A different kind of affinity exists between Edward III and Richard III, although fuller deployment of soliloquy and aside is intrinsic to Richard III, whose early action depends on the double vision afforded to the audience by Richard’s confidences. There are points of similarity between the Countess episode in Edward III and Richard’s two wooing scenes, 1.2 and 4.4.197–431, which lie outside the chronicle narrative derived from Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III (Bullough, 3.235–7). The first of these scenes, the fictional wooing of Anne Neville, widow of Prince Edward, son of Henry VI, is a virtuosic display of seduction. At its climax Richard urges Lady Anne either to take up his sword and kill him, or to order him to stab himself (R3 1.2.176–90). In Edward III, thinking herself trapped in a situation with Edward in which she faces dishonour, in a parallel action the Countess draws her ‘wedding-knives’ and suggests a double suicide (E3 3.165–85).

  Richard’s later attempt, after the death of Anne, to strengthen his hold on the crown by marrying his niece Elizabeth has historical warrant, though the circumstances in Richard III are of Shakespeare’s invention. Richard woos his sister-in-law and implacable enemy Queen Elizabeth to act as his go-between to his niece, her daughter. The dialogue between Richard and Elizabeth, ushered in by a passage of intrusive drumming, shows strong affinities with Edward III, specifically with the parallel scene of Edward’s attempt to bully and trick Warwick into becoming the seducer of his own daughter (2.459–512), to become his ‘mistress and [his] secret love’ (510). Warwick’s dilemma replicates that of Queen Elizabeth (R3 4.4.377–86) as she catalogues the results of Richard’s breach of his oath to God and of his allegiance to his brother Edward IV and his heirs. Both Warwick and Elizabeth see their predicament in similar terms by the end of each scene: E3 2.502–14, ‘WARWICK An office for the devil, not for man. / KING EDWARD That devil’s office must thou do for me … / WARWICK … Well may I tempt myself to wrong myself’; R3 4.4.418–20, ‘QUEEN ELIZABETH Shall I be tempted of the devil thus? / KING RICHARD Ay, if the devil tempt you to do good. / QUEEN ELIZABETH Shall I forget myself to be myself?’

  Rhetoric and vocabulary thoughout Edward III show links with R3 4.4 and include a few from elsewhere in the play. Specifically, the imagery of R3 4.4.423–4 matches E3 1.14–16; the dilemma of Prince Charles at 11.15, ‘Villiers, I will not nor I cannot do it’, echoes ‘I/It cannot’ and ‘I/It will not’ in R3 3.7.206 and 4.4.410–11; the musical conceit at E3 2.287–8 recalls the ‘ground’ and ‘descant’ of R3 3.7.48; ‘contemplation’ at R3 3.7.93 appears at E3 2.136; ‘slaughterhouse’, R3 4.1.43, and ‘immured’, 99, appear at E3 6.117 and 2.343; ‘suborn’, R3 4.3.4, and ‘attorney’, 4.4.127, 413, 5.3.83, at E3 2.610 (‘subornation’) and 547. The weight of armour (E3 1.159) and the disruptive noise of drumming (3.46–59) are topics at R3 4.4.189–90 and 149–51, while the conflict of divine law and human will (E3 2.421–36) recurs at R3 4.4.337–86. Rhetorical display takes the form of a seven-line anaphora on ‘For’ at R3 4.4.98–104, and of a nine-line epistrophe on ‘sun’ at E3 2.321–8.

  The most familiar kind of material adduced as evidence for authorship consists of parallels of vocabulary, phraseology or collocation. The caution of E.H.C. Oliphant is, however, apposite: ‘ “Some of our brightest intellects” have succumbed to “the baleful influence” of “the deadly parallel” ’.61 The most thorough display of such material is in the edition of Eric Sams, which enumerates Shakespearean parallels (including those with 1, 2, 3 Henry VI) on the clear assumption that they constitute in themselves the strongest kinds of evidence for his authorship of Edward III. The commentary of this edition is indebted to the assiduity of Sams, but offers only a selection of his findings, together with more from other authors who have been canvassed as putative part-authors of the play, Marlowe and Kyd among them. The foregoing account of various indicators of multiple authorship and of the participation of Shakespeare in particular portions of the play should serve as a structure within which to assess the likely significance of such material.

