SOURCE: Champion, Larry S. “‘Answere to this Perillous Time’: Ideological Ambivalence in The Raigne of King Edward III and the English Chronicle Plays.” English Studies 69, no. 2 (April 1988): 117-29.

[In this essay, Champion uses the example of the anonymous play The Raigne of King Edward III to argue that the chronicle play resonated in different ways with different strata of the audience.]

The Raigne of Edward III, published anonymously in quartos of 1596 and 1599, has been described as ‘one of the finest examples of the chronicle history plays’,¹ ‘the most academic and intellectual’² and the ‘most interesting and controversial’ play in the Shakespeare Apocrypha.³ The association with Shakespeare dates back to Edward Capell in 1760, and subsequent critical arguments have been mounted both for his sole authorship (most recently Wentersdorf, O'Connor, Hart, and Bell)⁴ and for his role as collaborator or reviser (Muir, Kozlenko, Chambers, Ward, Koskenniemi, Mincoff, Leech).⁵ The play also has been attributed in its entirety to others, most notably Peele and Kyd.⁶

Whatever the authorship, Edward III is a part of the remarkable outburst of plays in England in the 1590's dealing with past English rulers. It is traditional to attribute this hybrid dramatic form to a tide of patriotism cresting in the struggle against Catholic Spain; it ‘seeks to inspire in its auditors the impulses of pride in country and patriotism’.⁷ Coleridge envisioned these plays as arousing ‘a love of liberty, and a respect for all those fundamental institutions of social life, which bind men together’.⁸ Dealing with the fate of a nation,⁹ they furnish ‘examples of the political course of the world, applicable to all times’;¹⁰ they provide a political mirror¹¹ concerning the science of government and the art of politics.¹²Edward III, we are told, is ‘a continuous illustration of warrior honor’;¹³ it ‘breathes the spirit of nationalistic feeling that was particularly strong in the years immediately after the victory over the Armada’;¹⁴ its real subject is ‘the national prestige in its steady progress from Crecy to Poitiers and from Poitiers to the conquest of Calais’;¹⁵ one of the ‘most ardent patriots, certainly, of his generation,¹⁶ its author effectively utilizes French history ‘as a foil to display the glory of English arms’.¹⁷

Viewed in this light, the theme of the play is the education of a king who in time becomes a glorious ruler, a theme that extends as well—at least in terms of the heroics of war—to his son the Black Prince. He who is to rule a country effectively must be able to rule himself, a lesson Edward painfully learns in overcoming and repudiating his lust for the Countess of Salisbury; he also, with Queen Phillip's aid, must master his vengeful desire to annihilate his enemy and must learn that mercy and peace are attributes of martial magnanimity. Edward, in a word, must learn both publicly and privately that the king's law must subserve moral law.¹⁸ Just so, his son must learn independence in battle; thrice his father refuses to send aid to rescue the Prince in order to ‘season his [son's] courage’ (3.5.39),¹⁹ to require him to vanquish death and fear ‘And ever after dread their force no more’ (55). Yet another theme, in such a view, reflects the fundamental liberty of the English citizen in its depiction of the limits of obedience to the king. Edward, in the face of the Countess' threatened suicide, is ultimately forced to admit that he has no authority over his subject's moral convictions, as is the French king when he challenges the validity of his son's pledge of safe passage for an English earl. Through such an experience, we are to suppose, those in the audience corporately sense a ‘strong current of national feeling’, a kind of ‘embodiment of England's glory’²⁰ as they witness ‘a providential view of history in terms of the official Tudor interpretation of earlier events’²¹ from a playwright unmistakably ‘on the side of authority’.²²

The essential flaw in such an approach is that it assumes not only a universal perspective but also an audience basically sympathetic to the monarchy and its policies and prompt to respond communally and patriotically. In reality, the broad range of social classes represented by the spectators—some ninety-four percent dealers, craftsmen, laborers, and servants—would in all likelihood reflect a wide variety of attitudes toward government. That it was primarily a ‘working-class audience [reflecting] the great numerical superiority of the working classes in London’²³ would not, of course, necessarily indicate a gathering either disruptive by nature or one critical of the monarchy. Nevertheless, if the response indeed had been monolithic, the authorities would not have been continually alarmed about the public theaters as ‘centers of potential social unrest and as dens of iniquity which made people restive’.²⁴ Admittedly, for the aristocracy and the London authorities, the surface political ideology of chronicle play after chronicle play provides a ‘rationalization of [the] class's social position and material interests’;²⁵ but, as D. M. Palliser observes, such a cult of monarchism ‘reflects a position in need of buttressing rather than one of unassailable strength’.²⁶

