There is one unforeseen absentee: the capture of the Dauphin, Prince Charles, in Sc. 17 builds expectations that some directors, Tocilescu among them, have felt it appropriate to fulfil, bringing Charles on as a third French prisoner. The line is easily emended to include ‘three Princes’, but the alteration runs counter not only to the historical record, which told the playwright(s) that Charles escaped from battle to conduct an interim government during his father’s captivity in England, but to the significance of the final grouping, in which captives would then outnumber captors.

  The three English royal persons, united for the only time as a family, set against three royal captives, French and Scots, neatly epitomize the military plot of the play, the absence of Charles becoming the sole detail to allude (subliminally) to what was to follow this moment of inflated English triumph. Sc. 18 concludes the roles of King John and King Edward, antagonists throughout. Edward has no doubt learned his lesson and gained mastery of ‘this little mansion of myself’ (3.94). His claim that he ‘As well can master [his] affections / As conquer other by the dint of sword’ (18.51–2) has been validated on the field of Crécy. He is a stronger king than he was, though still liable to a burst of Senecan passion (18.164–75) when he believes he has a dead son to avenge. John, whose overconfidence and unwise trust in Fortune (e.g. at 4.133–6) and in an equivocal prophecy have built the ironic conditions for his fall, reveals, if only momentarily, an awareness of his own unwisdom and failure to perceive the true reading of the foretelling of his crossing to England (18.214–15). King David is given no cue to speak and accordingly remains silent, his presence in itself a bonus to add to the crown of France and Montfort’s coronet from Brittany, with which Edward is loaded in the course of the scene.

  The other silent captive, Prince Philip, stands in direct relation to his captor, the victorious Prince of Wales. Each entered the play with his father, both defined by youth and lack of military experience. Where Edward accepts his father’s call to arms with enthusiasm (1.160–7), Philip’s heroic boasts and politic perception of the merits of possession of power, irrespective of rights (4.107–13, 123–4), are spoken from a position of safety, and accompanied by the act of eating and drinking (see 4.114–16n.). The play modifies history to separate the Prince of Wales from his father until the battle of Crécy, and again after it. Philip speaks only once in public, disparaging the English and urging his father to battle at 6.137–9 (see 6.137 SPn.). He is next heard of when his herald offers Prince Edward a book of prayers on the morning of Poitiers (12.101–21) and is himself in need of such a book as a captive in Sc. 17, after yielding to tongue-tied panic and despair in Scs 13 and 15. The prayer book, taken by Edward as evidence of Philip’s lack of personal spiritual initiative, may perhaps recall his own ‘study’ and ‘books’ abandoned in favour of military service, the ‘school of honour’ (1.165).

  The play’s final focus is on Prince Edward, first in Salisbury’s extended narrative of his presumed death (18.131–56), then in his triumphal entrance with his royal captives and the crown of France. His prophetic reference to Caesar in Sc. 1 (164) is capped by the herald who announces his approach in terms of a Roman triumph (18.180). In keeping with his modest deference whenever he addresses his father, he yields his captives and booty to King Edward. It is to him, however, rather than his father that the play’s climactic speech – in some sense its epilogue – is assigned. This comes as no surprise to audiences who have seen him, at least since Sc. 12, assume the active military role in the play, eclipsing his father’s brief appearance at Calais in Sc. 10.

  The ‘Father’ he finally addresses can only be construed as God (18.216), and his last speech combines a prayer of thanksgiving with a prophetic vision of English victory in future wars, to be fought by ‘many princes more’ (220), perhaps against Spain or Turkey, certainly against ‘what countries else / That justly would provoke fair England’s ire’ (233–4). The identity of these ‘princes’ is left open: they could include his own younger brothers (whose existence is barely acknowledged by the play (see 8.23–4)). More surely they extend to Henry V, the other English hero of the Hundred Years War, whose exploits had already been staged in London in whatever play underlies the surviving text of The Famous Victories of Henry V, and perhaps to Henry’s brothers, especially John, Duke of Bedford, familiar to London audiences from March 1592 in The First Part of King Henry VI (Foakes & Rickert, 16). But it is equally evident that the Prince’s address must have embraced the young men in his audience, potential volunteers for service under Henry IV of France in the still continuing civil conflict of the Huguenot king against the Catholic opponents to his succession, in which Englishmen still served.27

