Edward III - Women

Gendered beings,

I'm struck in this play by the two women, who I think stand out a bit because there are always so few active women in these history plays. I remember Cindy writing about Constance during our discussion of King John, celebrating the verve both Constance and Queen Eleanor brought to the play.

In her book Shakespeare and Women, Phyllis Rackin writes, "It is interesting ... to compare Shakespeare's treatment of warlike women in his early history plays with their far more sympathetic treatment in the anonymous contemporary play Edward III. This play is sometimes attributed to Shakespeare, and it even appears in recent editions of his collected works, but it has yet to achieve a secure place in the Shakespearian canon, and its female characters are depicted in strikingly different terms from those in the canonical Shakespearian history plays. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Joan is both the chief enemy to the English kingdom and a witch as well. In Parts 2 and 3, Margaret is a bloodthirsty adulteress. the more sympathetically depicted female characters in Shakespeare's history plays, such as the victimized women in Richard III and the Duchess of Gloucester and the Queen in Richard II, never go to war, they play no part in the affairs of state, and they seem to spend most of their limited time on stage in tears. Helplessness seems to be an essential component of female virtue in most of Shakespeare's English histories.

"Edward III, by contrast, depicts courageous women warriors who are also models of feminine virtue. The Countess of Salisbury resists the Scots king's siege of her castle and the English king's assault on her virtue with equal courage and resolution. The English queen, equally virtuous, leads her army to victory over the Scots at Newcastle, 'big with child' but still 'every day in arms' (4.2.40-6). In Edward III, warlike English women defend their country against foreign threats. In Shakespeare's English history plays, warlike women embody those threats" (48-49).

I think Constance, and the attributes Cindy discussed, would satisfy Rackin's point about the embodiment of threat. I'm looking harder for a Shakespearean character who is similar to the Countess. Certainly none exists in the history plays. But what about Isabella in Measure for Measure? (I'm a couple weeks away from reading this play for my Folger experience, so if no one has any thoughts, I can revisit the question then.)

And finally, does Rackin's differentiation between the English women in Edward III and the English women in Shakespeare's history plays, ring true?

Randall

RE3: Edward III and Historical Myth

Randall writes:

Ernst and all,

That's an interesting question about the genesis of theme. As a high school teacher, I spend a lot of time encouraging students to look at a text's implicit values. Do I suggest they are all intentional? No. A writer may completely avoid establishing thematic coherence as part of the creative process and think nothing of it. Themes, we suggest, emerge. But is the expectation that writers concern themselves with narrative coherence merely a product of a certain way of looking at literature? Or can we assume that all playwrights work toward a satisfactory narrative. If a writer establishes the most basic structure -- a beginning, middle, and end -- doesn't that imply a beginning, middle, and end of something?

Taking Edward III specifically, are we looking at the beginning, middle, and end of Edward III's battle for France? Or the beginning, middle, and end of a personal and public crisis in his life? Or the beginning, middle, and end of the rise of Edward the Black Prince? Can the playwright(s) in this case be expected to have asked themselves, "what story are we telling?"

Beyond the simple, we talk about comedy and tragedy, among the generic conventions of which we find a narrative component, a relationship between order and chaos and a transition from one to the other. Certainly, history plays can challenge narrative coherence, pre-determining a character's biography, choices and actions, the existence of social order and chaos, and even the public's attitude toward the story's figures and events. Perhaps history plays expose an author's creative process more completely precisely because history has provided a template by which we can observe narrative choices, deviations, amendments, agreements. And when we can put our finger on an author's choices we can determine attitude.

For me, that provides a connection between narrative coherence and theme. For example, in 1348, a third of the English people died from the plague, eight years before the battle of Poitiers. The Edward III playwright chooses to leave out Edward's successfully getting his people through this portion of English history. Did the ravages of the disease not fit the warrior story? Is reference to the plague box office suicide? Does the play let us explore the possibility that the real challenges of leadership come from within or from other people, rather than forces of Nature? The Edward III playwright does include Edward's interaction with the Countess of Salisbury, which he gets from William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566). Again, he has a choice: either depict the temptation as Painter did (Edward is single, the Countess a widow) or retain the historical fact that both are married. The latter path addresses Edward's stature as a hero in the story. Can we move from that to the idea that the story has something to say about heroism?

