation of Antonio Ballesteros; and no doubt elsewhere. On 13 April 2011, a scene from Edward III figured in the first of a series of musical and dramatic presentations under the title Shakespeare’s Kings & Westminster Abbey, in association with the RSC. This was the dialogue of King Edward III (Nicholas Asbury), a Citizen (Roger Watkins) and Queen Philippa (Hannah Barrie) in which the Queen pleads for mercy for the citizens of Calais.

  Robertson’s production at Theatr Clwyd was revived late in July 1987 in Cambridge and travelled to the classical theatre at Taormina in Sicily in August. His handling of the playtext was as bold as his decision to revive Edward III. Queen Philippa appeared with her two younger sons, Lancaster and York, ‘yet too young to fight these foreign wars’, in Sc. 1, while her retinue in Sc. 18 included the Countess of Salisbury, who, after a speech in support of the Queen’s pleas for mercy for the citizens of Calais, was later allowed a reunion with her husband. King David, brought captive to Calais, gave vent to his indignation in the idiom in which we had earlier heard the Countess mimic him to a delighted King Edward (an opportunity too good to be missed; see 2.193–201).90 The text was freely trimmed, rearranged and rewritten, especially after the interval (Scs 9–18). Two aims are clear: to produce an acting text no more than two hours long and to clarify whatever audiences might find obscure in an unfamiliar play’s action or language. Cutting reduced every scene and every long speech; reordering of sections of text and verse paraphrase of complexities smoothed all difficulties. New material was also inserted. Reasserting the King’s control at the end of the play, Robertson had him institute the Order of the Garter with his victorious son and nobles, identified as the ‘many princes more’ of 18.220, as founder members. The battle of Sluys is named, and the play is afforded the final couplet it so conspicuously lacks:

  God willing, then for England we will ship,

  On whose white cliffs and gentle swards of green

  Will step three kings, two princes, and a queen.

  In Cologne in 1999, Steckel added Edward III to a three-year Shakespeare repertoire that already included King John and Love’s Labour’s Lost, plays whose relation to each other he explored by cross-casting and design. ‘The link with King John prompted a cynical and Brechtian perspective on the politics of Edward III; the link with Love’s Labour’s Lost prompted a comical, indeed nearly farcical, vision of King Edward’s infatuation with the Countess’ (Bennett & Proudfoot, 318–19). His Brechtian approach, triggered by his objection to Proudfoot’s incidental comment that ‘Chivalry is theatrical’ (Proudfoot, Reign, 154), subverted romantic or heroic values. From a bespectacled Lorraine pacing the corridors of power as he waited for his delayed admission to the royal presence, to a King of Bohemia grotesquely wearing a small yellow diver’s helmet, and at last to the unexpected collapse of Prince Edward, reduced to a quivering wreck by post-traumatic stress disorder during his final exhortation to the youth of England, the production pursued its agenda. This agenda included the cross-casting as the King (Jochen Tovote) and the Countess (Dagmar Sachse) of the actors who also played Don Armado and Jacquenetta in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the reduction of the love-sick King to languishing on the ground before Lodwick in his tight-fitting striped robe (see Fig. 6).

  Clark’s production at Stratford in 2002 had a different theatrical context, as the company had recently staged all ten of Shakespeare’s histories, including a cycle from Richard II to Richard III. Edward III, though chronologically a prologue to the sequence, was offered instead as an afterpiece: in casting, design and direction, the production stood apart from the others. Audiences were presented with a full and unprejudiced account of the play, staged with minimum visual elaboration (a necessity in a repertory of seven plays which entailed rapid transition between performances). Neutral modern costuming, largely military, was colour-coded: the English wore red and dark blue, the French a paler blue and silver. Dress uniforms under red cloaks bearing the Garter insignia defined the English nobility.91 Artois, who entered in a blue cloak, was created Earl of Richmond and honorary Englishman simply by turning his cloak inside out to reveal its red side (an insensitive reward for a turncoat). Among the red-cloaked knights of the Garter stood Edward, Prince of Wales (Jamie Glover: see Fig. 7), whose distinctive youth and inexperience, not to mention his lack of a knighthood, were thereby disguised, blurring any sense that the play dramatizes his growth from bookish schoolboy to maturity as soldier and heir apparent. The text was uncut, leaving the puzzle of the ‘pelican’ speech – Steckel’s only cut – to be resolved (see 8.109–13nn.). It became the emblem on Bohemia’s shield, which raised invidious comparisons with Edward himself for refusing to rescue his son on the battlefield. Anachronism jarred only in Sc. 5, where the fleeing French were costumed as refugees from the German advance in 1940, and the reasons for the mimed suicide of the Third Frenchman, prematurely a member of the Resistance, remained obscure.

