5Crispijn de Passe, the elder, engraving of Queen Elizabeth I, 1596, with pelican emblem and quartered royal arms in top-left corner

  AMATORY CONCERNS

  By the 1590s the chronicle anecdote of Edward’s passion for the wife of his friend and supporter the Earl of Salisbury had a long and varied history (see Proudfoot, Reign, 149–52). The myth achieves its most developed form in Edward III. The scenes that present it were early recognized as a highlight of the play (see Appendix 1).24 Scs 2 and 3, amounting to about one third of the action, constitute a self-contained play within the play, briefly set up in Sc. 1 and barely alluded to in Scs 6 and 8. It alone of the principal actions goes unmentioned in Sc. 18. Despite their lack of narrative integration, however, the scenes belong in Edward III. Faith and the breach of faith are among the play’s pervasive concerns, as they are here, and although the action of Scs 2 and 3 is digressive, it is anchored in the issues of legitimacy, loyalty, obedience and reliability that pervade the military action.

  King Edward, consumed with ‘Fervent desire’ for the French crown that is his birthright (1.109–13), refuses homage to King John and declares war. In that war he assumes divine approval against a tyrannous usurper. In Scs 2 and 3 it is Edward’s turn to slip into the role of tyrant. Spurred by a different desire, for the Countess of Salisbury, his will becomes his imperative. The scenes dramatize the romantic cliché of love at first sight (least rewarding when one-sided) and the Petrarchan commonplace of the unrequited lover wounded to death by desire in a duel of wits between credible and sharply differentiated characters in a situation of great particularity. Only Scs 2 and 3 revolve around a woman, their politics sexual and domestic rather than international. Having swiftly relieved the siege of her husband’s castle of Roxborough, restoring right authority and defending the interests of the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Salisbury (father and husband to the besieged Countess), Edward embarks on a siege of love. The values of the military action are reversed: there Edward is God’s soldier in a just war; here he is the source of injustice, disobedient to the rule of law, human or divine.

  The concerns of Scs 2 and 3 are revealed in the repetition of the words ‘love’, ‘oath’ and ‘swear’: ‘love’, as noun or verb, occurs thirty-six times in Scs 2 and 3 as against seven uses elsewhere in the play; ‘oath’ occurs ten times – eight of them clustering in the dialogue between Edward and Warwick (2.492–525) – as against five occurrences elsewhere (four of these in Scs 9 and 11); and ‘swear’ occurs nine times as against three elsewhere (in Scs 9 and 11). It is to be expected that Scs 9 and 11 would share some of the language of Scs 2 and 3 as they share the topics of loyalty and truth to one’s word: the allegiance of Montfort to King Edward (9.6, 8) and the undertaking of Villiers to return to Salisbury whether or not he succeeds in winning him a passport from Prince Charles (9.36–40, 11.26–41). The connection of Sc. 11 with the dialogue of the ‘Countess episode’ is particularly reflected in verbal reminiscence: the commentary on 11.1–50 contains a dozen notes that cite Scs 2 and 3.

  The principal oaths of the Countess and of Warwick in Scs 2 and 3 are extracted from them by trickery (2.375–6, 486–93). Warwick, having debated the issue of divided loyalties at some length, resolves his dilemma by fulfilling only the letter of his oath to aid Edward’s seduction of his daughter. The Countess pledges herself to cure the King’s love-sickness (2.368–71). Following her father’s tactics, she does so by an apparent compliance, but on terms that compel Edward at the last moment to desist from his ‘most unholy suit’ (3.180). In so doing she also implements her claim to bear the King the love that is his due, the love of a loyal subject ready to place her own life in jeopardy in defence of his honour (2.383–6, 3.121–2). The last oath is Edward’s, his promise never again to resume his suit to the Countess (3.178–89). Its fulfilment is implicit in the rest of the play. After 3.205 she receives no further mention, nor does she reappear. The episode is a self-contained unit within Edward III: its action and argument achieve full closure.