It is difficult, at best, to envision commoners, alongside their social betters, responding in patriotic exaltation to plays that focus on political ideas that are so ‘deeply rooted in the emotions of the age’.²⁷ England in the 1590's was sorely troubled and divided, suffering from ‘famine, discontent, faction, and social dislocation’.²⁸ As London's population increased, for example, so did the number of ‘idle persons and masterless men’, to more than thirty thousand by the turn of the century.²⁹ Inflation was rampant as prices rose seventy-nine percent between 1559 and 1602;³⁰ the price of firewood in the same period shot up almost three times that of general prices. Wages, meanwhile, in most counties remained almost unchanged from 1580 to 1640. One demonstrable effort to keep a pool of cheap labor available to support the aristocratic system was the Statute of Artificers, passed in 1563, which stipulated that children should not be allowed to depart from the occupation of the parent; and as late as 1610 ‘any able-bodied man or woman who should threaten to run away from his or her parish was liable to sent to the house of correction and treated as a vagabond’.³¹ Even so, with the deterioration, both relative and absolute, of the peers' income and their capital holdings in land, ‘respect for their titles and their authority was diminished’.³² In this ‘class society in crisis’³³ the development within the family of ‘affective individualism’, which Lawrence Stone describes as the most important change in social mentality in the last thousand years, produced a ‘decline of loyalties to lineage, kin, patron and local community’ and the corresponding rise of a family ‘organized around the principle of personal autonomy’.³⁴ Generally the evidence suggests that England during this time was ‘relatively cold, suspicious, and violence prone’ (p. 102). Given such volatile conditions, it is understandable that the government was ‘obsessed with the fear of revolts, riots, and armed assaults’³⁵ as the rampant individualism of both the old aristocracy and the most aggressive section of the bourgeoisie began to offer a very real challenge to the monarchy.³⁶

Within the past two decades or so critics have steadily chipped away at the assumption that the history plays were written as little more than dramatic panegyrics.³⁷ If one is still hard pressed, though, to perceive a full reflection of the social backdrop of the late sixteenth century in most commentary, he must remember that criticism begets criticism. As Malcolm Evans has recently noted, the ‘text is never simply itself, but what it has become, the encrustation of all previous criticism’;³⁸ and the ‘reconciliatory strategy of conventional literary scholarship has been committed to a view of literature as a benign, and thus culturally and politically innocuous, institution’.³⁹ To be sure, critics of Edward III for many years have worked within variations of the assumption that the plays affirm and support—or at very least do not defy—the Tudor establishment.

For a spectator inclined to view the action from another perspective, however, the political ideology is radically different. The point is not that Edward III or any other drama of the period mirrors the contemporary social background in any precise or exact manner, but that the spectator's response to the political issues of a particular chronicle play would inevitably be affected to some extent by his own social status and his attitude toward monarchic authority. To the degree to which one wishes to find it, a glance beyond the monarchophilia and patriotic glitter reveals a sordid world of political treachery, a play in which putative honor bows to greed and kingly solicitude is transformed into political exploitation, an aristocratic world of self-seeking oath-breaking, a king for a time satiated with lust to the point of utter neglect of political responsibilities, a world foregrounding the horrors and brutalities of a war with, as its special prey, commoners unwittingly victimized by confrontations within the power structure of their society.

One dominant characteristic of this society is that individuals, acting as political and pragmatic policy dictates, time and again publicly renounce loyalties or silently fail to adhere to previously stated principles. The impetus for Edward's interest in France, for instance, comes in the opening lines from Robert of Artoys, banished from France and newly created Earl of Richmond in England. His urging of Edward's right to the throne—immediately following the conferral of his English honors—can hardly be the act of high moral principle he claims:

Perhaps it will be thought a heynous thing,
That I a French man should discover this,
But heaven I call to recorde of my vowes,
It is not hate not any privat wronge,
But love unto my country and the right
Provokes my tongue thus lavish in report.

