Friends and colleagues who have contributed to our work in various ways are more than we can hope to remember, but most significantly include: members of the London Forum for Authorship Studies, Sir Brian Vickers, Marina Tarlinskaja and Marcus Dahl; Thomas Merriam, Richard’s polymath graduate student and latterly tutor; Peter Blayney for details about the stationer Thomas Scarlet; Mami Adachi; Antonio Ballesteros; A.R. Braunmuller; Warren Chernaik; Sandra Clark; T.W. Craik; Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin; Susan Doran; Darren Freebury-Jones; Crista Jansohn; Paulina Kewes; Gordon McMullan; Dieter Mehl; Stephen Miller; Martin Mueller; Jane Roberts and Emma Volodarskaya; Leslie Thomson; Bart van Es; Stanley Wells; Martin Wiggins; George T. Wright; also the late John Crow (coiner, at the Folger in 1962, of the term ‘Hinmania’ for bleary addicts of the subterranean Hinman collator), Kenneth Muir, Harold Jenkins, Eliot Slater, Reg Foakes, Ernst Honigmann, Douglas Brookes, and Tony Weir for his hospitality at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  We have been extremely fortunate to have benefited from the support of successive members of the Arden team, most especially of Margaret Bartley, the present publisher of the series, whose patience – both in supporting the editors through many trials and tribulations, and above all in believing that one day this book would come – has been indomitable. We are also grateful to Emily Hockley, who started the process of obtaining illustrations, and to Susan Furber who finished it. Jane Armstrong, a good and supportive friend for many years, has been connected with the Arden Third Series since its inception in the 1980s. To have her as our copy-editor has been a bonus. We are very grateful for her knowledge, experience and keen eye in the edition’s final stages; she has not only saved us from errors but kept us calm and focused in the process.

  Above all, it has been our great good fortune to have had the comments and criticism of three superlative General Editors of Arden 3. The sharp wisdom of George Walton Williams has been indispensable from the early stages of the book, as has the eagle eye of David Scott Kastan in the last. Throughout the process the book as a whole has benefited in every respect from the patient, learned and enquiring support of Henry Woudhuysen. Detailed acknowledgements in the book barely scratch the surface of what it owes to them. Many of those named have alerted us to error, but no doubt we have more, for which we take full responsibility.

  Less formal, though no less well-earned, acknowledgement is due to our families, who can now look forward to the resumption of life without Edward III. We dedicate our edition to our respective parents: George and Ninette Proudfoot (both sadly long departed), and Roger and Eleanor Bennett – without whom even the editors would never have seen the light of day.

  Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett

  Oxford

  INTRODUCTION

  The anonymous history play The Reign of King Edward III, published in 1596, is the sole play dating from Shakespeare’s early years in the theatre but absent from the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623 to find a place in modern collections of his works. Edward Capell, in his edition of the play included in Prolusions (1760), was the first1 to claim a connection between Edward III and Shakespeare, printing it as ‘Edward the third, a Play, thought to be writ by SHAKESPEARE’:

  That it was indeed written by SHAKESPEARE, it cannot be said with candour that there is any external evidence at all: something of proof arises from resemblance between the stile of his earlier performances and of the work in question; and a more conclusive one yet from consideration of the time it appear’d in, in which there was no known writer equal to such a play.

  (Capell, ix)

  Capell’s suggestion that the play was Shakespeare’s in the total absence of documentary evidence launched a debate which gained in intensity in the course of the following 150 years. Reprints in several collections of ‘doubtful’ or pseudo-Shakespearean plays increased the availability of Edward III, and consequently furthered speculation. In 1876 F.G. Fleay, in his Shakespeare Manual, 303, proposed that the play was of collaborative authorship, Shakespeare having written only the scenes concerning the King and the Countess. By 1930 so cautious a scholar as E.K. Chambers could speak of the play’s two authorial hands and give his opinion that ‘one only requires serious consideration as Shakespeare’s’ (Chambers, Shakespeare, 1.516).2 Acceptance of Shakespeare’s presence in the play became more widespread. One seemingly unsurmountable obstacle was, however, the play’s absence from the First Folio.