Ernst has given us on a number of occasions the suggestion that Shakespeare may approach his stories from the standpoint of a question: why would a character act this way? That question has been quite fruitful for me in reading the plays. With Edward III, though, I don't find adequate exploration of the Countess sequence. I don't find a clear foundation for Edward's harsh refusal to rescue the younger Edward in Act 3, scene 4 (Audley says, "O cruel father"), and by the end of the play I'm uncertain about the kind of person I'm expected to associate with Edward. I certianly don't feel that way about Henry V or even Henry VI or, to extend beyond Shakespeare, Thomas of Woodstock.

One last thought: given that this play may have undergone some revision, which may account for the possible Shakespearean passages, we might even have a greater right to expect a narrative coherence and the resultant emergence of some thematic coherence, as playwrights work to smooth the story into a pleasurable, and marketable, piece. On the other hand, too many cooks may spoil the soup, but with this play it's hard to tell which situation we have.

Randall

RE2: Edward III and Historical Myth

Ernst writes (from Rome):

It could be said to boil down to the matter of how consciously coherent that play we have in front of us is. It is clearly episodic, and, at the same time, a sense of coherence can be derived from it. I have limited belief in some of the themes here, not that they don't make sense looking at later plays. How, indeed, do themes develop in a playwright's mind? Are they consciously planned out in advance, or do they arrive slightly after such a play has been written and thought about?

I lean out a window in a stone building not far from the Campo di Fiore here in Rome--in order to catch an open website to deal with.

Ciao Amici,
Ernst

RE: Edward III and Historical Myth

Randall writes:

Edwardians,

Gil asks, in his "Edward III and Historical Myth" posting, if Edward III's seeming disconnect between Edward's seduction sequence and the "heroic victories on the killing fields of France" isn't analogous to the transition from the Eastcheap and Falstaff sequences to "the emergence of the militarily unprepared Prince Harry as he arms to fight Hotspur at Shrewsbury." I don't think the analogy holds, though, for two reasons.

We are led to make some comparison by the opening scene of Edward III, where Edward, seeking a legal foundation for his battle with France, discusses his right of rule with Robert Artois. Edward's claim will rest on the fact that his mother is the sole heir of France's previous king, Philip LeBeau, his three sons having died without issue. France, of course, denies her claim due to Salic law, which excludes women from inheriting the throne. This is the same Salic law that Henry V learns has exploitable loopholes allowing him to make his claim on France with "right and conscience." Hence, both plays begin by justifying England's right to do battle in and for France, a predictable bit of national propaganda in two plays that present great historical English victories.

Once we have similar starting points it is easy to extend the comparison to the two kings. In Edward III and Henry V, though, we get two very different rulers. Edward's lapse into temptation and attempted seduction represents a deviation from his role as king, putting his success in France at risk. In fact, at the moment that he becomes smitten with her, he says:

What strange enchantment lurked in those her eyes,
When they excelled this excellence they have,
That now her dim decline hath power to draw
My subject eyes from piercing majesty
To gaze on her with doting admiration? (1.2.102-106)

Giorgio Melchiori, in his footnote to this passage in my New Cambridge edition, points out the contrast between "subject" and "majesty." In short, Edward is unkinged by his lust ... um, admiration ... for the Countess. (And it's no surprise that in unwittingly wielding this power over him, the Countess has been cast as a witch by the playwright's use of the word "enchantment." As we learn from Joan of Arc in Henry VI or Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, women who exert power over men can only be in league with the devil.) And this is where the comparison between Edward and Hal begins to fall apart for me.

Both men face publicly acceptable and unacceptable paths to their future. Edward begins on an acceptable path (rightful king pursues legal claim to greater territory and national pride) but deviates to an unacceptable path (seduction of chaste, married woman, a personal rather than public goal inappropriate for someone who wields the royal "we" and the moral obligations that go with it). Gil reminds us that our comparison begins not with Henry V but with 1 Henry IV, where Hal is hanging out in a tavern, plotting robberies with scruffy ne'er-do-wells. Hal, then, has begun on the unacceptable path, as noted bitterly by his father ("riot and dishonor stain the brow/ Of my young Harry"). By the end of 1 Henry IV though Hal has moved to the accepted path, defeating Hotspur and distinguishing himself in battle. Even before the final showdown between the two Harrys, Sir Richard Vernon, who might be seen as a sort of public voice, acquaints Hotspur with Hal's kingly qualities:

...let me tell the world:
If he outlive the envy of this day,
England did never owe so sweet a hope
So much misconstrued in his wantonness. (1 Henry IV, 5.2.68-71)

Ah, "misconstrued." We're asked to finally recognize what Hal has been arguing all along -- that his "wantonness" is part of an essential path to kingship. Or, as Hal puts it,

Yet herein I will imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. (1 Henry IV, 1.2.204-210)

So, Gil asks, is the disconnect between the two worlds, the two paths of each character, so different? I think so because while Edward's represents a clear deviation from (and therefore a challenge to) his success as a king, Hal's is not. Instead of being unkinged by his association with Falstaff and his cohorts, it has made him a better king. As he tells the emissary from the Dauphin in response to the gift of tennis balls in Henry V, "we understand [the Dauphin] well,/ How he comes o'er us with our wilder days,/ Not measuring what use we made of them" (1.2.266-268). To turn this around, what use is Edward's temptation by and attempted seduction of the Countess? In the second half of the play, does his emergence from the temptation reveal him to be something stronger, greater, or more aware than he was? No.

In fact, and this would be my second reaction to the comparison, Edward's disappearance as a main character in the second half of Edward III shifts the emphasis on to Edward the Black Prince. While 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V keep a fairly strong focus on Hal's journey, mitigating a division between Hal's experiences in the tavern and his experiences on the battlefield, Edward III emphasizes the disconnect between its two parts with a significant character shift. This reminds me of the focus on events rather than on central character that we found in the Henry VI plays, and if we agree with Gil about Edward III's probable placement between those plays and the Henry IV and Henry V trilogy, that would make some structural sense. Ernst suggested we spend some time comparing this play to the Henry VI trilogy, "especially with regard to the nature and depth of Edward III's characters." I throw that out there for anyone willing, and I'll leave it at this: while Shakespeare's second set of Henry plays treats Hal like an epic hero, this play, Edward III, is more like the first set of Henry plays, a dramatic mirror for magistrates.

Randall

[Quotes: 1 Henry IV from Folger edition; Henry V from Signet edition; Edward III from New Cambridge edition.]

Edward III and Historical Myth

Gilbert writes:

“Edward the Third, my lords, had seven sons,” genealogist York explains to the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury (2 Henry VI, II.ii.10), though I hope these are not the same Warwick and Salisbury who are the father and husband of the Countess in Edward III. “Edward’s seven sons … were as seven vials of his sacred blood,” laments the Duchess of Gloucester, widow of number six, Thomas of Woodstock (Richard II, I.ii.11-12).

The Plantagenets (Lancasters and Yorks) put historian Holinshed to work full time; when the eldest son, Prince Edward, the Black Prince (so called because of the armor he wore at Crecy), died, his son, Richard II, became king. The third son, Lionel of Clarence, was the grandfather or great grandfather of Edmund Mortimer, heir presumptive of Richard (remember Hotspur taught a starling to cry “Mortimer” to bedevil Henry IV). Son number four was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, whose son, Henry Bolingbrook, was acclaimed King Henry IV, father of King (Saint) Henry V, in turn father of Henry VI. The fifth was Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, patriarch of Edward IV, father of Edward V (the prince in the Tower), and brother of crook-backed Richard III, and of an Elizabeth who married Richmond who usurped the throne as Henry VII, father of Henry VIII, who fathered Edward VI, Bloody Mary, and Elizabeth I, and whose sister Margaret, married James VI of Scotland (James I of England), Shakespeare’s quasi patron, who may have suppressed Edward III as anti-Scot.

Got that? Therein are nine of Shakespeare’s plays (until we find manuscripts of plays of the histories of William of Hatfield and William of Windsor, sons number two and seven, The Two Bills?).

If Shakespeare did not write Edward III, he should have. It is the cornerstone of all the bloodlines I have just outlined, and thus a necessary part of what Randall called “English monarchical myth building.” More important is “stage-ability,” English attitudes toward “honor, chivalry, leadership, political expediency.” I find a draft of Henry V here, the military coming of age of Prince Edward, his Agincourt-like victory against odds at the battle of Poitiers, arrogant and insulting French (three Heralds offer a horse and a prayer book instead of a tun of tennis balls), a siege of Calais (with a glance at Harfleur) threatening annihilation, but elevating to mercy.