(1.1.30-35)

He piously declares that his true duty lies in defiance of the French king, John of Valoys, and in helping to secure the throne for the ‘true shepheard of our commonwealth’ (41). To the contrary, however, his fellow countryman, the Duke of Lorraine, brands him a ‘Traytor’ and a ‘viper’ (107), his views as ‘poysoned’ (119); and he must be physically restrained from attacking the renegade even in the presence of the English king. That political expediency rather than principle dictates the action is suggested, as well, by precisely what Edward does not say. As the sole surviving descendant of King Phillip of Bew through his mother Isabella, Edward must surely have had prior thoughts about his right to the French throne; yet he claims that his breast ‘was rakt in ignorance’ (46) before Artoys' counsel. Now that he is aware of his right, he proclaims that those who resist his sovereignty will find their necks yoked with steel. Obviously he considers the occasion of Artoys' pronouncement at court the opportune moment for asserting publicly his intention to expand the kingdom. It little concerns him that he, too, will be forsworn in the action, a point made explicitly clear in King John's later statement that Edward had joined with him in ‘solemne covenant’ and that in moving against France the ‘fugitive’ and ‘theevish’ Englishman has ‘infringed [his] faith [and] / Broke[n] leage’ (3.3.56,57,62-63). And there is yet another irony. When Edward violates his oath with France in order to declare war with that nation, he justifies his action as noble and righteous; but, when King David of Scotland shortly thereafter violates his oath with England in order to declare war on that nation, Edward brands the action treacherous, tyrannical, and ignoble (1.1.28,33,40). Apparently it is not a matter of right and wrong but of convenience and political perspective. This same kind of political casuistry is evident in Prince Phillip's peremptory dismissal of Edward's claim to the French throne, even if it should happen to be valid: ‘bring he nere so playne a pedegree, / Tis you are in possession of the Crowne, / And thats the surest poynt of all’ (3.1.112-14).

In only three instances in the play are characters true to their pledged word, and each case seems to reflect a fundamental incompatibility between honor and survival in this highly politicized stage world.⁴⁰ Warwick, for instance, gives his oath to perform any task whatsoever for Edward to remove the king's long-standing melancholy, only to discover that he has pledged himself to serve as pander to his own daughter. Only because the Countess has the willpower to reject his counsel and preserve her honor does the earl retain a moiety of dignity and self-respect. Honor, however, is more costly for the Frenchmen Villiers and Charles, Duke of Normandy. Villiers, captured by the Earl of Salisbury, ‘sweare[s] by [his] faith’ (4.1.39) to procure for his captor safe passage through the enemy lines in return for his freedom; and he later insists that he must return to captivity unless Charles will honor the agreement:

[I]n an othe we must be well advised,
How we do sweare, and when we once have sworne,
Not to infringe it though we die therefore.

(4.3.41-43)

Charles, likewise, must subsequently argue the point with his father, threatening to fight no more if he cannot be ‘a soldier in [his] word’ (4.5.97). In both cases the relationship of a subject's integrity to his allegiance to his king is the crucial issue. Villiers asserts that monarchic powers are limited, that he is not bound to obey a royal command that would encourage or bind him ‘Not to performe the covenant of [his] word’ (4.3.34); King John argues the counterposition, that it lies in the king's power to affirm or revoke a subject's word and that no subject actually breaks his oath who ‘keepes it to the utmost of his power’ (4.5.91). While in these instances Villiers and Charles prevail and are true to their word, the overriding irony is that both examples of such integrity form a part of a military disaster provoked by terrified French soldiers who interpret a solar eclipse as an omen of divine displeasure.

In at least three other instances loyalty is all-too-obviously for sale. Except for the French ‘cunning guide’ who leads Edward through the shallow of the Somme River, the divisions of the English forces could not have joined for the decisive battle against the French; Gobin de Graie's reward is both freedom and ‘five hundred markes in golde’ (3.3.1,10). Similarly, the high rhetoric of political alliance—the aid and support that Bohemia and Poland have pledged to France ‘as league and neighborhood … when friends are in any way distrest’ (3.1.42,43)—quickly dissolves into the reality of ‘plentiful reward in Crownes, / That from [France's] Treasory ye shall receive’ (51-52) and the promised division of the loot of battle. Even royal command assures no obedience when the spoil is a conquered Scottish king; John Copeland, in open defiance of Queen Phillip, drags his prey all the way to France to ensure his reward from Edward himself—knighthood and ‘five hundred marks a yeere’ (5.1.101).

If the pervasive pattern of oath-breaking and commercialized loyalties foregrounds a world of unprincipled self-seeking, the pattern of monarchic conduct is equally startling when one looks beyond the traditional view of the doting romantic lover who matures into an idealized political leader. Most importantly, Edward's lust for the Countess of Salisbury endangers England's security. In hot pursuit of the Scots who have invaded his country, he vows with a ‘cheereful cry … [to] chase them at the heeles’ (1.2.101,102). And, in anticipation of his own invasion of France, he has just dispatched Audley and his son Ned to levy soldiers and Derby to solicit support from European allies. Action collapses precipitately on all fronts when he first sets eyes on the Countess. The Scots scamper home unscathed, and Edward's military leaders are left in utter consternation. Derby's report that the Emperor of Almaigne has agreed to join in league with him is met with confused mumblings, ‘Would it were the Countesse’ and ‘Thou lyest she hath not’ (2.2.28,30); and Audley must stare in amazement as Edward peremptorily dismisses the charge of ‘horse and foote’ (33) he has just organized. It is hardly likely that the line, ‘Lets leave him to his humour’ (41), could have been delivered without a note of sarcasm bordering on disdain.