  It has long been known that the language of Edward III brings it into close proximity with the three parts of Henry VI. What is less certain, since the widespread recognition that Shakespeare throughout his career engaged in the common practice of collaborative playwriting, is whether verbal parallels, especially with 1 and 3 Henry VI, signify possible links with Shakespeare, or with one or more of his alleged collaborators. If, for example, the division of 1 Henry VI between Nashe, Kyd (or Marlowe) and Shakespeare were correct, especially if the latter’s role were redefined as that of reviser of a pre-existing play and limited to a mere three scenes in it, then parallels in Edward III, if deemed significant, might announce the presence of any one of the collaborators. Similarly with 3 Henry VI, not all the many parallels on record need point towards Shakespeare, though in this instance no provisional division of authorship yet commands assent.62 We reach safer ground with Richard III and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, frequently cited in the commentary, where Shakespeare’s sole authorship is uncontested and other grounds exist for positing direct connection with Edward III.

  Other early works of Shakespeare which figure largely in the commentary, especially on Scs 2 and 3, are The Rape of Lucrece and the Sonnets (neither yet published in 1593). Discussion of particular sonnets, most notably 94, by Melchiori and others63 indicates much more than a superficial verbal link with the Countess episode in Edward III. The relation of Edward III with Lucrece may be even more intimate, if we read the behaviour of the Countess as constituting some level of critique of that of the Roman heroine. Unlike Lucrece, however, Edward III cannot be seen as aiming at gravity, and the rhetorical bravura of the poem is reflected only sporadically in the play. Most striking is the accumulation of sententiae, quotable aphoristic lines, in Warwick’s successive formal arguments for and against his daughter’s acquiescence in the King’s request that she become his secret mistress (2.523–32, 550–77 and 596–623). Sententiae are also significantly present in Lucrece, to the extent that they are sometimes marked in the 1594 edition by the conventional sign of double inverted commas before such lines.64 Bodenham’s Bel-vedére (1600) recognized that Edward III is rich in sententiae as it picks for quotation no fewer than twenty-three sententious sayings from the play. All but three of the quotations in Bodenham’s florilegia come from Scs 2, 3 and 12, with one from the passport section of Sc. 11 and three from Sc. 18 (see Appendix 1).

  Summary

  On the evidence, a revision of Edward III in 1593–4 was undertaken that entailed the replacement and expansion, based on Painter, of a lost earlier version of the Countess episode closer to Froissart’s briefer and simpler account of the matter, in which the Countess’s honour is never seriously jeopardized and the King gets over his infatuation with her without risk of murder or perjury. It seems highly plausible that the reviser was Shakespeare. This view, posited by R.L. Armstrong,65 won the support of Melchiori (Cam, 184–96).

  The revision may be imagined in two stages. The first introduced Warwick, preparing for his crucial role at 2.459–625 by adding him to Sc. 1, where – not having entered – he is placed in the action by the explicit details supplied at 1.132–5. His meeting with his daughter early in Sc. 2 is brief and silent and contains at 94 a direct echo of 1.132. The last reference to Warwick, like his appearance in Sc. 1, is designed to locate him within the military action, but having been appointed ‘Warden of the North’ (3.199) he is neither seen nor heard of again, even in Sc. 10 when it is a new character, Percy, who relays news from the Scottish borders.

  Once Warwick had been added, it must have become apparent that some counterpoise to the moral quagmire of the King’s strategy of seduction was required as a safety-net and a premonition of a happy outcome. This took the form of Lodwick, a fictional character built from hints in Painter, in whose story Edward’s Secretary performs a number of his functions. Lodwick’s arrival on the scene is abrupt. He both mocks the superficiality of the King’s passion and is presented as an external witness to his folly. Even when the conflict between military honour and lawless desire reaches its height in Sc. 3, if we do not expect a bloody outcome it is in part because of the extent to which first Lodwick, then Audley and Derby, have distanced us from the King and illuminated the absurdity of his behaviour.