If Edward III dates to 1594, it would follow the Henry VI’s (and my ear finds its verse more mature), but precede Richard II and the Henriad. If this is accurate, then rather than merely being a draft of Henry V, it prefigures the whole Henry IV progression—the Hal-like Gadshill hijinks slightly in a class with temptation of seducing the Countess, then the apotheosis of patriotic heroic victories on the killing fields of France by the father & son Edwards. There is more chivalry in Edward III—Salisbury’s safe passage is the prime example. Edward III is a bifurcated play, but isn’t Eastcheap and Falstaff almost as disconnected as the emergence of the militarily unprepared Prince Harry as he arms to fight Hotspur at Shrewsbury? So, I’d like to explore coming-of-age, and also the touch of skepticism about honor and politics (if you remember, I think Henry V is the perfect politician, manipulating perception, rather than embodying the perfect warrior). I’ll try to look at Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets” before I proceed.

Gil

Edward III - Connections

Ernst writes:

Here's a copy of an introduction to Edward III from William Kozlenko’s Disputed plays of William Shakespeare, which contains more connections to other Shakespeare plays than could sink an oil well. I think Kozlenko considers the play as having been written a bit later than I do.

(Click on the images to see an enlarged version of the pages.)

RE3: Edward III - Authorship

Ernst writes:

I could envy Derek’s coming stay in Basel, a city famous both for its metabolism and for its love of smallish, light-brown Siberian dogs, which accounts for their saying “Chow” every time they turn around.

I also sympathize with Derek’s impatience with contemporary (but already dead) criticism. Bah! My father’s dissertation was on German translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets for Hyder Rollins at Harvard—a sadly narrow topic in certain respects—good for only a few notes in Rollins’ book on Shakespeare. My father who was also far better educated and more brilliant than his son, never got to teach Shakespeare. The Shakespeare course had already been taken over by a woman at Hobart and William Smith, where he had been invited to establish a Harvard-like Western Civ, program. And though he was English Department Chair for years, he honored the woman’s claim to the course.

And so it goes.

Ernst

RE: Edward III - Opening Thoughts

Ernst writes:

My first response to Edward III was how wonderfully clear the iambic pentameter is—clean, efficient, tremendously easy to follow. Having read (at one time or other) all the surviving English plays written between the mid fifteen hundreds and 1615 or so, I should have something of an “ear,” but I wouldn’t trust it too far.

To me, however, the play feels as it was written around 1589-90. Shakespeare, who, people argue convincingly, surely had a (considerable) hand in it, would have been around 25-26 at the time, married for a number of years and with two children—old enough to have a relatively firm sense of himself as a writer. The chief playwrights of and before the time were John Lyly (fading from favor at the Court), Robert Greene (who wrote competent blank verse), Thomas Kyd (who wrote The Spanish Tragedy in 1587—our melodramatic sense of which may be affected by Ben Jonson’s later, over-the-top additions) and, most sensationally, Christopher Marlowe, whose Tamburlaine plays were an earth-shaking event for the English Theater.

I felt that the characters were pretty flat. What strikes me as Shakespeare’s abiding question in most of his history plays (“What sort of character would do these sorts of things?”) goes largely unanswered. But I found the language that these flattish characters speak to be—often—quite delightful. I could certainly feel Marlowe in the grand posings that sprinkle themselves through the play—especially its earlier parts. Confrontations like those between Kings John and Edward in III.iii remind me of similar confrontations in Tamburlaine—most especially those between Tamburlaine and Bajazeth, or Cosroe, or the coalition of emperors who try to stop his rise to power. Phrases like “Fairer are thou than Hero was;/Beardless Leander not so strong as I,” etc. (II.ii) remind me of Tamburlaine’s apostrophe to his beloved Zenocrate, or the mention of the stars, “When, to the great star-chamber o’er our heads,/The universal session calls to count/This packing evil…” sounds like Marlowe (and foreshadows King Lear).