  Despite the First Folio’s establishment of the Shakespeare canon, laying claim to thirty-six plays, eighteen previously unprinted (see Hinman, xiv–xv; Blayney, Folio, 1), there were various attempts, both before and after its publication, to attribute other plays to Shakespeare (as sole author or as collaborator), of which very few have stood the test of time.3 It has been accepted that the Folio contains plays of collaborative authorship since the Oxford edition (1986) explicitly acknowledged Shakespeare’s collaborators in four Folio plays, 1 Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens and Henry VIII (titled All Is True). The First Folio’s exclusion of Edward III, if it were even seen as a candidate for acceptance, was easy, on several grounds. It has no narrative connection with the sequence of plays from Richard II to Richard III and does not broach their topic of the dynastic struggles of Edward’s heirs. Valid rights to be its sole publisher were held by a stationer outside the Folio combine of Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, with John Smethwick and William Aspley (who entered the publishing partnership as copyright holders for particular plays).4 By transfer from William Welby on 1 March 1618, the sole right to reprint Edward III belonged in 1623 to Thomas Snodham, or Snowden.5 Had they wished to print Edward III in the Folio, its publishers would have had to bring Snodham into the combine, at the cost of further dilution of their profits. Even if they had agreed to invite him, Snodham might have struck too hard a bargain. The portrayal in Edward III of the Scots and their king, David II, was unlikely to have been congenial to Queen Elizabeth I’s Scottish successor, which would no doubt have strengthened any argument against paying a further stationer for permission to include it.

  Shakespeare’s dominance of discussion of the authorship of Edward III is a historical fact explained in large measure by the cultural politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when his status as Bard and England’s national poet was at its untroubled height. Other dramatists have of course been proposed as alternative or supplementary authors of the play. Among these are Christopher Marlowe, George Peele and Thomas Kyd. That none has established a secure claim is chiefly because of the lack of truly comparable bodies of work that can be used for close study and statistical analysis.6 The other shadow cast over dramatic authorship in the years preceding 1594 is that of the plague. As Lukas Erne has cogently argued in the case of Arden of Faversham, we ignore at our peril the possible participation of some ‘inheritor of unfulfilled renown’,7 whose early death has removed even his name from the record – or has left that name floating without the ballast of attributable work (see Erne, Spanish Tragedy, 222–3).

  The authorship of Edward III remains the principal concern of scholarship on the play, and will be explored in greater detail later in the Introduction (see pp. 49–89), but what of the play itself? The earliest record of Edward III is Burby’s entry of it in the Stationers’ Register on 1 December 1595, under the title ‘Edward the Third and the blacke prince their warres wth kinge Iohn of Fraunce’.8 The absence of information about the play before December 1595 and the uninformative title-page of the 1596 edition (lacking even the name of the printer), with its unspecific reference to performance ‘sundrie times … about the Citie of London’, leave us in ignorance of who wrote Edward III, of when it was written, of what company or companies of players presented the sundry performances mentioned, and of when and in what playhouse or other setting they did so (see p. 114 and Fig. 12). Of these questions the only one to which a certain answer has yet been given is the first: Edward III was the last of five plays to be printed by Thomas Scarlet (who died in July 1596),9 and his third for Cuthbert Burby. Otherwise, the most that can safely be stated is that the play is a competent piece of work, with requirements compatible with known playing companies and playhouses, and so presumably the work of professional playwrights. These circumstances define the problematic nature of Edward III, a play about which knowledge is limited and conjecture unbridled.

  Edward III dramatizes the major military events of the years 1337–56, the beginning of the Hundred Years War, principally the famous English victories at Sluys (never named in the play; see Fig. 1), Crécy, Poitiers and Calais. These are selected and digested into an orderly and sequential action, celebrating English military prowess. Simple contrasts between English and French sustain an argument in which English piety and the rightness of Edward’s claim to the French crown are set against French over-confidence in numbers and submission to the whims of Fortune. Pairing of antithetical characters and values creates a simple structure of opposition, while mechanical symmetry is avoided by the inexact balance between the English and the French royal houses and nobility. As a play of aggressive warfare Edward III is remarkable for its avoidance of onstage carnage and for the fact that only a single named character (the King of Bohemia) is killed and his body brought onstage.