Moreover, various other characters call the spectators' attention to Edward's failures as a king. His confidant Lodwicke, for instance, observes in an aside that Edward's blush in the Countess' presence is that of immodest shame (‘to waile his eyes amisse being a king’ [2.1.17]), his paleness that of guilty fear (‘to dote a misse being a mighty king’ [21]). She herself accuses him of committing high treason against God in his desire to violate the marriage bond (23.2.261,264) and later comments privately that this ‘corrupted judge’ shall tremble for his ‘packing evill’ when called before the ‘universall Sessions’ (165,167,168). Warwick, too, brands him a ‘doting King’ (2.1.352); he concurs in his daughter's assertion that honorable death is preferable to a polluted life and specifically denounces Edward's sin as the abusive use of royal power:

The greater man, the greater is the thing,
Be it good or bad that he shall undertake …
That sinne doth ten times agrevate it selfe,
That is committed in a holie place,
An evill deed done by authoritie,
Is sin and subbornation.

(440-41,447-50)

In this regard, Edward informs Lodwicke that, because of his ‘greene … thoughts’, his counsel house or cabinet shall be a summer arbor, his estate her footstool; that which heretofore has been considered sin shall now be deemed a virtue (65,106,116). Later, in France, John taunts Edward as ‘a belly god’ given over to ‘tender and lascivious wantonnes’ (3.3.159,160).

The numerous references to sinful conduct and neglect of political responsibility flatly confound any attempt by the perceptive spectator to pass off the incident as but an episode of Edward's salad days, a romantic flirtation from which he ultimately gains a sense of self-control. To the contrary, this strain of proud willfulness dominant in the affair of the flesh seems to possess Edward throughout the remainder of the play. For one thing, considering his earlier crass manipulation of moral values, one is prone to see his claim that God has directly aided him in his struggle against France as simply another example of self-serving arrogance:

Just dooming heaven, whose secret providence,
To our grosse judgement is inscrutable,
How are we found to praise thy wondrous works,
That hast this day given way unto the right,
And made the wicked stumble at them selves!

(3.5.6-10)

If Prince Edward's later pronouncement that ‘heaven aides the right’ (4.9.14) can perhaps be excused as a moment of youthful naivety and patriotic exuberance, the father demonstrably has had far too much practice in the art of manipulating both the metaphysical and the human to permit such an assumption.

This same manipulative pride leads King Edward to a willingness to sacrifice his son's life in battle against the French. Determined that Ned shall demonstrate his worthiness for knighthood, he refuses to aid the prince despite successive implorations from Artoys (‘Tis impossible that he should scape / Except your highnes presently descend’ [3.5.15-16]), Derby (‘oh succour him / Hees close incompast with a world of odds’ [20-21]), and Audley:

Renowned Edward, give me leave I pray,
To lead my souldiers where I may releeve,
Your Graces sonne, in danger to be slayne.
… [H]e cannot free him selfe.

(27-29,34)

Edward curtly denies Audley's request; in fact he threatens death to anyone who attempts to provide aid. His crass comment that his son is laboring for a knighthood and that, should he die, ‘[W]e have more sonnes / Than one’ (24-25) smacks more of a fanatic devoted to a heroic ideal than of a father / king concerned either for the safety of his child, the proper lineal descent of his kingdom, or the outcome of the battle. And for those who make the connection, there is a terrible irony in the fact that, in time, the next in line to receive the crown—Richard II—will eventually give it up without a fight. That Ned on this occasion fights through to victory erases neither the irony nor the parental indifference. Indeed, it sets up an even more blatant irony in Ned's thankful assumption in the final lines that his father ever ‘hath bin his strongest shield’ (5.1.226). Edward, in character to the end, makes no effort to disenchant him.

