Shakespeare's Edward III: a consolation for English recusants.

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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With the publication of three new editions in the past five years, The Raign of King Edward the Third has reemerged as a prominent candidate for inclusion in the Shakespeare canon. (1) Nonetheless, the play still continues to be received with suspicion. Critics recognize it is written in a genre, the chronicle history, that Shakespeare dominated in his day and admit the play has the same variety of imagery, a similar texture of vocabulary, and verbal parallels to Shakespeare's other dramas. (2) Notwithstanding, few scholars are willing to embrace the play wholeheartedly as Shakespeare's own. The problem, they claim, is the play lacks dramatic unity. As they see it, the play appears to be divided into two poorly integrated halves. The first two acts focus on the king's campaign to seduce the Countess of Salisbury; then, the theater of operations shifts abruptly to France and the Hundred Years' War to detail the English conquests at Sluys, Crecy, Calais, and Poitiers. This largely unexplained bifurcation within the play between love and war, shame and honor, England and France, has cast the play and its playwright into disrepute for centuries, and it is upon this legacy of censure that skepticism about Shakespeare's authorship of the play has its most secure foundation. (3)

Among those who see Shakespeare's hand in the play, this perceived lack of dramatic unity has generated a wide range of special pleading. To explain this singular fact, A. F. Hopkinson has told us that Shakespeare's "sublime genius spurned at arbitrary rules and restraints," (4) that the two plots in themselves must be considered as separate plays, and as the dramatic unity in each is perfect, the play as a whole is therefore in Shakespeare's manner. (5) Kenneth Muir has told us that Shakespeare collaborated with another playwright, as yet undiscovered. (6) Melchiori and others have told us that Shakespeare contributed the king and countess scenes to a play already written. (7) J. J. M. Tobin has told us that Edward III stages an education of princes, its two episodes tied together by a concern for self-mastery. (8) And Eric Sams, to support his contention that past complaints about Edward lies lack of dramatic unity are overstated, has argued that "each [subplot] is adroitly aligned as a separate aspect of one single unifying topic, namely the rights and wrongs of vows and promises," (9) in the process conflating unity of theme with unity of plot. Such descriptions of "Shakespeare's" craftsmanship, however, leave this play a broken thing. In neglecting the rationale that necessitates the sequence of action, the play's defenders inadvertently confirm the century-old hypothesis that "[t]hough there may indeed exist a sort of interior connexion between the episode and the principal plot, yet it appears more than doubtful whether the link joining the two parts was easily, if at all, discoverable by the play-going public of the age." (10)

In actuality, this century-old hypothesis is unfounded. In sustaining it, critics do not merely consign this play to ignominy. Edward III is most cohesive as a brilliantly incisive critique of the official propaganda sustaining the persecution of English recusants after the Invincible Armada's defeat. Denying the unity of the play and thus Shakespeare's authorship perpetuates the myth of Shakespeare as a Tudor apologist unconcerned with the course of the English Reformation. Allusions to the Armada's defeat within Edward III have been used to date the play, but critics remarking on them have tended to assume that the play was originally written to exploit swelling patriotic feeling. (11) But this reading of the play is entirely too naive. Certainly to Elizabeth, as to other members of Shakespeare's audience who were educated in medieval history and who had seen in Mary's last year on the throne the loss of Calais, Edward's victory in France was but a temporary highpoint, a peak in the long and tumultuous Hundred Years' War. Just as educated viewers would have known that the Black Prince would break his health in later years while pursuing the claim to France, finally dying in 1376, so too they would have been aware that Edward III finally succumbed to his lust, wallowing in the shocking affair with Alice Perrers, misconduct which encouraged the Good Parliament to impeach the King's lack of restraint and introduce constitutional limitations on the monarchy. In ending Edward III at a high point in this monarch's history, the play's author was demonstrating to his audience how palpable was the enthusiasm that accompanied Edward's early French campaign; however, as his educated audience would have known just how transitory were the blessings of Edward's victory, the parallels between the victories of the 1340s and 1350s and 1587 to 1588 would have served as not so much a celebration of the past victory as a caution against contemporary enthusiasm.

The nature of the enthusiasm after the Armada's defeat was religious, specifically Protestant. For Protestants in England, the Armada's defeat had the quality of an apocalyptic moment, a manifestation of God's hand shielding his Chosen. In 1589, the courtier Richard Robinson began collecting treatments of the Armada's defeat circulating at court into his commonplace book, Robinson's Eupolemia, Archippus and Panoplia, that is to say his good warfare against Satan (1576-1602), British Library MS. Royal 18 A. 66. He opened his own description "Of the Spanish Navyes and English Fleetes Conflict upon the Coaste of England in anno domini 1588, and of Gods gracyous good Success given unto youre Maiestyes fleete over the sayde Spanish navy in August Anno thirty" with an exegesis of the event: "Most admirable and therefore most memorable are the mercyes of God son unto mankynde above all merite and expectation of Man, but specially towards those most often and appearently embracing his pure Religion to the advancement of His glory" (fol. [19.sup.v]). Quoting from Numbers 24:20 concerning the Israelites' triumphs over the Amekelites and Kenites, Robinson insisted the Battle of Gravelines was an occasion no less miraculous than the biblical Deborah's victory: "The same prophecy may be by all similitudes most aptly applyed unto the present action sent now at hand, as by the Spanish Amelek and Roman Kenite.... But praysed be the God of Hostes, of our English ships onely some 7 are worse for beyng by youre Maiestyes politike commandment" ([20.sup.r]). In Robinson's discourses on the Armada's defeat, Her Majesty Elizabeth emerges as both "the virtuous Deborah" who had "wonderfully overcome the Spanish Sicera, and put to flyght all his forces" and the "Holy Judith," who "conquered the huge hoste of the Spanish Olofernes, even by Gods powrefull extreme and your ffaythfull prayirs." The scriptural quotations in the margins become poems in themselves arranged to reconstitute the sinking of the Armada into an apocalyptic event by which God revealed his opposition to the Roman Catholic faith. (12)

