Evidence that this scene has undergone revision, whether at the time of composition or later, exists in the form of an error in the printing of the 1596 quarto.55 On clear evidence for the precedence of the outer forme of quire H (see Figs 13 and 14, and pp. 118–21), the latter part of the speech was printed first, on the verso of sig. H2, leaving the same compositor to set its beginning, on the recto, when he came in due course to set his pages for the inner forme. Since the verso was already at press, he was left with no alternative to setting the opening section of the speech exactly as he saw it in his manuscript copy. Editors since C.F. Tucker Brooke have noted the awkwardness of these lines as printed, which results from ambiguity in the word that starts line 44. ‘Then’ is a temporal or concessive adverb, but it is also the almost invariable spelling in Q for ‘than’ (the modern spelling found in Q only at 1.110, 13.78 and 15.24). Reading ‘then’ as ‘than’ points to a superficial remedy for the apparent muddle by identifying line 44 as following line 41.

  Further investigation, however, suggests that what happened was not just misplacement of a single line, but rather the interspersing of lines starting two different sentences, comprising respectively lines 41 and 44, and lines 42–3 and 45–6. Only the second sentence leads smoothly into what was already in print on the verso. Had the verso not already been in print, the compositor could have placed lines 41 and 44 where they clearly belong, that is directly before line 50. He failed to see the less radical alternative still available to him, as proposed by a number of scholars since 1908, of moving line 44 to follow line 41 (see 12.42–60 LN). In the following quotations, lines apparently added by a reviser to the original draft of the speech are printed in bold type and indented.

  Sig. H2r, inner forme, set and printed after H2v:

  40 Pr: Deathes name is much more mightie then his deeds,

  Thy parcelling this power hath made it more,

  As many sands as these my hands can hold,

  are but my handful of so many sands,

  Then all the world, and call it but a power:

  45 Easely tane vp and quickly throwne away,

  But if I stand to count them sand by sand

  Sig. H2v, outer forme, set and printed before H2r:

  The number would confound my memorie,

  And make a thousand millions of a taske,

  Which briefelie is no more indeed then one,

  50 These quarters, spuadrons, and these regements,

  Before, behinde vs, and on either hand,

  Are but a power, when we name a man,

  His hand, his foote, his head hath seuerall strengthes,

  And being al but one selfe instant strength,

  55 Why all this many, Audely is but one,

  And we can call it all but one mans strength:

  The manuscript of lines 41–6 evidently had one or other of the sentences interlined or marginally added to the other.

  The speech continues with two further similes (56–60), before reverting to the topic of the alleged equality of the French and English powers.

  And we can call it all but one mans strength:

  He that hath farre to goe, tels it by miles,

  If he should tell the steps, it kills his hart:

  The drops are infinite that make a floud,

  60 And yet thou knowest we call it but a Raine:

  There is but one Fraunce, one king of Fraunce,

  The three similes, of counting sand, of enumerating steps and of computing the drops in a rainstorm, can all be removed without damage to the argument of the speech. The first and third pick up images from 2.301–3, while a variant on the second occurs at Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.184–97. It may not, then, seem fanciful to see Shakespeare’s revising hand at work, the more so as among his current labours was sonneteering, a compositional process much concerned with the containment of similes or metaphors within units of two or four lines. Whether or not the original draft was by Shakespeare, the added lines can plausibly be assigned to him. What cannot be recovered is the gap in time between initial composition and revision – minutes, hours, days, even perhaps months.

  It is reasonable to associate this speech with broader evidence for an attempt in earlier and later scenes to build up the independent role of Prince Edward. Other passages that could be seen as contributing to this process include: 1.89–97, the Prince’s defiance of Lorraine; 1.157–67, the King’s exhorting his son to leave books for arms; 3.200–1, the order to the Prince to hasten to Newhaven; 6.11–45, the Prince’s account of his activities between landing and reunion with his father at Crécy; 6.97–108, 118–21, the Prince’s defiance of King John; 6.172–218, the formal arming of the Prince; 8.10–60, the King’s refusal to send aid to his son at Crécy; 8.109–13, the enigmatic (and probably misplaced) emblem of the pelican; 12.66–133, the Prince’s reception of the three heralds; 12.150–62, his acceptance of Audley’s counsel against fear of death; Sc. 14, his finding of the flint-stones at Poitiers; 17.1–17, his scornful reception of the captive French King and Princes; 18.216–35, his epilogue-like final speech. The suggestion that any of these passages may have resulted from revision is far from a claim that all of them did, but they constitute the strongest points in creating in Prince Edward a figure to challenge and even in the end eclipse his father.