Yet another motif that appears to undercut a grandly patriotic reading of the play is the consistent depiction of the horror and futility of war, regardless of the victor. For all the vaunted nobility in Edward's and John's counterclaims of righteousness and strength of purpose, war's true face surfaces time and again, whether in Edward's flippant comment that his embracing the Countess of Salisbury in an unlawful bed is less sinful than ‘to hacke and hew poore men’ (2.2.123) or in French and English taunts on the battlefield: Before John will resign the crown, the ‘field shallbe a poole of bloode, / And all our prospect as a slaughter house’ (3.3.120-21); the English power, in response, will transform John into ‘one that teares [France's] entrailes with [his] handes, / And like a thirstie tyger suckst her bloud’ (124-25) It is seen again in the fact that, of the forty men with Salisbury granted safe passage by Prince Charles and ultimately by King John himself, the great majority are slaughtered by the time they reach Edward's camp. And it is seen when Ned—surrounded, outnumbered, and expecting to face death at any moment—concludes that life in such a world is a mere idiot and the ‘imperiall victorie of murdring death’ a sham; ‘to live or die I hold indifferent’ (4.4.158,166).

Reports of actual combat center not on cause and principle but on the specter of agony and grisly death. A French mariner reports that the naval engagement prior to the English landing turned day to gloomy night:

Purple the Sea whose channel fild as fast,
With streaming gore that from the maymed fell,
As did her gushing moysture breake into,
The cranny cleftures of the through shot planks,
Heere flew a head dissuvered from the tronke,
There mangled armes and legs were tost aloft,
As when a wherle winde takes the Summer dust,
And scatters it in middle of the aire.

(3.1.168-75)⁴¹

Edward subsequently threatens to destroy Calais with ‘fire and sword’ (4.2.76), to ‘Put all to the sword, and make the spoyle your owne’ (5.1.11). When six wealthy merchants offer themselves as scapegoats for the city, his order that their bodies be dragged around the walls and then quartered is averted only by the Queen's convincing him of the pragmatic value of mercy in leading the people to acknowledge him as king. His vicious side bursts forth again less than two hundred lines later when he vows to exact dire revenge for the presumed death of his son:

[A]ll the Peeres in Fraunce,
Shall mourners be, and weepe out bloody teares,
Untill their emptie vaines be drie and sere …
The mould that covers him [shall be] their Citie ashes,
His knell the groaning cryes of dying men.

(173-75,177-78)

The spectators can conclude only that, if it served his purposes earlier to accept his son's presumed death with calm equanimity, it serves his purpose now to use such an event to justify a new round of general carnage.

Most significant, considering the multiple audiences of the chronicle play, is the plight of the commoner in this aristocratic world of conflicting political interests. While the members of the upper class would likely have seen nothing amiss in the casual references to the deaths of nameless and numberless commoners, viewing such scenes as mere background for the actions of those who move society, many in the galleries and the pit would probably have been sensitive to the depiction of the bourgeoisie and the peasants as the real victims of the war in terms of both life and livelihood. One catches the note of disregard in Ned's report of battle casualties carefully listing princes, barons, knights apart from the rest; even more revealing, the tabulation indicates one thousand commoners lost for every titled individual (31,000 to 211). Victims of a different sort are the ‘wretched patterns of dispayre and woe’ (4.2.14), the ‘deseased, sicke and lame’ (20), who, unfit to serve in defense of the besieged city, are forced out of Calais to save the expense of their food. Perhaps the most compelling view of the commoners' plight is a group of men and women fleeing from their homes with what possessions they can carry on their backs. They have no idea which side is winning; they know only that ‘envie and destruction is so nigh’ (3.2.14) and that, whoever wins, their lives and sustenance are totally disrupted. Within moments their worst fears are realized as it is reported that ‘Slaughter and mischiefe’ are afoot and that the ‘unrestrained make havock’ throughout the countryside (54,55). Cities, cornfields, and vineyards are burning; and many of the poor folk who escape the flames meet their deaths on the soldiers' pikes. Desolation is universal: ‘Here if you staie your wives will be abused, / Your treasure sharde before your weeping eies’ (74-75).

Clearly, chronicle plays like Edward III were ‘problematically multivocal’,⁴² ‘confirming the Machiavellian hypothesis of the origin of princely power in force and fraud even as it draws its audience irresistibly toward the celebration of that power’.⁴³ The playwrights, in order to succeed, developed dramatic strategies that would interact inherently with the social strata in the audience, forging ‘a language and a means of representation that would satisfy a heterogeneous audience representing diverse loci of power and support’.⁴⁴ The Queen and her court circle, the London authorities with their puritanical readiness to censure anything overtly seditious or decadent—both elements had to be considered if the play was to find its way on stage. But, once there, the action had to hold the interest of a broad public drawn primarily from the artisan and working classes who comprised the economic basis for the theater's vitality and survival. While the playwright was not free to create on stage an arrant subversion of authority (and perhaps had no desire to do so), what he could and did do was to develop mimetic strategies to explore critically the sources of authority, in terms of both its social divisions and its manifestations regarding a monarch's personal life. Edward's wantonness, more specifically, would strike some in the audience as tantamount to malfeasance; such spectators would recognize all too well that ‘a ruler's personal life might easily become a public one’.⁴⁵ The rupture between signs and significations, between the rhetoric of ceremony or authority and the actuality of its deeds can reveal a hollowness or depravity at the center without stating anything that was likely to be construed by the authorities as directly critical of the political process.