  1A miniature of the Battle of Sluys, taken from Jean Froissart, Chroniques, 1401

  The predictability of the outcome, to the extent that English success comes almost to have as much an aura of romance as of history, is offset by the introduction of two subsidiary actions, one in each movement of the play. The first of these, King Edward’s Scottish campaign in the course of which he falls in love with the wife of his friend and general the Earl of Salisbury, was and remains the play’s main source of appeal to audiences. On a smaller scale the second, the story of the journey of the Earl himself from Brittany to Calais by way of the battlefield of Poitiers (9.13–43, 11.1–56, 13.56–126, 18.97–119), not only diversifies the action but tells a parallel tale of the hazards faced by the nobility when reliant on the honour and integrity of kings.

  THE JUST WAR

  The celebration of a barely provoked war of aggression, provided it meets with a sufficient level of success, is a formula long on patriotic appeal if short of dramatic complexity. Both Marlowe earlier, in Tamburlaine (1587–8), and Shakespeare later, in Henry V (1599), recognized the need for a compelling protagonist or a sufficiently nuanced and complex portrayal of war to transcend mere sensationalism or nationalist propaganda.10 In Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine (1336–1405, historically Edward III’s younger contemporary) challenges all comers and all concepts of justice and religion. Like a force of nature he is the universal conqueror: like a force of nature he will eventually burn out, leaving a weakened succession. Henry V made his first gung-ho entry on to the London stage in the Queen’s Men’s The Famous Victories of King Henry V (c. 1587–8, printed 1598), a play among the models for Edward III. By the time of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), the figure of Henry had become one of inscrutable impersonality. Henry’s righteous commitment to the invasion of France is framed by the interested motives of his ecclesiastical advisers, vitiated by the ordinary greed and petty criminality of some of his soldiers and fuelled by visions of a united Great Britain; it is undercut at its moment of crisis by the need to propitiate a God, in whom the King places his reliance, for the crime – the deposition and death of his father’s cousin, Richard II – which has secured his position not on the throne of France but that of England (H5 4.1.289–302). Here too the glamour and excitement of war are distanced from the leading participants, to become a sustained choric commentary – a commentary whose celebration, in retrospect, is of a fleeting splendour during the too brief life and reign of ‘This star of England’ (H5 Epil.6).

  Edward III, lacking the challenge of a Scythian ‘scourge of God’ unstoppable except by death, and equally innocent (for all the deposition and murder of Edward II) of the shadow of blood guilt, relies on argument to sustain the casus belli. The play goes to great lengths and to the bitter end (18.234) to promote the legality of English aggression. Covenants or treaties, broken both by the Scots and by the French, recur throughout. The Scottish King David, ‘forgetting of his former oath’ (1.126), invades the border towns, leaving his treaty with Edward ‘Cracked and dissevered’ (123). King John, already a usurper of the French crown (15–27), breaks his promise to the captain of Calais (10.80) and tries to override his son’s promise of a passport for Salisbury (13.80–1). At 6.52–71, he catalogues his own (dubious) grounds for believing Edward’s desire for war to be unjust: he claims Edward has ‘Broke league and solemn covenant’ (59); he calls him ‘A thievish pirate and a needy mate’, whose ‘thirst is all for gold’ (53, 63); and finally he charges Edward with having ‘persecute[d] the weak’ (68).

