Just finished reading another Christmas present, the play Edward III. It’s lots of fun, very clear and easy to follow (most of the footnotes are historical or textual pedantry rather than explaining the language, and when they do, they are usually superfluous). Oh, I’m talking about the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition here, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence with this howler of a typo in the second speech of the play:
Artois:
Three sons of his, which all successively
Did sit upon their father’s regal throne,
Yet died and left no issue of their lions.
The reason I was interested in reading it was, of course,
that it’s recently entered the Shakespeare canon, with its entire second act
(along with bits of acts one and four) widely attributed to Shakespeare,
written in collaboration with one or more authors including Thomas Kyd.
The play reminded me of the Henry VI plays, as it is has a
very episodic structure – the King defeats the Scots that have been besieging the
Countess of Salisbury, the King attempts to seduce the Countess, the King
launches an attack of France with a spectacular naval victory at Sluys and a
land victory at Crecy, and for the last two Acts the narrative splits into three,
one concerned with the progress of the Earl of Salisbury through French-held
territory to meet King Edward at Calais, one concerned with King Edward holding
Calais under siege, and the third the other with the progress of King Edward’s
son Prince Edward (aka the Black Prince) in battles against the French at Poitiers.
Although there are elements that link the different episodes – for instance,
the Scottish King David is captured and brought to King Edward in Act 5, and characters that only appear in later acts are mentioned in Act 1– it is easy to imagine it being a composite work.
This piecemeal structure does have some flaws. Although it is
adhering to historical fact, to have Prince Edward achieving a miraculous
victory practically singlehanded against overwhelming Frenchmen in Act 3 and
then again in Act 4 is repetitious (and doesn’t exactly create much suspense
the second time around). Also all three of the major battles are won the same
way; not through any particular ingenuity of the English (save for Prince
Edward’s trick with the flint-stones at Poitiers) but because both the Scots
and the French are habitually disorganised and cowardly. The play also makes the point that the English
victories at Sluys and Poitiers are both partially down to freak weather
conditions acting in their favour (the victory at Sluys being deliberately reminiscent of the celebrated defeat of the Spanish Armada which was 'hot' at the time the play was written). Freak weather conditions being, of course, an indicator of god taking sides.
Act 2 is regarded by those who know better than me
as being the work of Shakespeare, and it’s not hard to see why, as the language
suddenly becomes more poetic (and speeches become longer!), and the arguments
posited by the characters become more subtle and nuanced and, in the case of
King Edward, as the character himself abruptly changes from what was
established in Act 1; it seems the sight of the Countess of Salisbury is enough
to change a warmonger into a poet (though he does fall for her immediately in
Act 1, to be fair, she has pretty eyes). He then changes back to the warmonger in Act 3, as though
waking from a dream.
This Act largely concerns the idea of ‘what to do if
your king asks you to break an oath’ – a theme visited elsewhere in the play,
but whereas in Act 4 the arguments are quite black-and-white (honour dictates
that oaths are paramount) in Act 2 things are much more complex; as King Edward
uses the fact that he’s King first to effectively order the Countess into bed
with him and then to order her father to order his daughter to sleep with him
(the King). Rather amusingly her father reconciles this conflict of honour by instructing his
daughter to sleep with the King, in order to fulfil her oath of loyalty to the
king, and then immediately tells his daughter not to as instructed in order to fulfil her
oath of loyalty to her husband and god.
Acr 2 reminded me very strongly of the interlude in
Henry VI Part One where Talbot is briefly imprisoned by Auvergne, partly
because of its tonal incongruity of being a chunk of light-hearted love story pasted
into an otherwise battle-focused place and also because Talbot also undergoes a
weird shift in personality once he’s placed in a romantic setting.
What really struck me about this Act, though, was how funny
it was. The book’s introduction to the play describes it as entirely humourless
which I found baffling given that the whole scene with King Edward and his
poet-for-hire Lodowick (free Lodowick!) is pure comedy. The gags
are broad, yes, but they work; Lodowick struggling to keep up with King Edward’s
detailed and lengthy instructions on what Lodowick should put into his love
poem to the Countess is clearly the struggle of any writer-for-hire trying to
satisfy the demands of an unhelpful client.
My favourite part was the first big joke
which consist of King Edward spending a good couple of minutes describing the
subject and recipient of the poem in extravagant terms (‘more beautiful than
beautiful’) while neglecting to give any pertinent details, leading Lodowick to
eventually ask:
Lodowick:
Write I... to a woman?
To which the King responds:
King:
What, thinkst thou I did bid thee praise a horse?
Yes, I’m doing the thing of quoting the best jokes in the
review, so sue me. Then a short while later, after the King has spent another
few minutes telling Lodowick what to write in his love poem, he finally asks
Lodowick to show him his finished work. Which consists of two lines! Which the
King immediately finds fault with and gets Lodowick to cross
out and start again. And then when the Countess walks in, there’s a funny
little bit where the King pretends that he and Lodowick have been discussing
battle strategies.
The rest of the play is not dissimilar to Henry V, with its
various sieges and with Prince Edward a prototype Hal, though with much less personality; he is a model son, courageous and obedient, as a paragon of
virtue, quite dull. King Edward is a more interesting character – even overlooking
his entirely different personality in Act 2 – and recalls some of Hal’s bloodthirstier moments in Henry V (i.e. his threats to the citizens of the city
of Harfleur). King Edward makes similar threats to the citizens of Calais and
it’s only the intervention of his wife that prevents him executing six merchants just
to make a point. His attitude to his son is also rather harsh; when the Prince is in trouble in battle, King Edward won’t
sent him help, on the basis that either the Prince will survive, and gain
honour and experience, or he’ll die honourably in battle and it won’t matter
much because King Edward has plenty of other sons to take his place! So King
Edward is portrayed heroically, but not sympathetically – rather like the
depiction of Talbot in Henry VI Part One.
The big difference, though, is that Edward III relates the
battles from the point of view of the losing side; we see the French King being
given the bad news of his defeat at Sluys, we see French refugees fleeing from
Crecy, and the defeat at Poitiers is also depicted from the French end. By
focusing on the French perspective, the play enhances the image of the English
as an unstoppable, terrible force of nature; each battle begins with the French
boasting (taunting from the battlements!) about how they will win, and depicts
how they become unstuck due to over-confidence (their fatal flaw at Crecy and Poitiers
is their assumption of an easy victory; the mere fact that the English are
prepared to fight back rattles the French troops so much they flee in terror).
Where it scores over Henry V is that it has its romantic
interlude in Act 2, rather than as an anticlimax in Act 5. Of course it’s
nowhere near as well-written, but I’d certainly say it was the equal of King
John or the Henry VI plays and probably easier to sit through than Richard II.
The main fun for me, though, was that it depicts an unfamiliar period of
history (though the story of English soldiers killing lots of French soldiers is fairly familiar!)
so I felt I was learning something (or remembering bits of history I’d
forgotten) as well as having the novelty of a new play. I hope The Globe
does a production soon, it would be ideal for that venue, and as I was reading
it, I could easily imagine how it would be staged. Bring it on!