The date of Edward III probably falls somewhere between 1588 and 1596.⁴⁶ While more certainty regarding the earlier date might strengthen the argument for Shakespeare's authorship or at least for a greater degree of artistry in comparison with other dramatic productions of the late eighties, the more important point is that the play forms a part of a general movement in the English chronicle play toward a new mode of historical inquiry. This new historiography, which developed in British intellectual life between 1580 and 1640,⁴⁷ moves beyond Ciceronian platitudes about history's moral utility, beyond the services of didacticism in a reflection of a providential view of human events, beyond history as a response to the tide of patriotism following the Armada, beyond history as a tool of the Tudor political establishment. Embodying their own internal dialectic, these plays begin to view history as a process of change, as self-determined, as a struggle between aristocratic houses and the monarchic state, between military and civilian interests, as a conflict regarding matters of succession and inheritance—a view of history, in a word, founded in ideological confrontation.

The anonymous Edmund Ironside (1588-1600) offers another example. This play begins and ends with Edmund Ironside, King of England, and Canutus, King of the Danes, issuing counterclaims of rightful power; and traditional criticism views Edmund as a glorious and magnanimous Anglo-Saxon ruler. From a slightly different point of view, however, with the plot peppered with indecisive battles, church officials fighting among themselves, and the kings dividing up the land after fomenting countless confrontations, the effect is to strip the concept of kingship bare of legal and spiritual mystification and to focus attention more on the futility of political conflict than on monarchic glory and patriotism. Not only is neither ruler sufficiently powerful to establish peace and social order; both also in falling prey to the flattery and self-serving advice of the villainous Edricus fail to harken to wise counsel, and the consequence is mass slaughter of English commoners, for whom the aristocrats in the play indicate a general disdain and disregard.

The final act of Shakespeare's King John provides another illustration of the chronicle playwright's delineation of historical process as human process; government and society are reduced to the chaos of individual machination at worst and an unstable nexus of conflicting self-interests at best. Any pretense that the Dolphin is leading an invading French army as champion of the Holy Church against the heretical English king collapses when he refuses Cardinal Pandulph's command to ‘wind up’ his ‘threat'ning colors’ once John is reconciled to Rome. Nor do the defecting English lords fare better when, learning that the Dolphin plans to execute them for their efforts, they rush back to John affirming their full loyalty. John's capitulation to Rome, in the face of his earlier vaunted assertions of English independence, strikes the spectator as nothing less than treason, a desperate effort to save his life and his kingship; moreover, his death throes reveal not a hint of remorse or spiritual sensitivity. As for the Roman Church, John's poisoning by a monk is but the final treacherous deed of an institution that has acted throughout the play not on spiritual but temporal principle. Faulconbridge is little more than a hero by default. Given control of the English forces, he leads John's army to at best a stand off with Lewis; and his rousing assertion that England shall never fall so long as Englishmen are true to one another is grimly ironic in light of the ravages of civil war that lie in the future. Prince Henry hardly emerges as one to ‘set a form upon [this] indigest’; he utters not one word about the advancing French army, and the tenderhearted nature revealed in his tears of thanks to his nobles is, in context, more reflective of naive youthfulness than of leadership potential. Through this refusal to provide the comfort of closure Shakespeare seems consciously and methodically to deconstruct any sense of providentialism in the chronicle play, raising expectations only to leave them unfulfilled as the governmental process grinds to a virtual halt. His future Henry plays bear further witness to the development of this vision—with martial valor counterpointed by the pragmatics of survival in one, political efficiency counterpointed by a gradual but inevitable process of dehumanization in another, and the heroics of national ambition counterpointed by occasional glimpses of the price of that dehumanization in yet another.