The cute/clever wordplay reminds me a good bit of Lyly: the carefully balanced remarks such as:

COUNTESS
As easy may my intellectual soul,
Be lent away, and yet my body live,
As lend my body, palace to my soul,
Away from her and yet retain my soul.
My body is her bower, her court, her abbey,
And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted;
I I should lend her house, my lord, to thee,
I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me. (II.i.236-243)

Like Lyly for adults, not for the children who generally performed his plays. And there is also stichomythia, the bouncing back of lines echoing and answering other lines, a typical Lylyesque trick:

Edward: Thinkst that thou canst unswear thy oath again?
Warwick: I cannot; nor I would not if I could.
Edward: But, if thou dost, what shall I say to thee?
Warwick: What may be said to any perjured villain… (II.i.327-330)

There is a good bit of this Lylyesque word-play in Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labors Lost. It would be good to think of those two plays when trying place Edward III in context, as it might be good to compare the plays to the Henry VI plays—especially with regard to the nature and depth of Edward’s characters. There are certainly echoes of situations and character types that Shakespeare uses in this play throughout his later work. I will try to get to that next broadcast. Also, the play mentions two (relatively early, less complex) types of Malcontentedness (my dissertation topic)—Edward being a lover’s-melancholy sort of “malcontent” in his dealing with the Countess, and King Charles referring to England as harboring “malcontents,/Blood-thirsty and sedition Catalines,/Spend-thrifts and such as gape for nothing else/But change and alteration of the state.” Robert Greene put himself forward as having been a “malcontent” in 1592. And the word had been used by both Lyly (jokingly) and Marlowe (darkly) only a year or two earlier than 1590. And Robert Greene was probably returning to England and “ruffling out [his] silks in habit of a malcontent” at about the same time.

Many people seem to think that Shakespeare wrote many of his sonnets during the mid-1590’s, but one wonders how many of them he got started with earlier. The play’s often-mentioned use of the phrase, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (Sonnet 94) makes one wonder whether Shakespeare was writing sonnets more vigorously during these early years than many suppose. The order in which the sonnets were written is very much up in the air.

Finally, I enclose with this post a discussion of Edward III I pulled from the Internet.

Ernst

Edward III - Character Matters

Randall writes:

I opened our discussion of Edward III with some questions about structure and contemporary attitude. I'd like to add a few inspired more by the play's characters.

Where does the Countess of Salisbury fall in our experience of Shakespearean women and/or Elizabethan or Tudor drama? Is she a type, a stock character? Or is she more fully developed? Given the usually peripheral roles women tend to play in historical dramas (Joan of Arc and Margaret in Henry VI, Lady Percy in Henry IV, Katherine in Henry V, Queen Isabel in Richard II, and Lady Anne in Richard III), how does the Countess shape our experience of Edward? If you were to pick an actress to play her in your production, who would it be?

Edward undergoes a grand temptation in Act 2, then retreats to occasionally worrying about or stoically ignoring his son. Is he the play's central character? (If not, who is?) As an audience presented with a piece of our vital history, what does this particular king teach us? Given our modern desire for stories with central heroes or at least clear protagonists, how do we react to an Edward III?

And Edward, the Black Prince. I guess if you've got a Hal, you can have a Ned. Despite the many parallels though, our Ned is not quite so deftly realized in the text. How is the prince not like Hal? What makes him fit to be king? What impresses the playwright most about him?

Does King John of France emerge at all as a notable character? Are there any real villains in the play? Or mostly opposing forces?

And is there one of those enjoyable outsider characters, the one who comments -- chorus-like -- on a particular proceeding, someone like the Bastard in King John?

Characteristically,
Randall

RE2: Edward III - Authorship

Derek writes:

You know, I just got back from Europe a couple of days ago, and am still fighting jet lag, and so am about to head to bed (at what continues to feel like 4:30 am), but just the briefest response: yes, there is something Shakespearean about Shakespeare, something in way the words sound together, the way the characters speak, that distances "his" works from those of his contemporaries. I remember reading Dr. Faustus for the first time a few years ago and being struck by how stilted much of the language sounded. I hadn't expected to be so struck. But the difference was unmistakable.

Claim 2: That said, I don't think we'll get anywhere, ever, by attempting to atomize the writing and explicate the origin of that difference. And I think that's what people in this situation are tempted to do -- to LOCATE and describe the source of the problem. But just in the way that an obviously brown desk will lose all its brownness as we peer into its atomic structure, so will that which makes Shakespeare's writing so particular to him vanish as we try to train our eyes upon it.