  The conflicts of love and loyalty are fought with words, and with a verbal and rhetorical exuberance and exhilaration experienced only intermittently in the rest of the play. The tone of the episode is kept light early in Sc. 2 by the introduction of Edward’s go-between and confidant, Lodwick. Lodwick’s opening soliloquy (2.167–89) is the play’s first virtuoso display of rhetoric and also supplies a detached and comic point-of-view from which to follow the unfolding drama between King and Countess. Only this speech confirms that Lodwick is ‘well read in poetry’ (219). Its adoption of a ten-line truncated sonnet form for its final section (180–9) clinches the suggestion made by its variation on the sonnet cliché of ‘red’ and ‘white’ in its opening section.25 The rhymes adopt a particular mode, that of epistrophe, or rhyming on repeated words, already used with ‘pale’ at 172 and 175. The alternations of ‘shame’, ‘king’ and ‘fear’ define the formula for a deadlock expressed in the felicitous metaphor of ‘A lingering English siege of peevish love’ (189). Lodwick’s later contribution is deflatory, from ‘Write I to a woman?’ to the two-line start of a love poem designed to undercut the dubious aims of his King – a bathos matched by Edward’s own descent to punning on ‘chaste’ and ‘chased’ (319). In Sc. 3, Lodwick becomes anonymous, his role as watchful critic suspended as the King steps further into his moral morass.

  King Edward does most of the talking in these scenes, which largely account for the size of his role, more than double any other in number of lines (see Appendix 2). He is the protagonist, but these scenes alone offer any personal insight into his motives and values. His contemplation of the Countess ranges from the analytic (2.131–6) to the boyishly enthusiastic (191–213), before exploding into furor poeticus in the high comedy of his attempt at proxy poetical wooing. Testing stock imagery for its utility, he soon discerns that nightingales may point towards adultery (275–7; see 272, 275, 276n.) and mirrors towards flattery, while ‘To music every summer-leaping swain / Compares his sunburnt lover when she speaks’ (273–4).

  At its peak Edward’s poetical outburst extends to a virtuoso riff on the life-giving qualities of ‘the sun’ in the form of a nine-line epistrophe (321–9), and appropriation of some familiar verses (342–8) deriving ultimately from Propertius. So far the King’s doting obsession is comical, as it will once more be at the start of Sc. 3. With the arrival of the Countess, everything changes.

  Hers is the most carefully controlled role in the episode. It has four phases: expectation of relief by the King; greeting him after he has raised the siege of her castle; learning the truth of his desire for secret sex and warding it off impromptu; and presenting the ultimatum that will free her from his further attentions. The King’s arrival is a longed-for summer after a blustery spring. She has shown her spirit in her mockery of the escaping Scots (2.75–80). Greeting the King is a more anxious matter, and her anxiety to get the social form right is conveyed through the stiff formality of an extended speech in rhyming couplets (the longest in the play by far: 141–61). Elaborating antithetical similes of a flowerbed and a goldmine, she contrasts the humble appearance of her castle with the wealth of welcome within (imagery too apt to rouse Edward’s desires). Having won his assent to a visit, she next enters as concerned hostess, and has to improvise when the King’s claim to have been wronged since his arrival, so disingenuously imputing his own fault to her, turns into the conventional Petrarchan complaint of the lover dying of his lady’s refusal. While maintaining respect and etiquette, she argues forcibly for her virtue as a married woman, whose would-be seducer is likewise married. The terms of argument, once Edward has shown his hand, are debated closely and carefully, with rhyme and epistrophe deployed by both speakers in a controlled battle of wits, from which the lady emerges clear winner. She is ready with the argument to counter requests to give, lend or sell her love: principally that her body, being soldered to her soul, cannot survive the soul’s damage.

  She cites classical and biblical support for her emphasis on the primacy of marital over political fidelity:

  That love you offer me you cannot give,

  For Caesar owes that tribute to his queen;

  That love you beg of me I cannot give,

  For Sara owes that duty to her lord.