‘Reinstalled … in their historical context’,⁴⁸ such chronicle plays refuse to be bound by a particular design or ideology. They are as rich and ultimately as contradictory as the motivations that generate human action; and, precisely for this reason, they fulfilled the complex demands of the contemporary public-stage audiences. Edward III, in the final analysis, offers little guidance of shaping of events in such a manner as to delimit the meaning or significance of history, and the spectator individually is forced to come to terms with the welter of contradictions and conflicting ironies. He may leave the theater assuming that the playwright has depicted the canker at the very heart of monarchical government and hierarchical society, convinced that the play encodes an attack upon the Tudor establishment to which the general public would be attuned. He may, on the other hand, be convinced that the play is not an attack upon monarchism itself but on its delusions of limitless power, that the struggle between the King and his nobles effectively denigrates the excessive ambitions of both ruler and aristocracy. He may believe that the play above all exhibits the grave dangers of depraved leadership, or of political division, or of civil dissension, or of nationalistic imperialism run wild. He may believe that the play affirms England's greatness, or that it suggests a potential glory limited only by the degree to which rulers fail to bridle their lusts or subjects fail to share a monolithic political vision. He may, of course, leave the theater in a muddle, confused at his inability to bring consistent moral values to bear on a political situation in which ‘Sinne though synne would not be so esteemd, / But rather vertue sin, synne vertue deemd’ (2.1.115-16). The rare spectator might well leave the theater with precisely that conviction, but without the confusion, envisioning the play dispassionately as an artistic assertion of a new historiography and a refusal to reduce to simplistic absolutes the complex ambiguities and the human frailties—and the human corruption—inherent in any political process.

Whatever the individual perception, Edward III stands as evidence that the history play appealed both to the elite as a ratification of monarchism and the privileges of class and to the commoner as an instrument of criticism and agitation. The text of such a play, with its varied range of social responses, is itself a form of history as process,⁴⁹ shaping the events of the past into a mimesis that provided for the lower and middle classes a sense of temporary social release within a framework in which the aristocracy would perceive nothing seriously in violation of the constraints of orthodox politics.

Notes

1. John S. Lewis, ‘The Rash Oath in Edward III’, Allegorica 1.1 (1976): 269.

2. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1944), p. 131.

3. Inna Koskennieme, ‘Themes and Imagery in Edward III’, Neophilologische Mitteilungen 65 (1964): 446.

4. Karl Wentersdorf, ‘The Date of Edward III’, Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965): 227-31; Frank O'Connor, The Road to Stratford (London, 1948); Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne, 1934); Mary Bell, Unpublished Thesis, U of Liverpool, 1959.

5. Kenneth Muir, ‘A Reconstruction of Edward III’, Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953): 39-47; William Kozlenko, Disputed Plays of Shakespeare (New York, 1974); E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1930); A. W. Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, 2 vols. (London, 1889); M. Mincoff, Review of Shakespeare as Collaborator by Kennth Muir, English Studies 43 (1963): 216-18; Clifford Leech, Review of Shakespeare as Collaborator by Kenneth Muir, N & Q NS 8 (1961): 156-7.

6. Peele: C. F. T. Brooke, The Tudor Drama (Boston, 1911); Kyd: G. Lambrechts, ‘Edward III, Oeuvre de Thomas Kyd’, Etudes Anglaises 16 (1963): 160-74.

7. F. E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama (Boston, 1908), 1: 251.

8. S. T. Coleridge, Literary Remains, ed. H. N. Coleridge (London, 1836), 2: 165.

9. H. B. Charlton, Shakespeare, Politics and Politicians, English Association Pamphlet 72 (Oxford, 1929), p. 8.

10. A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art, trans. John Black (London, 1889), p. 419.

11. L. B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, 1947), p. 15.

12. J. A. R. Marriott, English History in Shakespeare (London, 1918), p. 25.

13. R. L. Armstrong, ed., The Raigne of King Edward III, Six Plays Related to the Shakespeare Canon, ed. E. B. Everitt and R. L. Armstrong (Copenhagen, 1965), p. 197.

14. Wentersdorf, p. 231.

15. Brooke, Tudor, p. 332.

16. C. F. T. Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford, 1918), p. xxiii.

17. Schelling, Drama, 1: 411.

18. Convinced of his right to the crown, Edward must also be perceived as ‘delivering a worthy French nation from tyranny’ (David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics [Cambridge, 1968], p. 201). Both Tillyard (p. 169) and Lewis (p. 269) focus more specifically on the carnal lust that poses a deterrent to this effective rule, and Lewis notes the popularity of the theme in other plays of the period. See also W. A. Armstrong, Elizabethan History Plays (London, 1965), p. ix.

19. References are to the edition of The Raigne of Edward III by Herbert Farjeon in The Complete Works of Shakespeare (New York, 1929).