  6King Edward (Jochen Tovote) languishing over the Countess, directed by Frank-Patrick Steckel, Bühnen der Stadt, Cologne, 1999–2000

  7King Edward (David Rintoul) and his son, Prince Edward (Jamie Glover), directed by Anthony Clark, RSC, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2002

  Clark rejected the option of guying the Scots, and missed the potential for ironic humour in the slanging-match between the monarchs in Sc. 6 (a quality richly captured in David Troughton’s reading of the role of King Edward). Not all the laughter provoked was sympathetic. The Prince’s offer of money to the wounded Audley regularly got a laugh as a futile gesture rather than a settling of the dying man’s debts. After the Prince’s prophetic epilogue, King Edward’s ‘Here, English lords, we do proclaim a rest’ (18.236), ‘played as “Steady on, son” usually got a laugh – legitimate, I think’ (Rintoul, 82).

  The most intrusive directorial decision was motivated precisely by the fear that the play lacked humour and that audiences unfamiliar with it might be bored by its restricted tonal range, especially in the second half (the interval came just before Crécy, at the end of Sc. 6). The casting of an engaging comic actor with a fine singing voice (Wayne Cater) as Lodwick was a means of lightening the tone. Present from the opening scene, Lodwick’s extended role incorporated the lines of several minor figures, Percy (10.36–59) among them, and was played almost as the Clown of the piece. The attempt to import humour throughout had the unfortunate side-effect of blunting the subtler comedy of Lodwick’s own most significant scene, 2.167–359, where the complexity of his attitude to the King’s adulterous inclinations was reduced to merely comic commentary (see Fig. 8). As a final coup-de-théâtre Lodwick appropriated the speech of the messenger who announces Prince Edward’s triumphant entry as victor of Poitiers. The speech was sung as an operatic recitative in the manner of Purcell, switching midway from tragic to triumphant tones – for no discernible reason other than to double-underline the Prince’s return from the dead.

  8King Edward (David Rintoul) instructing Lodwick (Wayne Cater) to write a love poem to the Countess, directed by Anthony Clark, RSC, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2002

  Audiences both in Stratford and London, and most reviewers, were cautiously appreciative. The issue of the play’s authorship remained very much on the surface, and actors and spectators alike engaged in a guessing game – is it Shakespeare or isn’t it? Confidence in the play, high by the climax of the episode of the Countess of Salisbury (Caroline Faber), dipped again during the first long battle sequence, to revive intermittently in the Poitiers scenes and for the finale. Michael Billington’s scepticism about accepting the play as Shakespeare’s arose from his perception that ‘the protagonist is so unsympathetic’ (Guardian, 27 April 2002), though that may have resulted as much from David Rintoul’s buttoned-up performance as from a different authorial hand.

  When Edward III is performed outside England two concerns diminish as the war ceases to have any national significance and the question of authorship is distanced by a translated text that removes the language to which that question primarily relates. Edward III could be announced in Bucharest as Shakespeare’s without controversy, or indeed very much concern. The ethical preoccupations of Edward III recommended it for performance by the National Theatre, especially its focus on the issues of honour and truth to one’s word.

  Edward III is a play of oaths. No other play of Shakespeare abounds in so many oaths. An oath ties an individual to God … An oath may trigger one’s death, one’s loss of liberty, anything may happen lest one should forswear a promise. That is why we are now bringing to stage Edward III. We are doing this for a world in which a promise means nothing … to remind people that the word of honour, the oath, is a sacred fact that everybody should observe.92

  In an interview headed ‘The Play of Oaths – A Cultural Event’,93 Tocilescu said: ‘I decided to bring Edward III to stage as soon as I had read the play, because I realized that the things in the play – honour, the word of honour, keeping an oath – are things that can no longer be found in Romania. All that our present-day society shows us is lies, broken oaths, lack of honesty.’ Edward III also offered the company’s eminent director and star actor, Ion Caramitru, a role very well suited to his talents.94