  (417–20)

  Proverbially, Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion (Dent2, C9.12). Similarly, Sara is the example of marital obedience chosen for the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer. When Edward cites Caesar, it will be in relation to Cleopatra (3.43–4), while his prototypes of passion are Hero and Leander (3.149–53), forgetting that they are destined to early death in the pursuit of illicit love. The Countess, on the other hand, declares that

  To be a king is of a younger house

  Than to be married; your progenitor,

  Sole-reigning Adam on the universe,

  By God was honoured for a married man,

  But not by Him anointed for a king.

  (2.428–32)

  The Countess’s Adam, greater as well as prior to any king, belongs in the unfallen universe; when Edward matches her allusion, it is with reference to the fallen world of ‘leathern Adam’, awake to shame in a world of death (3.114; see nn.).

  The final lines of the Countess exemplify her tact, leaving Edward an alibi and room for withdrawal. They also offer a clue to the care with which the scene is constructed.

  I know my sovereign, in my husband’s love

  Who now doth loyal service in his wars,

  Doth but to try the wife of Salisbury

  Whether she will hear a wanton’s tale or no.

  Lest being therein guilty by my stay,

  From that, not from my liege, I turn away.

  (2.437–42)

  Here she employs a couplet only in conclusion, echoing the ‘away’/‘stay’ rhyme with which she earlier capped the departure of the humiliated King David (72–3) and which she used again in her first unavailing attempts to persuade the then reluctant King Edward to stay (118–19, 137–8). This pattern of repetition is among the clearest indicators of the tight control of the structure of the scene – as is the stylistic progression of the three climactic speeches of the Countess, from her stilted couplet welcome to this well-argued rejection of the King to the powerful simplicity of her ultimatum at 3.165–85.

  Though Edward talks twice as much, it is the Countess who leads the action to her own final triumph. Before her last entry we have learned much that will have a bearing on the outcome. The Countess, reconciled to her father, has reinforced her commitment to marital fidelity. The King is in mental confusion, tormented by distracting desire into the Freudian slip of ‘Countess for Emperor’ (3.39) and infuriated by the beat of the intrusive drum in a speech which distorts the language of war into the pangs of unfulfilled desire (46–62).

  The mini-drama reaches its swift and alarming conclusion: among its unobtrusive sources of power is its unprecedented dependence on monosyllabic lines.

  Keep but thy word, great King, and I am thine.

  Stand where thou dost; I’ll part a little from thee –

  And see how I will yield me to thy hands.

  Here by my side doth hang my wedding-knives:

  Take thou the one, and with it kill thy Queen,

  And learn by me to find her where she lies;

  And with this other I’ll dispatch my love,

  Which now lies fast asleep within my heart.

  … this sharp-pointed knife

  Shall stain thy earth with that which thou would stain –

  My poor chaste blood. Swear, Edward, swear,

  Or I will strike, and die before thee here.

  (166–85)

  So intense is the verbal duel that when the Countess draws her ‘wedding-knives’ (169–70) the shock is as extreme as it is sudden. In this play of warfare they are the only weapons drawn onstage with the immediate purpose of inflicting bodily harm. By maintaining the primacy of her wedding vows over other duties of obedience, to her father or her King, the Countess validates her offer to Edward of all the love she can give (2.383–6), jeopardizing her life to save him from himself. Edward’s multiple disloyalties, to hostess, to friend, to loyal supporter, to wife, to God, add up to a single disloyalty – to himself and his royal obligations. To speak of Edward’s reversion to right values in terms of the King’s education may be in some sense true,26 but the theatrical impact is of shock therapy, and his reaction evidently includes sheer relief that his intended victim has forced his retraction.

  From the King’s lesson in love, the play moves on to explore his son’s lesson in war. In Sc. 3 King Edward is moved by the sight of his son, metamorphosed from schoolboy to soldier eager for service at the head of ‘The choicest buds of all our English blood’ (3.82), and touched by guilt at reminiscences of his Queen (74–9). Only here and, as Lodwick’s opening speech describes, at his first encounter with the Countess does Edward succumb to ‘blushing’, linking the Countess and the Prince. Later, addressing Audley in Sc. 12, Prince Edward transfers the imagery of courtship into the inexperience of an apprentice in war:

  Thou art a married man in this distress,

  But danger woos me as a blushing maid.