20. Brooke, Tudor, p. 331.

21. Tillyard, p. 320.

22. M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (New York, 1961), p. 84.

23. Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (New York, 1941), p. 90.

24. Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (New York, 1986), p. xiv. Henry Crosse observed in 1603 that plays provoked spectators to ‘execrable actions, commotions, mutinies, rebellions’ (Vertues Common-wealth: or, the Highway to Honour [London, 1603], Sig. Q₁); another wrote in 1597 that the theaters provided a meeting place for ‘contrivers of treason and other idele and daungerous persons’, citing especially the ‘mutinous attempts’ of apprentices and servants (E. K. Chambers and W. W. Greg, eds., ‘Dramatic Records of the City of London: the Remembrancia’, Malone Society Collection, 1, Part 1 [Oxford, 1907], pp. 76,80).

25. Paul N. Siegel, Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays: A Marxist Approach (Rutherford, NJ, 1986), p. 16.

26. The Age of Elizabeth: England Under the Later Tudors 1547-1603 (London, 1983), p. 301.

27. E. W. Talbert, The Problem of Order (Chapel Hill, 1962), p. 121.

28. Palliser, p. 27.

29. Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530-1780 (New York, 1967), pp. 31-2.

30. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 139; see also R. B. Outhwaite, Inflation in Tudor and Early Stuart England (London, 1969).

31. Hill, p. 41.

32. Stone, Crisis, p. 164.

33. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1986), p. 104.

34. Family Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York, 1977), p. 7.

35. Palliser, p. 309.

36. Siegel, p. 80.

37. Bevington discusses in some detail the ‘analysis of ethical responsibility’ which acts in Edward III as a unifying theme. Koskenniemi, on the other hand, envisions the unity in a series of images that radiate from the concept of the education of the king—for example, images of school, learning, and teaching, the vocabulary of law in images of right and wrong, the sun as an image both of the Countess' beauty and also of the king's responsibility, images of war in the sense of both internal and external conflict, and images of courtship and marriage (pp. 451, 455, 458). Playwrights, to make such plays ‘convincing and compelling’, dealt openly and sometimes problematically with the ‘nature of a commonweal, the nature of the many and the few, the requirements for kingship, the necessity for good advice’ (Talbert, p. 121). On Shakespeare's histories, see the recent work, for example, of Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968); H. A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, 1970); Michael Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play (Syracuse, 1973); Graham Holderness, Shakespeare's History (Dublin, 1985).

38. Signifying Nothing: Truth's True Contents in Shakespeare's Texts (Athens, 1986), p. 34.

39. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (London, 1985), p. 13.

40. Lewis observes that a pattern of a rash oath followed by a contradictory oath that releases one from the binding power of the first occurs in all three sections of the plot—the Scottish invasion, Edward's succumbing to lust, the war in France—and functions as a unifying element in the play.

41. Wentersdorf argues that this report of the Battle of Sluys is modeled on reports of the English victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588; cannon is not known to have been used until much later than Sluys, and the name of a ship mentioned by the mariner—the Nonpareil—was one of Elizabeth's ships in the fight against the Spanish (pp. 228-30).

42. Raymond Williams, Afterword, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, 1985), p. 238.

43. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion’, Shakespeare's Rough Magic: Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erikson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark, 1985), p. 298.

44. James H. Kavanagh, ‘Shakespeare in Ideology’, Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London, 1985), p. 151.

45. Talbert, p. 92.

46. 1588: Wentersdorf, p. 231; 1596: A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1933), 5: 276. Evaluations of the quality of the play vary as widely as do opinions on the date. ‘Totally lacking in dramatic coherence’ to Brooke (Tudor, p. 331), it is ‘a finished product’ to J. A. Symonds (Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama [London, 1884], p. 44), ‘easily maintaining the literary excellence of the plays on Henry VI in the qualities of spirited dialogue, picturesque phrase, and occasional poetical sentiment’ (F. E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play (New York, 1902), p. 60). Ward, both in History (2: 224) and in Cambridge (5: 273), claims that there is a disjuncture in the plot between the love scenes and the war scenes, the one taken from William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure and the other from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles. On the other hand, Robert Metcalf Smith (Froissart and the English Chronicle Play [New York, 1915], p. 70) argues that John Froissart's Chronicles, which includes both elements of the story and which was translated early in the sixteenth century by John Bourchier, second Lord Berners, was the source of the entire play.

47. F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580-1640 (London, 1962), p. 300.

48. Derek Longhurst, ‘“Not For All Time, But For an Age”: An Approach to Shakespeare Studies’, Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson (London, 1982), p. 159.

49. Williams, p. 238.