  The process of revision at 12.40ff. led to misplacement on the printed page of additions made to the manuscript either between lines or in the margin. Comparable evidence for revision is not far to seek in Shakespeare’s early plays (e.g., MND 5.1.5–8, 12–18, 29–31, 33–8, 58–60, 66–70, 76–8, 81–3 (see Ard2 MND, Appendix 3, 163–4)), though it more often takes the form of failure to delete one of two successive drafts of a single passage: e.g., Love’s Labour’s Lost, twenty-three lines mistakenly printed in QF after 4.3.291 (see Ard3 LLL, Appendix 2.1, 339–40); and Romeo and Juliet, the two versions in Q2 of 2.2.188–91 (see Ard3 RJ, 104–5).

  Once we posit Shakespeare as reviser, Edward III’s distinctive verbal links with his early works accumulated by scholars and editors acquire a fresh interest. The verbal parallels most likely to carry significance are recorded in the commentary notes. Capell spotted the most striking Shakespearean ‘echo’, at 2.617, ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’, which replicates or is replicated by Sonnet 94.14. This line occurs in the scene between Warwick and the Countess, which places it in the section dependent on Painter, and thus potentially of Shakespeare’s authorship. A phrasal link with 10.15–16, ‘No ghosts, my lord, but men that breathe a life / Far worse than is the quiet sleep of death’, may suggest that line 617 was composed for the play and reused in the sonnet (see 2.617n. and LN). The LION database affords evidence to suggest that the phrase ‘far worse than’ may be distinctive of Shakespeare (cf. TGV 5.4.51, 2H6 3.1.305, Tit 5.2.194, Son 94.14). If so, we have a further instance of his touching up in Sc. 10, this time to accentuate the pathos of the six poor men turned out of Calais. It is hazardous to propose identification of minor verbal revisions on the grounds of style alone, but a process of piecemeal revision is congruous with the impression often given by Edward III of stylistic disparity within scenes or even shorter passages.

  The case for Shakespeare

  With the evidence for collaborative authorship, relating to narrative sources and the incidence of feminine endings and patterns of n-grams, as context, what are the literary and dramatic reasons for supposing parts of Edward III to have been written by Shakespeare? It seems incontrovertible that Shakespeare was aware of Edward III. When he alluded in later plays to Edward’s reign he did so in terms that recall the play. In King John the bastard taunts Lewis, the Dauphin, with former instances of French cowardice, among them

  to thrill and shake

  Even at the crying of your nation’s crow,

  Thinking this voice an armed Englishman.

  (5.2.143–5)

  The reference appears to be to Edward III’s portentous ravens at Poitiers in Sc. 13 (20–38), although it could be to the chronicle account of Crécy which is its source. Henry V several times refers back to Edward III, most certainly when speaking of the unhistorical shipping from England to King Edward in France of a King of Scots, captured in his absence:

  She hath herself not only well defended

  But taken and impounded as a stray

  The King of Scots, whom she did send to France,

  To fill King Edward’s fame with prisoner kings.

  (1.2.159–62)

  The sole known source for this is E3 18.63–82. It is likely that other references in Henry V to the Black Prince and to King Edward on a hill at Crécy also have the play in mind. The French King uses that memory to urge his son and nobles against underestimating King Henry:

  Witness our too much memorable shame

  When Cressy battle fatally was struck,

  And all our princes captived, by the hand

  Of that black name, Edward, Black Prince of Wales,

  Whiles that his mountain sire, on mountain standing

  Up in the air, crowned with the golden sun,

  Saw his heroical seed, and smiled to see him,

  Mangle the work of nature and deface

  The patterns that by God and by French fathers

  Had twenty years been made.