  Teach me an answer to this perilous time.

  (12.131–3)

  In Edward III the virtue of just war and the evil of adultery are absolute values: the ‘happy’ outcome, where the former transcends the latter, has been engineered throughout the episode, from Lodwick’s voice of ironic amusement onwards. The claim of love over war is only presented through a vision (Edward’s) distorted by desire:

  The sin is more to hack and hew poor men

  Than to embrace in an unlawful bed

  The register of all rarieties

  Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour.

  (3.111–14)

  Any serious debate on the conflicting claims of love and war is evaded in the interests of immediate theatrical satisfaction. That omission is in line with the element of romance which reassures spectators and readers that Edward III is a play in which the extremes of peril will leave wives virtuous and English princes not only alive but triumphant.

  A CONCLUSION IN WHICH (ALMOST) EVERYTHING IS CONCLUDED

  Edward III differs most from other historical plays from 1588 to the mid-1590s, notably those of Shakespeare, in its self-containedness. This self-containedness is nowhere more perceptible than in its last scene. Within the constraints of casting (which offer one explanation for the absence of Prince Charles), the scene brings together all the characters of sustained significance (Warwick, the Countess and Lodwick, having vanished at the end of Sc. 3, presumably doubled roles: see Appendix 2). No action is left at a loose end. But rather than giving full satisfaction, the neatness of the ending may seem somewhat perfunctory. In this respect it may reflect the broader circumstances of the play’s inception: that its aim was short-term, with a topical focus on the immediate military and political circumstances of London and England c. 1592–4; that though enjoying the acting strength of a small professional company, the play was staged in makeshift or minimal venues; that it was written under pressure of time. Whatever the explanation, the final scene has about it something routine, never more so than in its closing lines.

  Sheathe up your swords, refresh your weary limbs,

  Peruse your spoils, and after we have breathed

  A day or two within this haven town,

  God willing, then for England we’ll be shipped,

  Where in a happy hour I trust we shall

  Arrive: three Kings, two Princes and a Queen.

  (18.238–43)

  The final line of Edward III must have struck many readers as bathetic (see 18.243n.), and the absence of a final rhyming couplet places Sc. 18 among the few scenes that lack one (see 8.107–8n.). Given the scene’s tidy finality in other respects, this is perplexing (both editors and directors have sought to supply the missing rhyme: see 18.242 t.n. and p. 99). Since the theatrical revival of the play in the 1980s, however, the visual importance of the final stage grouping of characters has been confirmed, and the line has been revealed as an implicit stage direction to bring the action to a conclusion with a significant grouping. The topical contexts of the play further suggest that to end it with the word ‘Queen’ was to move it from the world of historical fiction into that of everyday reality (see Proudfoot, ‘Wars’, 98–9). The seemingly small role of Queen Philippa bears great weight of significance. Her appearance, whether armed or visibly pregnant or both (see 10.45), as well as the unhistorical introduction of the captive King of Scots, confirms both her effective participation in her husband’s wars and her role in shaping the future of his dynasty.

  The closing emphasis on six prominent figures implies the question of how they might be grouped onstage: in symmetrical groups of victors and vanquished; in triangular formation with the Queen at the downstage corner of the triangle; or simply in line, with the English flanked on each side by their French and Scottish prisoners respectively? The triangular arrangement would reflect the reversal of the expected hierarchy reached in the play’s final scene, so that Queen and Prince occupy positions stronger than that of King Edward himself, his political role manipulated by his Queen, his military command appropriated by his respectful son. These options do not begin to exhaust the range of possibility, but they serve to indicate the significance of that final grouping as a summary of the play’s military and political action, in which these royal figures have played a central part.