  In February 1594 these ‘Princes’, as well as the play’s exceptionally frequent uses of the title ‘Prince of Wales’ (see p. 20), would acquire a fresh significance with the much heralded birth of Henry, first son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. The birth of a potential future Prince of Wales contributed to the eventual qualification of James to become Elizabeth’s successor in 1603. Henry would indeed enjoy the title of Prince of Wales, to which he was appointed in 1610 (see Appendix 1) – but not for long, as he would die in November 1612, like Prince Edward predeceasing his father.

  THE PLAY’S SOURCES

  Froissart

  The principal historical materials for the play, including the episodes of Edward’s pursuit of the Countess of Salisbury (Scs 2, 3) and the model for her husband’s search for and use of a safe-conduct (9.13–43, 11.1–56, 13.56–126, 18.105–56), are to be found together only in a single narrative, the Chroniques of Jean Froissart, in the English version made by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, on the orders of Henry VIII at Calais between 1521 and 1525.28 That Edward III derives primarily from Froissart has been demonstrated most comprehensively by G. Harold Metz, who tabulates his findings, indicating the range of chapters, from 23 to 167, selected from the narrative and moulded together into a tightly and skilfully plotted play (Metz, 33–40). The demonstration in 1911 of the play’s dependence on Froissart, Ch. 135, for the episode of the Dauphin’s grant of a safe-conduct through French territory to an English general (see 9.13–43 LN) clinched the argument of R.M. Smith for Froissart as the play’s primary source.

  Smith particularized the evidence, but the assumption that a play about Edward III must depend on Froissart was not new. A less systematic critic of the play, Charles Knight (in his Pictorial Edition of The Works of Shakspere, Doubtful Plays, 277–93), had earlier expressed his assumption that the play was based on Froissart and his disappointment with the military scenes for failing to measure up to their model:

  In the latter portion of the play [the author] has Froissart before him; and dealing with those incidents which were calculated to call forth the highest poetical efforts, such as the battle of Poitiers, and the siege of Calais, the dramatist is strikingly inferior to the fine old chronicler.

  (Knight, 281)

  Conversely in 1866, François-Victor Hugo prefaced his French translation of Edward III with a rapturous account of the French origin of the Countess of Salisbury in Froissart. Recognizing that what he had translated was not quite the version of the story he had met there, Hugo proposed that the mannered narration of Froissart had been transformed by a great poet into an intimate drama of passion: ‘L’âme humaine aussi a ses Poitiers et ses Crécy, et c’est l’art du grand poëte d’élever ces triomphes inconnus à la hauteur des plus glorieuses victoires’ (Hugo, 35). Hugo’s great poet, needless to say, is Shakespeare. Ignorance of the play’s dependence upon Painter and Bandello misled him into crediting the playwright with inventing rather than adapting the heightened climax of the episode, but Hugo, as French translator of Shakespeare, was quite clear that he was dealing here with the author of Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Sonnets (Hugo, 35–7).29

  Both Knight and Hugo assume that a tinge of chivalric romance is of the essence of Froissart. Its lack in the play has struck several commentators and may even have detracted from the strong arguments that its principal source of historic information is indeed Froissart. Edward III, especially in its depiction of the victorious Prince Edward, falls far short of Froissart’s portrait of chivalrous courtesy (see, e.g., Proudfoot, Reign, 147). This shift in tone is itself among the pointers towards the play’s topical agenda.