  (2.4.53–62; cf. E3 Sc. 8)

  In Richard II, the main such reference is less specific, taking the form first of John of Gaunt’s contrast between the living king and his grandfather, Edward III:

  O, had the grandsire with a prophet’s eye

  Seen how his son’s son should destroy his sons,

  From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame,

  Deposing thee before thou wert possessed,

  Which art possessed now to depose thyself.

  (2.1.104–8)

  It is with York’s memory of his eldest brother, though, that the two plays draw closest together:

  I am the last of noble Edward’s sons,

  Of whom thy father, Prince of Wales, was first.

  In war was never lion raged more fierce,

  In peace was never gentle lamb more mild

  Than was that young and princely gentleman.

  His face thou hast, for even so looked he,

  Accomplished with the number of thy hours;

  But when he frowned, it was against the French

  And not against his friends. His noble hand

  Did win what he did spend, and spent not that

  Which his triumphant father’s hand had won.

  His hands were guilty of no kindred blood,

  But bloody with the enemies of his kin.

  (2.1.171–83)

  That Shakespeare is likely to have Edward III in mind can be confirmed by contrast with two later plays in which King Edward appears: along with the Black Prince, in the anonymous Woodstock, as an admonitory ghost (5.1.55–102); and in William Smith’s The Hector of Germany (1615) as a minor character. Neither of these plays evokes the faintest reminiscence of Edward III.

  Richard II and Henry V give more detailed evidence of relationship with Edward III. Contrasting Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II, to which it owes a structural debt, Warren Chernaik notes that ‘the honorific terms of Feudal loyalty and traditions – “sovereign”, “liege”, “duty”, “knighthood”, “crown” – reverberate through [Richard II]’.56 Two of these honorific terms occur with even greater frequency in Edward III: ‘sovereign’ twenty times, ‘liege’ twenty-nine. What is striking is the confinement of each to particular scenes: ‘liege’ is used eighteen times in Sc. 2, seven in Sc. 3, twice in Sc. 13 and once each in Scs 17 and 18; ‘sovereign’ thirteen times in Sc. 2, three in Sc. 3, twice in Sc. 6 and once each in Scs 4 and 12. The vast majority of uses is in Scs 2 and 3, encouraging the view that ‘liege’ and ‘sovereign’ may be markers of authorship (and by extension possibly Shakespeare’s). Most striking is the absence of the terms from more than half of the play.

  A similar pattern of detailed resemblance links Henry V to Edward III. The Chorus speeches, unique to the Folio text of Henry V, contain echoes of topic or phrase which suggest familiarity with Edward III: among these are

  For now sits expectation in the air

  And hides a sword from hilts unto the point

  With crowns imperial, crowns and coronets,

  Promised to Harry and his followers.

  (2.0.8–11; cf. E3 Sc. 18)57

  Others include the description of the English fleet crossing from Southampton (3.0.5–16; cf. E3 4.62–78); characterization of ‘The confident and over-lusty French’ on the night before Agincourt and of the ‘largess universal, like the sun’ given to all his men by the ‘liberal eye’ of King Henry (4.0.18–22, 37–47; cf. E3 12.124, 2.321–9); and the simile of Rome’s welcome of ‘their conquering Caesar’ for Henry’s welcome to London (5.0.24–8; cf. E3 4.11–12, 18.176–84).

  Shared subject-matter does even more to locate Scs 2 and 3 of Edward III, the Countess episode, among Shakespeare’s other writings. The scene between the King and Lodwick shares its topic, the writing of poems as instruments of courtship, with a range of Shakespeare’s comedies. The love poems of the King and his lords in Love’s Labour’s Lost constitute a small critical puzzle: just how bad they are intended to be.58 At their first meeting Romeo and Juliet improvise their own extended sonnet, and the use of the form for the prologues to Acts 1 and 2 makes its own implicit comment on the subject of ‘star-crossed lovers’ (1.Prol.6). In Taming of the Shrew, the disguised Lucentio’s qualifications as a tutor include his being ‘well read in poetry’ (1.2.168; cf. E3 2.219), and Ovid is the poet used in his mock Latin lesson for Bianca.

