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"Edward III": A Play by Shakespeare?
From: Cambridge University Press
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Giorgio Melchiori |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
A major new play was claimed for the Shakespeare canon  by the 1998 publication of The New Cambridge Shakespeare's edition of "King Edward III." The editor of that volume, Giorgio Melchiori, Professor Emeritus of English literature at Universit` Roma Tre, argues that while Shakespeare is not the sole author of the play, he undoubtedly contributed a significant proportion of its words.
Melchiori considers the reasons that the play, which was almost certainly written at the end of 1592 or early the following year, might have been omitted from the defining 1623 Folio collection. And in outlining the collaborative nature of theatrical authorship in the 1590s, Melchiori throws light on the processes of writing for the Elizabethan stage. |
 he preliminary question is: why was a play of undoubted merit--whoever its author--so totally ignored for over two and a half centuries? The reason must be external to the play, connected with the history of the Elizabethan stage at large. It should be noted that the real "villains" in the play, boastful and cowardly, lacking all sense of honour, are not the French, but the Scots. Of their king Edward says:Ignoble David, hast thou none to grieve
But silly ladies with thy threatening arms? (1.1.136-7)
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And their greed, their "rough insulting barbarism," and finally their cowardice is exposed in 1.2.1-93, while the last scene of the play presents King David led prisoner on the stage. On the attitude towards the Scots in the last years of Elizabeth's reign Chambers quotes a letter sent on 15 April 1598 by George Nicolson, Queen Elizabeth's agent in Edinburgh, to Lord Burghley in London, informing him of the strong feeling of resentment of King James VI's court for the abuse of the Scottish nation on the English stage: |
It is regrated [= regretted] to me in quiet sort that the comedians of London in their play scorn the King and people of this land and wished that it be speedily amended and stayed, lest the worst sort getting understanding thereof should stir the King and country to anger thereat. |
Critics have looked for some satirical comedy of the period as the occasion for the Scottish protest, but no certain identification has been made. Is it not more likely that the offence was caused by a revival on the London stage of the recently printed Edward III, where scorn is poured on the King and people of Scotland? The fact that this was not a comedy, but a history, and that the appearance of the Scots in 1.2 provided the only comical episode in a humourless play, was liable to stir the anger of the people so mercilessly satirised. The only solution was to have the play "speedily amended and stayed," i.e. withdrawn from public performance. |
If such is the case, the 1599 reprint can be taken as an attempt by the publisher to get some profit from a play that was no longer to be seen on the stage, though its subject-matter had acquired a new topicality, thanks to the references to Edward in Henry V, triumphantly presented at the Globe in the same year. It should be noted that the new edition reproduces verbatim the noncommittal statement in the title-page of the 1596 quarto: "As it hath been Sundry times played about the Citie of London." |
This formula runs counter to the practice of mentioning the company owning the play at the time of publication, especially if it was revived in 1598 by a different company from that for which it was written, as may well be the case with Edward III, first performed presumably before the radical changes of 1594 in the London theatre world. It suggests that no company was then eager to claim the play. |
There was of course no question of lifting the ban (if one existed) on the play after the accession in 1603 to the throne of England of King James of Scotland, who may have originated the veto five years before. So after a time, although some booksellers still had copies in stock, the play would have been completely forgotten. |
Under such circumstances, even if Shakespeare had had a hand in the writing of Edward III, by the time Heminges and Condell prepared the 1623 Folio they would hardly have remembered or thought of including, alongside the early histories and comedies which were still alive on the stage, a play which had totally disappeared from it a quarter of a century before. This speculative account of the most likely reason for the disappearance of the play from circulation for such a long time leaves the question of authorship wide open: Shakespeare may or may not have been involved to a greater or lesser extent in the writing of Edward III. |
Play-books and plots
More relevant is an understanding of how professional players secured texts for public performance. While authors' names figured from an early time on title-pages of academic and other plays intended for private presentation or offered for performance by travelling players, until about 1597 the vast majority of plays presented on the public stage were published with no indication of authorship, but only of the companies that owned them. |
Up to the same date Henslowe's Diary entered only receipts from performances, with no mention of the plays' authors; from then on it began to record payments to playwrights, but in most cases they were to teams of three or more working on single plays, or to odd writers for "additions" to existing play-books. There could be no better evidence that play-writing for public playhouses was originally conceived as a collective endeavour, in which no doubt the actors themselves had the last word. |
This applies to the early work of the actor William Shakespeare, so that Gary Taylor's remark that "Shakespeare only wrote about 20 per cent" of The First Part of Henry VI (Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, 1987, p137) is far from unfounded, an implicit acknowledgement that some of the early canonical works of Shakespeare consecrated by inclusion in the First Folio bear evidence of multiple authorship. |
Collaboration in the writing of a "book" for the stage took different forms, comparable to what happens now in script-writing for film and television. The starting point must be in all cases what at the time was called the "plot," setting down the general outlines of the play (an essential "scenario") to which the different collaborators were asked to contribute. |
The "plotter" then assembled the various contributions, providing a first treatment, or at times indeed a "book," that is, a complete script, for submission to the players. They in turn would impose adjustments and changes in the text, answering further theatrical requirements, or even more substantial modifications (at times of a censorial nature). These "additions" could be entrusted either to some of the original contributors, or to others, including the actors themselves to whom the play had been offered. |
Though the manuscript Book of Sir Thomas More (1592-3) may be considered a special case, in view of the heavy censorial interference which prevented its acting and of the doubts as to the date of its many additions, it remains the best available evidence of the process of composition of play-texts for the public theatre. The original book was planned and transcribed in a fair copy by the man who enjoyed the reputation of being the "best plotter" of the age, Anthony Munday, with the help of one or two others (probably Henry Chettle and possibly Thomas Heywood, a beginner at the time). |
When this first treatment was submitted to a company of actors, a number of substantial changes were required, both for theatrical and censorial reasons, entailing the intervention, at different times, not only of Chettle and Heywood, but also of other young actor-playwrights connected with the company, namely Thomas Dekker and William Shakespeare, while a professional book-keeper was put in charge of inserting the new material in the book as well as of correcting and transcribing the additions. |
Composition as a communal activity
Edward III belongs to the same period and probably involves Shakespeare at least as collaborator. If we accept that this procedure--a "plotter" laying down the general outlines of the play and providing, possibly with the help of others, its first complete treatment, followed in turn by further interventions by the same or other writers intended to improve the stage-worthiness of the whole--was the current practice at the time, there is no reason to disbelieve that Edward III, or for that matter 1 Henry VI, the two Parts of The Contention between the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (later known as 2 and 3 Henry VI), and a number of other plays, especially histories, produced in the late eighties and early nineties of the sixteenth century, underwent a similar process. |
The "plotter" fulfilled a key function, since he had to select, conflate, and manipulate the historical sources for dramatic effect, but he could hardly be considered the author of the play in the modern sense of the word, because the guidelines he provided were not necessarily developed by him. In a way, the later revisers of the books, responsible for substantial additions and changes that gave the texts their final shape, have a stronger claim to authorship than the devisers of the original treatment. |
Composition as well as performance were communal activities in the Elizabethan public theatre. We should not, therefore, think of Edward III in terms of sole authorship whether Shakespeare's or one of the other numerous playwrights variously suggested as authors, or of collaborations between only two authors, carefully apportioning different scenes to the one or the other, or even of revision or rewriting by one author of a pre-existing work by somebody else. |
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