  In his Exhortation to stir all Englishmen to the defence of their country (1539), Richard Morison, ‘[Thomas] Cromwell’s most brilliant propagandist’,30 sang the praises of Froissart as author of a patriotic text of great potency in face of French and Spanish threats to the nascent Reformation in England:

  Reade Froysarte, a frenche wryter, who wolde almoste thynke it possyble, that he wryteth of vs? It were ryghte expedient. that yonge Ientyll men dydde ofte reade theyr fathers noble actes … Who can rede the battayle of Cressy, and not conceyue wonderful hope of victory, whan we be any thynge egally matched? … Oughte not the battayle of Poyters to remaine freshe in our memories, where an handfull of Englishe men ouerthrewe all the force of Fraunce? … The frenche kynge was taken there, and well nere al the nobles of Fraunce slayne. … Where dyd the hardye hartes and manly couragies of the Englyshe men better appere, than in the battayle on the see before Sluse in Flaunders? the fight was fierce and terrible, and our men sore matched, for there were. iiii. of them to one englysshe man, and they very experte men of warre vppon the see.… Here the noble Englyshemen bare them selfe so valyantly, that they got the vyctorie, vtterly discomfetynge and sleinge all the frenche men and Normans.

  (sigs C3r–4r)

  Morison’s view of Froissart survived to be echoed by the Duke of Alençon in 1 Henry VI in a speech (perhaps, as recent analysts maintain, by Thomas Nashe),31 which might serve as a trailer for Edward III:

  Froysard, a Countreyman of ours, records,

  England all Oliuers and Rowlands breed,

  During the time Edward the third did raigne:

  More truly now may this be verified;

  For none but Samsons and Goliasses

  It sendeth forth to skirmish: one to tenne?

  (1H6 1.2.29–34; TLN 226–31)

  Froissart’s relation to the events of the first three decades of Edward’s reign, 1327–56, was itself derivative, the immediacy of his narrative a rhetorical trick. He entered the service of Queen Philippa only in 1361, his account of the earlier decades being derived from the chronicles (unknown to scholars until the nineteenth century) of Jean le Bel. Le Bel, a canon of Liège, wrote his chronicle in bursts, at the behest of Jean de Hainault, uncle of Queen Philippa. The years up to 1340 were written up between 1352 and 1356; the remainder, to 1358, was finished by that year. Though acquainted with many of the leading players, and a familiar traveller between the courts of France and England, Froissart did not live through the play’s events. He was best known as a poet before he began his chronicle, which perhaps explains the ‘strong element of knightly romance in his history’ (Richard Barber, Edward III and the Triumph of England (2013; repr. 2014), 6–13, 10).

  Holinshed

  Berners’s translation of Froissart offered an important resource for later English chroniclers. Among these was Raphael Holinshed, whose vast Chronicles, ‘greater in size than any individual work printed in England to that point’,32 were first published in 1577. Froissart was Holinshed’s chief source for the reign of Edward III.33 In 1760 Edward Capell identified Holinshed’s chronicles as a source of Edward III. But Holinshed’s Chronicles, in its second, posthumous, edition of 1587, overseen by Abraham Fleming,34 while running parallel with Froissart most of the time, crucially omits Froissart’s story of the Countess of Salisbury as well as the episode relating to the passport supplied to Sir Walter Manny by John, Duke of Normandy. Though omitting some material from Froissart, Holinshed did add to his account of Edward III, most significantly, in relation to the play, the story of the stone-throwing at Poitiers (see 11.69 LN). He also offered intelligible spellings of the French towns listed at 6.20 (see 6.20n.). Where Froissart treats the Scots with dignity, emphasizing their valour, the play, following Holinshed, comprehensively denigrates them.

  Taking issue with Metz’s conviction that Froissart rather than Holinshed was the play’s source, Giorgio Melchiori proposed a greater reliance on Holinshed, especially in the early scenes (see Melchiori, 25–39, 178–216). The question as to which chronicle lies behind Edward III is complicated, however, by the heavy reliance of Holinshed on Froissart. In the seventy-two double-columned pages (3.343–414) in the second edition of Holinshed devoted to the reign of Edward III the name of Froissart recurs in the margin, among the principal authorities cited, seventy-nine times, on average more than once per page.