  Faced with the vast Grand Auditorium of the National Theatre, the production was conceived on a spacious scale and employed a cast of well over thirty actors and musicians, drawn from repertory companies throughout Romania.95 The stage space was dominated by a huge, twin-towered metal structure, on tram-tracks, whose movements and transformations, using panels and ramps, allowed for flexible, if time-consuming, alterations in the size and shape of the playing-area (see Fig. 9).96 Though the general visual impression was medieval, the range of reference was wide and eclectic. In the military action much use was made of projected film clips. These ranged from newsreel footage of naval warfare represented by warships of the Second World War (Sc. 4) to a colour film of medieval warfare somewhat in the manner of Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V, complete with archers, cavalry, even cannon (a surprising touch of historical accuracy) as a representation of the battle of Crécy to fill the gap in the text between Scs 7 and 8. The jeopardy of Prince Edward (Daniel Badale) later in the battle (Sc. 8) was graphically presented in a series of projections in the style of a Japanese comic book in which the Prince contended with overwhelming odds, each successive image suffusing the original black and white with increasing areas of red until the Prince staggered onstage wounded and exhausted, to throw down a sack containing the head of the dead King of Bohemia. The production concurrently descanted upon military themes and carefully reshaped the action. A triumphant entry after Crécy would have pre-empted the Prince’s spectacular return from Poitiers at the end of the play in which, dominating the stage at the top of a long ramp, he bowled the crown of France down to his relieved and exultant father.

  9The English confront the French before Crécy, directed by Alexandru Tocilescu, Teatrul National Bucuresti, 2008–10

  The director’s concern with oaths in Edward III goes a long way to explaining major decisions about the production. In particular it accounts for the frequency with which various characters crossed themselves at moments of crisis or achievement. The resolution of the Countess (Mircea Anca) was strongly underlined at the end of Sc. 2 not only by this gesture, but by lighting that projected a cross on to the cyclorama. The play concluded, after its last line, with a communal prayer.

  The battles mounted in intensity, Crécy earning Ned his knighthood, but not a triumphal entry, so that the staging of Poitiers, though without textual warrant, became the true climax, its sombre emphasis centred on the death and funeral of Audley (Constantin Dinulescu: an old man, whose deafness was a source of humour in his dialogue with Derby at the opening of Sc. 3, 3.13), rather than on the netting from above of King John (Şerban Ionescu) and his sons. Cutting became progressively heavier as the play proceeded, as did the freedom to interpolate expressive expletives, or even phrases. The boldest move, designed to sustain Queen Philippa (Simona Bondoc) as a figure of regal as well as military authority (see Fig. 10), was to add a final speech for her consisting of the last lines of Theseus in The Two Noble Kinsmen:

  10Queen Philippa (Simona Bondoc) urges King Edward (Ion Caramitru) to show mercy for the citizens of Calais, directed by Alexandru Tocilescu, Teatrul National Bucuresti, 2008–10

  Oh, you heavenly charmers,

  What things you make of us! For what we lack

  We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still

  Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful

  For that which is, and with you leave dispute

  That are above our question.

  (5.4.131–6)

  The step from possible early journey-work to what has some claim to be the last speech written by Shakespeare is a long one, nor, for all its impressive resonances, is this a prayer wholly consistent with English confidence in God’s support for the invasion and conquest of France.

  The play’s puzzles were variously handled. Lodwick was new to the audience at 2.167, one of the actors who alternated in the role (Andrei Aradis) improvising to the lute verses about the King’s passion, but was soon reduced to complicity and to the role of scribe for Edward’s own verses. The separation of the Countess and Earl of Salisbury – less problematic perhaps for audiences than for directors – was accepted as a fact, though Ion Caramitru remarked97 that he still had to bite his tongue in Sc. 18 to resist an impulse to ask Salisbury ‘How’s your wife?’ Other responses to this question have included doubling the roles of Countess and Earl (Hurley); adding the silent presence of the Queen and two sons to Sc. 1, and bringing in the Countess to second the Queen’s plea for the burghers of Calais and to greet her husband in Sc. 18 (Robertson); or seeking resolution in the King’s line ‘Challenge our favour, for we owe it thee’ (18.103), which David Rintoul (Clark) played to signify ‘ “I am in debt to you not just for the service you have done the state, but for the dishonourable way I behaved to you and to your wife, and I am delivering this apology in the presence of my own wife, who knows what I am talking about.” – It’s a lot to load onto “for we owe it thee”, but I think the audience got it’ (Rintoul, 81). The possibility that the writer of Sc. 18 knew nothing of the final text of Scs 2 and 3 offers no comfort in the theatre.