I mean, we can try. I just think that we won't succeed.

good night,
Derek

RE: Edward III - Authorship

Vere-ing off course,

I wish I'd included the small joke I'd intended about having a pool for how long it would be before one of us ripped into the authorship controversy. But I was thinking of an over/under number in terms of responses to my original e-mail. Not in terms of minutes. Derek wins.

I'm going to agree with Derek in principle, then explain why authorship matters. Ron Rosenbaum wrote, in his Slate.com article "The Double Falsehood of Double Falsehood," "The point is not who wrote Shakespeare (though I'm entirely convinced Shakespeare did) but what Shakespeare wrote, and what is falsely passed off as Shakespearean. The 'someone else wrote Shakespeare' types (and those who waste time arguing with them) are sad and pathetic because, frankly, life is short and if one has to choose between rereading King Lear or Othello and arguing about who wrote them, then one's priorities are profoundly misaligned. Any amount of time spent on the latter is subtracted from the former, alas."

When it comes to Edward III, I think we'll have a richer conversation if we focus on what is happening in the text or, by extension, what might happen on the stage. Every year that I teach Shakespeare, at least one student asks if Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him. And I give a version of Rosenbaum's response. Now, I'll add a bit of Derek's attitude as well.

But that said, I read Edward III with that question firmly in the back of my head: did Shakespeare write this? This is a question to which there is no definitive answer; asking it, though, leads us to an important form of assessment. Let's separate, for a moment, Shakespeare the man from Shakespeare the body of work. Then we must ask ourselves what makes the body of work unique? And finally are those attributes we've identified present in Edward III?

Why would we do this? Because to be able to do it means we recognize the essence of Shakespearean texts. Not the plot or the storylines or even the famous quotes, but something deeper -- the identity of the language. The question of whether Shakespeare might have written Edward III is the ultimate test of our familiarity with his work. By "familiarity" I don't mean that we have read it all and know it from memory; I mean that we have become familiar enough with the character of his writing that we know it from what it is not. Consider for a moment a more mundane version of this: the blind taste test. I have students who swear they can tell Pepsi from Coca-Cola. I like to pour a few colas (usually adding others like RC or Jones) into unmarked glasses and see. I'm impressed when they actually can. It means that they're familiar enough with the subtle differences in flavor that they "know" their colas. I want to know Shakespeare like that, because absent that familiarity, that understanding, I wonder if I really know "Shakespeare," as opposed to his fame. If I ripped a passage from a Shakespeare play you haven't read yet, maybe Coriolanus or Cymbeline, and one from Peele, one from Marlowe, and one from Fletcher, and sent them to you blind, could you tell who wrote which? Does it matter?

Randall

Edward III - Authorship

Derek writes:

Okay, having not posted a thing on Twelfth Night, I'm going to take a break from the ridiculous amount of reading, grading, writing, indexing, and teaching I'm doing over the summer and respond IMMEDIATELY to question 5.

Who wrote the play? It really does not matter, especially now. Arguments between the Oxfordians and the Baconians, or whatever, are all predicated upon the belief that the plays' authorship does something important for the meaning of the work, as though 400 years of theatrical tradition, summer Shakespeare festivals, and literally billions of student-hours have not entirely effaced whatever traces of authorial intention (if that's even a reasonable thing to point to anymore) once obtained in these works.

I've been reading Stephen Greenblatt this summer -- not the recent money-making Will in the World, but the original work of New Historicism, Shakespearean Negotiations. I expected to hate it, because I detest New Historicism generally, and particularly as it is applied to Shakespeare. Another scholar in this tradition, a guy named Kastan, who pretentiously titles his work Shakespeare After Theory (as though New Historicism does not have metaphysical commitments of its own), describes The Tempest like so: it is not a commentary on colonialism brought about by the recent discovery of the New World. No, it is rather best understood as pertaining to -- I'm not kidding -- protestant/catholic strife in southern Italy.

I'm not an expert on Early Modern Europe by any means, and I never have been, but I've enjoyed The Tempest when I've seen it. I have felt it speaking to me. While it would be easier to hear colonial undertones there, I certainly heard not the slightest suggestion of religious unrest, and yet the play filled my ears.