  Even if Shakespeare is rightly identified as the originator of further piecemeal revisions, they are less easy to fit into any imagined sequence of composition. Shakespeare’s possible revision of Prince Edward’s speech at 12.40–65 would certainly add interest to any evidence for him in other passages relating to the Prince. It is possible that the arguments about the relative value of life and honour in Sc. 2 are his, in which case their recurrence in Scs 8 and 12 may also owe something to him. Stronger links connect the conflicts of loyalty and obedience in the passport scenes with those of the Countess and her father in Sc. 2. Here, however, it is necessary to avoid building conjecture on the foundation of a prior conjecture, and to accept that any firm conclusions are unlikely.

  Other authors

  Once Shakespeare is posited as a reviser of Edward III, what is to be said of its original authors? Rather than engage with yet more statistical and verbal detail, we may instead imagine the story of the inception and composition of Edward III from the point of view of the playwrights most frequently invoked in connection with it. Though no apology is needed for concluding that the plotting of Edward III was the work of a highly skilled and experienced professional playwright, the same cannot be said of the poetic style of the play, which may be experienced as fluctuating between the dramatically engaging and the pedestrian. Readers of its workmanlike but in some ways perfunctory first and last scenes are in no way prepared for the very different level of engagement experienced elsewhere, notably in the Countess episode. To invoke the names of the best-known playwrights of the early 1590s may seem naive or optimistic, but is congruous with the fact of the play’s survival in print and the opinion of Capell that it is a remarkable achievement for its date.

  Marlowe

  As discussed earlier (see pp. 46–7), Marlowe’s Edward II and The Massacre at Paris appear to bear some relation to Edward III. No record survives of early performances of the former, but the latter enjoyed, on the evidence of Philip Henslowe’s accounts, a successful place in the repertoire of the Rose playhouse, where it was regularly recorded from 30 January 1593 (Foakes & Rickert, 20; the play was also known as The Guise). It is imaginable that this success led to the commissioning from him of a further historical play, a sequel to Edward II dealing with the reign of his son. Though Marlowe’s plays set up a pattern of contrast rather than similarity with Edward III, avoidance of self-repetition is characteristic of his dramatic writing.

  How much of Edward III might have been on paper and in what form by 30 May 1593, when Marlowe met his sudden and violent death, can hardly be ascertained, but the presence of his hand has been claimed in much of the military plot.66 The scenes in question dramatize Edward’s defiance of the French King and his claim to the throne of France (Sc. 1), his victory at sea (Sluys in all but name) and landing on the Flemish coast (Sc. 4), his destructive progress through northern France (Sc. 5), the battle of Crécy (Scs 6–8) and the siege of Calais (Scs 10, 18). Such a progression may recall the first part of Tamburlaine, though without the escalation of antagonists in Marlowe’s play. Like Tamburlaine, Edward III lacks sustained comic relief, nor is there mention in its printed editions of the publisher’s omission of ‘fond and frivolous jestures, digressing and … far unmeet for the matter’ (1Tam, printer’s dedication, 9–10). In the manner of Tamburlaine, the action of Edward III comprises principally a series of offstage victories by the protagonist and his son, Edward, Prince of Wales. Consulting at least Holinshed’s Chronicles, in its amplified second edition of 1587, and Lord Berners’s English translation of Froissart’s Chroniques, Marlowe could have followed the sequence of military events familiar from Ocland’s Anglorum Praelia and its English version by Sharrock, which in turn may have had the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia (which Marlowe himself translated) as a structural model.

  In recent decades the case for Marlowe’s participation in Edward III has been most powerfully and persistently urged by Thomas Merriam. In 2000, Merriam proposed that ‘the divergence of Acts II and IV [of Edward III], on the one hand, and Acts I, III, and V on the other, is suggestive of a framework supplied by Marlowe, reworked and added to by Shakespeare, possibly after Marlowe’s death in 1593’.67 His evidence includes graphs to demonstrate the points in the text where a change of authorial hand could be clearly discerned, nowhere more sharply than between Scs 3 (2.2) and 4 (3.1).68