Such interpretations of the event were hardly restricted to Elizabeth's court. In 1594, Henry Smith preached in Clement Dawes Church, "As surely as Ionah sought to arive at Tarshish, so surely the Spaniards thought to arive in England. But as Ionah's companie wondered at this tempest, so at these Spaniards destruction, their fellows at home wondered, how their invincible power could be destroied, but God is strong inough for them that kicke against him, and disdaineth to be crossed of dust and ashes." (13) Repentance was the theme, and it had domestic applications. It was antagonistic toward faith and not just nationality. Perhaps the intolerance is understandable. The sailing of the Armada was not simply an attempted large-scale invasion of the British Isles: it was a Crusade published first by Pope Gregory XIII and renewed by Pope Sixtus V designed to restore the Roman Catholic Church in England. The Cardinal Archduke Albert personally blessed the fleet and named it the "Armada Fortunata," and the Pope promised to finance one-third of the expenses of the fleet and offered full pardon and indulgence to those who joined it.

The rhetoric was widely available in English. In 1588, John Wolfe had printed in London The Holy Bul and Crusado of Rome: first published by the Holy Father Gregory the XIII, and afterwards renewed and ratified by Sixtus the fift: for all those which desire full pardon and indulgence of their sins, and that for little money, and Cardinal William Allen had printed in Antwerp A Declaration of the sentence and deposition of Elizabeth, the usurper and pretensed Queen of England. Framed as a fight between faiths, the Spanish invasion was also framed as a war of rightful succession. According to the Papal Bull, the illegitimate Queen Elizabeth had usurped the throne from the rightful ruler of England, Philip of Spain, the husband of the late Queen Mary and a direct lineal descendant of John of Gaunt. In response to Sixtus V's Bull of Interdiction, the Bishop of London, John Aylmer, excommunicated the Pontiff, and on 1 July 1588 Elizabeth issued the proclamation Against Bulles from Rome that identified the Holy Father as a foreign enemy.

In the atmosphere of a looming showdown over the course of the Reformation, the apocalyptic interpretation of the Armada's defeat actually began, oddly enough, in the year preceding it. In 1587, Thomas Greepe wrote a poem characterizing Sir Francis Drake's assaults on Spanish cities in the New World and Europe as victories "whereby it may be seen unto the world, that God which hath alwayes defended his servaunts in former ages hath not let to shew a miracle in these latter days." (14)

In praising Drake's victories in 1587 against greater numbers with the verses "If wynde and waves had not so wrought / Full deerely they theyr pride had bought," Greepe implied that the elements themselves were allies in Drake's cause, forged into obedience by God to advance the Protestant faith throughout the world. (15) This faith was shared by the English privateer himself, who in the concluding epistle appended to Greepe's poem, urged the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe to continue with his efficacious praying, "that our purpose may take that good effect, as God may be glorified, his Church, our Queene and country preserved, and these enemies of the trueth utterly vanquished, that we may have continuall peace in Israel." (16)

The rhetorical strategy already prepared, once the English fleet was victorious at the Battle of Gravelines and the rest of the Armada had been scattered or destroyed by storm at sea, balladeers, naval commanders, foreign governments, and prominent Protestant theologians immediately celebrated the event as a miracle rebuking the pride of Philip of Spain and illustrating the impropriety of the idolatrous Catholicism he espoused. The popular ballad writer Thomas Deloney entitled his 1588 ballad on the event "A joyful new Ballad, declaring the happie obtaining of the great Galleazzo, wherein Don Pietro de Valdez was the chief, through the mighty power and providence of God, being a speciall token of his gracious and fatherly goodnes towards us, to all that willingly fight in defence of his gospel and our good Queene of England." Those who served in the navy interpreted the event similarly. Writing to Sir Francis Walsingham from the Nonpareil on 29 July 1588, reporting on the Battle of Gravelines, Thomas Fenner declared that "God hath mightily protected her majesties forces with the least losses that ever hath been heard of, being within the compass of so great volleys of shot, both small and great." Fenner concluded his letter "not doubting that but the world shall know and see that her Majesty's little army, guided by the finger of God, shall beat down the pride of his enemies and hers, to his great glory." Not two hours later Fenner added...

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