Whatever Shakespeare means, however we as a culture have come to value these plays, I am certain that searching back through 400 years of history, either to the genius of the Author himself or to the "energeia" out of which the plays emerged, will not help us answer these questions for ourselves. If what we hear now are but echoes of some original thing, the echoes remain what we hear, and they are enough. The original would not speak in a language we can understand anyway, the world in which it resounded having died away long ago. We should call off that particular search.

It does not matter who wrote the plays. The plays exist, and as much as we may hate on Joe Dowling for botching them, part of the reason it bothers us is because we recognize that every performance has, to some degree, a lasting impression on the content of the play. And because we paid money for our seats, of course.

That's enough of a rant for the time being. In the fall, I am off to the Eucor universities of the Rhein valley in order to start a second PhD at the universities where Heidegger and Nietzsche taught -- Shakespeare, obviously, will be the subject of the dissertation, but the broader project will be attempting to account for the way the plays interact with or have their being in our culture without resorting to either a claim to "universality," authorial intention, or historical context (that looks back to the originary period for meaning). I think in order to understand Shakespeare, we have to look at the way those plays exist now. I'm off now to downtown Iowa City, in fact, to read Julian Young's Heidegger's Philosophy of Art.

Ciao, as they for some reason say in Basel,
Derek

Edward III - Opening Thoughts

Shakespearenauts,

Welcome to our discussion of The Reign of King Edward III. Up to this point, we've read and discussed 21 of Shakespeare's plays, and we will be entering a stretch where many of the plays we read will be most familiar. I wonder if that doesn't have something to do our relative paucity of comment on Twelfth Night, for which I want to apologize to Cindy who got us started with some very good questions. Is there much left to say when we get to the Macbeths and the Hamlets? I hope so, and perhaps that will be a good discussion starter (when we get there): how does one continue a tradition of vital comment with a play about which there has already been so much?

We also have put the bulk of Shakespeare's history plays behind us. Which is too bad. I found Talbot, the Richards, Henry IV, Hotspur, and Hal to be fascinating characters, great fun to read about as characters as much as historical figures. Edward III gives us the opportunity to have another conversation about history as drama and the stageability of English monarchical myth building; Elizabethan attitudes toward honor, chivalry, leadership, political expediency, their own past, their neighbors, and warfare; the value, joy, and disadvantages of teaching lesser known works; and the beauty of English language from this period.

Edward III was printed in 1596 by London bookseller and publisher Cuthbert Burby, although it was probably written earlier; the title page, which includes no author's name, declares "As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London." I want to set aside, for the moment, the lurking question of authorship (did he, or didn't he?) and focus on some qualities of the play.

First, you put the play down, and you are struck by the clear division that seems to split it into two parts. Acts 1 and 2 present a King Edward on the brink of scuttling his continental ambitions in favor of a rather squalid attempt to seduce the Countess of Salisbury. Acts 3, 4, and 5 present the heroism of Edward the Black Prince and the fall of France. You wonder: have I seen this sort of bifurcation before? Is there some theme or characteristic that joins the two parts, unifying them? Is this "bad" playwriting?

Second, upon reflection you might recall that on a number of occasions we've commented on the chivalric values present in Shakespeare's history plays, and how they have seemed to fare in the presence of an edgier, distinctly Tudor, realpolitik. Talbot fell, Falstaff mocked honor, Hal manipulated his own image in order to create a certain impression of leadership, the war of the roses foregrounded political intrigue over "precedents" (or the rules of chivalry). Edward III seems to uphold chivalry and honor. How does it fit into the historical attitudes we've already discussed?

Third, Henry V came off as a fairly patriotic hagiography at times. Edward III? Even more so? Less? What takes precedence here: history, the English myth, drama?

Fourth, one night, over a couple drinks, you have a brilliant idea for staging this sucker. Your producing director thinks you're nuts and willfully seeking the financial ruin of your theater. What argument do you make to convince her otherwise? (And what is your brilliant idea?)

Fifth, who wrote this play? How do we know? Does it matter? I assume this is a question about language. Is it?

So, colleagues, invocate some golden Muse
to bring hither a discussion bedeck'd
with jewels of wit and sparkling intellect.

Randall