  Edward, having learned the cost of attempting to break oaths of love in his unlawful pursuit of the Countess at the beginning of the play, is placed in stark contrast to the French and Scottish Kings in his maintenance of military oaths and honour. He lets his ‘covenant stand’ and shows clemency to the citizens of Calais (18.32, 53–5), admittedly with some encouragement from his Queen. John’s failure to relieve Calais is characterized by the town’s captain as a damaging betrayal: ‘this it is to trust a broken staff’ (10.80). By contrast, Edward’s refusal to send aid to his son at Crécy (Sc. 8) relates to chivalric definitions of honour and cowardice, earning his son his knighthood and preparing him to face the challenging odds against him at Poitiers. The contrast is made most explicit in Sc. 13, when the Dauphin Charles highlights the integrity of both Edward and his son as an example to his father:

  Upon my soul, had Edward, Prince of Wales,

  Engaged his word, writ down his noble hand

  For all your knights to pass his father’s land,

  The royal King to grace his warlike son

  Would not alone safe-conduct give to them,

  But with all bounty feasted them and theirs.

  (13.97–102)

  The play is at pains to make it clear on whose side justice resides. As well as Charles, several other French characters (such as Artois, Gobin and the French refugees) express sympathy with the English, while others, such as Villiers and the French captain at Calais, place the blame for France’s destruction squarely on John’s shoulders.

  The military ethos of the ‘just war’ is rooted in the war manuals of Elizabeth’s reign, of which there were ‘no less than 40 titles … published between 1578 and 1600, including new editions and translations’ (Pugliatti, 92), reflecting the military preoccupations of the time. The arguments of Edward III can be seen to evolve directly from the current orthodoxy of such manuals. Writing in the early 1590s, Matthew Sutcliffe is probably, among Shakespeare’s contemporaries, ‘the writer who most diffusely details which causes of war may be deemed just’ (Pugliatti, 121). In The Practice, Proceedings, and Laws of Arms (1593), Sutcliffe declares ‘that warre iust’, that is made after lands are unlawfully taken. He observes that such ‘quarrels often fal out betwixt borderers.… This hath bene the beginning of many contentions betwixt vs and the Scots’ (sig. D2v). He categorizes many of the ‘just causes’ articulated in the play: ‘Breach of couenants … is numbred among the iust causes of warres … and for the same cause warres haue bene opened betwixt vs, and the Scots … and betweene the French, and vs’ (sig. D4r). Sutcliffe supports his arguments by drawing on the wisdom of other authors. Quoting St Augustine, Sutcliffe exonerates the good man serving under ‘a sacrilegious Prince, … as the duetie of obedience doth make the souldier innocent’ (sig. E2v). This argument is used perversely by John himself in urging his son to break his oath to Salisbury: ‘Go, hang him, for thy licence lies in me, / And my constraint stands the excuse for thee’ (13.90–1). John tyrannically shows readiness to sacrifice his people (see 6.115–18) even when faced with repeated English offers of peace – which are refused (see, e.g., 6.24–6, 111–17; 10.1–3, 7–9, 25–6). By contrast, John’s one offer is less of peace than of humiliation (12.69–73). Sutcliffe writes:

  it seemeth not reason … to prosecute him by force, that submitteth himselfe to order of lawe. and commonly those that refuse reason when it is offered, come afterward to wish they had taken it, when they can not haue it. The French disdaining and scorning the great offers made by the blacke Prince, were shamefully by him ouerthrowne at the fielde of Poytiers.

  (sig. D2v; italics = Thucydides)

  Finally, a crucial issue, often slippery for modern readers and audiences, is that of divine approval and support. Sutcliffe quotes Lucan: ‘good and iust causes make men hope to receiue fauour of God in the issue, and triall’ (sig. D1v). Is the war fought with God’s help and aid? This question lies at the heart of the play, which reads victory against the odds as clear evidence of divine approval. Despite the odds of numbers being in favour of the French, God is on the side of the English in the play, neutralizing any French advantage. Thus the outcome is seen as justifying the undertaking, ‘that which is right’, and dictates the strategy of dramatic plotting. Neither in his oration to his men nor elsewhere does King John ever mention God, contrasting sharply with King Edward and his son (see 6.18, 179, 212–18, 228; 8.5–9, 99; 12.77–81; 18.241). The contrast is made fully explicit at 17.10–11, where fortune is balanced against heaven.