  Full detail of the process of plotting and writing Edward III is unknown.35 That both chronicles were used is established by the evidence of fluctuating verbal and other correspondence with one or other. One possibility might be that a dramatist reading Holinshed was alerted by the frequency of citation to Froissart’s version of the story, which he knew to be available in English. Conversely, the fact that there is no indication of systematic alternate use of the chronicles by collaborating playwrights could be explained by late revision of the play, in which case Froissart’s narrative may then have been supplemented by the sporadic use of Holinshed.

  Ocland

  The victories of Edward and his eldest son had long figured as a high point in modern English history and military mythology by the time they received the accolade of incorporation into the syllabus of free and grammar schools (by order of the Privy Council to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, dated 21 April 1582) in the Latin hexameter verse of the schoolmaster Christopher Ocland’s Anglorum Praelia (1580; reprinted in 1582, and followed by publication in 1585 of a lumbering English verse translation by John Sharrock of University College, Oxford, titled The valiant Acts and victorious Battles of the English Nation, from the year of our Lord, one thousand three hundred twenty and seven, being the first year of the reign of the most mighty Prince Edward the third, to the year 1558). Ocland’s version of the English victories at Sluys, Crécy, Calais and Poitiers comes at the start of his poem, and was noted and quoted by Abraham Fleming in the second edition of Holinshed, Ocland being the only native poet writing in Latin thus quoted.36 On five occasions passages of quotation from Ocland’s Latin hexameters, ranging from two to sixteen lines, are incorporated into the narrative, lending it gravitas and imparting an aura of epic rhetoric to moments of especial significance. These are the quartering of the English and French arms (356), the foundation of the Order of the Garter (366), the defeat of the Scots and capture of King David II at Neville’s Cross (376), the defeat of the French and capture of King John II at Poitiers (388) and the magnanimous treatment by Edward of his royal captives (395).

  Anglorum Praelia was prescribed to replace ‘such lasciuious Poets as are commonly read and taught in the saide scholes (the matter of this booke being heroical and of good instruction)’, both as an incitement to valour and patriotism and as a model of Latin verse style.37 Ocland’s Eirenarchia, sive Elizabetha, which eulogizes Elizabeth’s peaceful reign, was printed with Anglorum Praelia. Surviving copies of octavo reprints of Ocland’s poem, which were evidently used in school, indicate that the section concerning the reign of Edward III was much studied for its Latin vocabulary and style, and the book remained in use at least until the mid-1590s.38 The choice of Edward III’s victories as the subject of a play for the public playhouses thus carried the implicit endorsement of the Privy Council, whose successors were advocates in the spring of 1593 of England’s continued support for the Protestant cause of Henry IV of France in his civil war with the Catholic League.

  Sharrock’s rendering of Ocland’s poem, as well as the original, was widely current and may have been known to the play’s author(s), had any been a schoolboy or a teacher in the later 1580s.39 If so, its chief influence could have been on the shaping of the action around the English victories at Sluys (1340), Crécy (1346), Calais (1347), Neville’s Cross (1347) and Poitiers (1356), rather than on verbal detail.40 Ocland’s interest in the reign ceased abruptly after Prince Edward’s victory at Poitiers, so abruptly indeed that the same page of Sharrock follows that victory with summary reference to the deaths of Prince Edward and his father (some twenty years later in 1376 and 1377):

  Thrise happy sure, if Atrapos fell Goddesse, had not wrest

  To vnripe death, his noble sonnes, Prince Edwardes fatall thredd,

  But hauing first begott a tender babe, in wedlocke bedd,

  Which Richard had to name, whom as his heyre he left behind:

  And whom his Grandsir dying to beare the regall mace assignde,

  According as this nations lawes, and auncient rites did binde.

  (sig. D1v)

  The sequence of topics in Anglorum Praelia, in which a Scottish expedition to Berwick precedes Sluys, which is immediately followed by an account of the plight of the commons of France, leading to the battle of Crécy, must recall the sequence of Scs 2–8 of the play. Ocland includes two topics omitted by the play: the institution, before Crécy, of the Order of the Garter, and the Black Death. England’s most destructive pestilence was a topic as inappropriate to a triumphal play as to audiences ‘about the Citie of London’ during the severe plague of 1592–4, when the weekly plague bill kept the public playhouses out of use.