  In Mueller’s list of n-grams across over 500 plays from the mid-sixteenth century to 166269 which show the most links with Edward III, Marlowe figures strongly. The top ten plays are, in descending order of frequency, 3 Henry VI (6.3%), Edward II, 1 Henry VI, Alphonsus King of Aragon (Greene), Richard III, 1 Tamburlaine, King John, A Knack to Know a Knave (anonymous), 2 Tamburlaine and The Massacre at Paris (4.11%). Mueller cautions against regarding the level of linkage as of high significance: ‘From a frequency perspective, I would say that not much is going on here. Genre seems to be the factor for the plays at the top [of a very much longer list]’.70 It would be fair to state, however, that in writing 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, The Massacre at Paris and particularly Edward II, Marlowe had certainly acquired the skills needed to shape and modify an often rambling or inconsequential historical narrative into dramatic action.71

  Kyd

  This exercise in conjectural history in respect of Marlowe leaves a further round of questions and speculations. Was the play planned by Marlowe or his employers as a collaboration? If so, with whom? Kyd and Nashe might, if available, have been desirable co-authors. In the aftermath of Marlowe’s murder on 30 May 1593, Kyd admitted to having at one time shared a workspace with him, leading to some confusion about ownership of papers.72 Like Marlowe, Kyd had achieved fame in the late 1580s, in his case with the perennially popular Spanish Tragedy, whose revenge plot ends with an amateur tragedy in which the killings are real. He followed about 1590 with Soliman and Perseda, an extension to full length of the story used for the murderous playlet in The Spanish Tragedy. His English version of Cornélie (printed in 1594), a neoclassical tragedy by the French poet Robert Garnier, offers a number of striking parallels with Edward III, chiefly its early war scenes, 4 and 6. Some critics have also found the battle narratives of Edward III, especially the naval battle in Sc. 4, closely analogous to Kyd’s battle narratives in The Spanish Tragedy, and it is in the sequence that stages the battle of Crécy that a SD in Edward III uses a formula familiar in Kyd, ‘Then enter’ (7.0.3: see Soliman and Perseda [1592/3], ed. Lukas Erne, MSR (Manchester, 2014), xvi, n. 44). Together with Marlowe and Nashe, Kyd has been proposed as one of the co-authors of 1 Henry VI, which has a close affinity with Edward III (see pp. 48 and 49).

  The case for Kyd’s involvement in Edward III, originally made in 1963 by Guy Lambrechts, has been revised and revived by Vickers.73 Using a programme called ‘Pl@giarism’, Vickers compiled an impressive list of ‘rare’ n-grams that appear in all scenes except Scs 2, 3 and 12 (which he attributes solely to Shakespeare). His hypothesis concerning Edward III is part of a wider project, to establish Kyd’s authorship of a larger canon, including Arden of Faversham, Fair Em and King Leir, together with parts of 1 Henry VI – setting aside Act 1 for Nashe, and 2.4, 4.2 and 4.5 (4.4 Ard3) for Shakespeare.74 The phrasal links strengthen the case for Kyd’s presence in Edward III, especially where most frequent, but they cannot support Kyd’s authorship of the entire play other than Scs 2, 3 and 12 for the reasons already explored in the earlier section on n-grams (pp. 58–62). If Kyd wrote any of Edward III it was most likely before he was imprisoned and subjected to torture in 1593. He died the following year.

  Peele

  The stylistic analysis of George Peele in Charles Forker’s introduction to The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (Manchester, 2011), 11–28, which he accepts, on the evidence of Vickers’s matching of phrases, as Peele’s, makes it clear in how many respects the style of Peele differs from that of Edward III. Peele has figured less in recent investigations than Kyd or Marlowe, though Brooke’s attribution of Edward III to him (Brooke, xxiii), later modified to ‘Edward III (1596), in which there are some good reasons for seeing Shakespeare’s hand’,75 still has supporters (see L. Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare (2012), 170). Any case for Peele would take as its point of departure the fact that his known plays share several concerns with Edward III: David and Bethsabe revolves around adulterous love and its consequences; the action of Edward I dramatizes the creation of the title of Prince of Wales (of which the Black Prince was only the third holder); while The Battle of Alcazar dramatizes sixteenth-century warfare – the anachronistic model for the battle narratives in Edward III, with their pikes and naval gunnery.

  Nashe

  How would it haue ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and haue his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.

  (Nashe, 1.212)