  The allusion to Lucrece as a Roman heroine less deserving of fame than the Countess (3.190–3) is the King’s attempt to wriggle out of a tight corner, but if Shakespeare wrote the lines then he must include his own Rape of Lucrece among the poetical ‘vain endeavours’ of line 193 – an in-joke that may concede awareness that his future might not lie in the direction of Ovidian epyllion, but that may also serve to advert to the ethical conundrum of Lucretia’s suicide.59 The play shares the poem’s concern with royal sexual misdemeanour, placing them among a range of early Shakespearean texts in which coercive power is brought to bear on a chosen victim.

  There are further close thematic links between the Countess episode in Edward III and two plays Shakespeare probably wrote in 1593–4, Richard III and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the latter, as in Scs 2 and 3 of Edward III, the inner feelings and intentions of a character with nefarious aims, here Proteus, are made apparent to the audience, creating ironic tension in scenes of cross-purposes with other characters. Like Edward (cf. 3.138n.), Proteus is involved in triple infidelity: to his betrothed, to his friend and to his friend’s intended wife (not to mention the fourth infidelity to himself). The striking resemblance of Edward to Proteus may be seen by comparing the two. Both go through a succession of comparable stages: love at first sight, articulation of a plan of seduction developed through soliloquy, poetical courtship (Edward’s scene with Lodwick, Proteus’s cynical view of love poetry and his song), an interview in which efforts are made to manipulate the lady’s father, and a final confrontation containing the threat of violence. In each play, likewise, criticism of the faithless man is voiced or implied by clear-sighted but powerless onlookers: Lodwick in Edward III, Launce and Julia in her disguise as ‘Sebastian’ in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. At last, after admitting his wrongdoing and conceding failure, each faces the penalty of public revelation of his actions (E3 3.204–5; TGV 5.4.168–9).

  Bart van Es, in his study of Shakespeare’s professional career, claims that in the years immediately preceding his purchase of a share in the new Lord Chamberlain’s company at some point in 1594,60 Shakespeare was systematically honing his skills in the use of soliloquy and aside (Van Es, 64–75). A shared feature of both the Countess episode in Edward III and The Two Gentlemen of Verona is the reliance on soliloquy, confidential between the audience and a single character, to develop the emotions and calculations of the would-be seducer of his friend’s partner. Proteus’s developing obsession with Silvia can be traced through three soliloquies, at 2.4.189–211, 2.6.1–43 and 4.2.1–17. So inflexibly and selfishly does Proteus pursue his obsession with his friend’s betrothed that any attempt, however skilful and subtle, to steer The Two Gentlemen of Verona to a happy ending founders on the realization of how little known the Proteus we have heard in soliloquy remains to the characters eager to reintegrate him into the harmony of ‘One feast, one house, one mutual happiness’ (TGV 5.4.171; cf. E3 18.243 and n.). The chief point of contrast with Edward III is that where the infidelity and duplicity of Proteus drive the action of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Edward’s infatuation is confined to a single episode, albeit a disproportionately long one, and is later forgotten.

  Edward’s passion is similarly expressed in soliloquies at 2.191–213, 443–58 and 3.111–14. He also uses aside, heavily exploited in 2.94–166 and again in Sc. 3, to chart his fluctuating reactions. No less than 156, or more than one third, of some 400 lines spoken by Edward in Scs 2 and 3 take the form of soliloquy or aside. Soliloquy is further exploited to establish the reactions and points of view of Lodwick (2.167–89) and Warwick (2.513–34). In their use of soliloquy and aside, Scs 2 and 3 stand far apart from the rest of Edward III where soliloquy is rare, and more rarely self-revelatory, and aside seldom used. Their only sustained use is to intimate to the audience the growing misgivings of King John from the morning of the battle of Poitiers to his final discovery of the true sense of the prophecy on which he has mistakenly based his hopes (see 13.39–40, 15.1–10 and 18.214–15).