Edward III - This fellow is well read in poetry

I logically followed Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II with the anonymous, but see below, Edward III (published 1596).  The first two acts look like a heterosexual parody of the Marlowe play, with King Edward swerving from strong to weak king when he suddenly falls in love with a married countess and threatens to ruin the kingdom for his passion.  Luckily this plotline is resolved at the end of Act II and Edward goes on to conquer France.  The last three acts cover the Battles of Crécy and Poitiers and the episode with the Burghers of Calais and other exciting scenes we all know from Froissart’s Chronicles.  They were exciting in Froissart, at least, although they are dramatically inert here.

There is one scene, though, before the war, Act II, Scene 1.  The lovestruck king wants to write a love letter.  Enter his secretary Lodowick.

This fellow is well read in poetry

and hath a lusty and persuasive spirit.  (p. 23)

They begin composing the letter.  Lodowick has problem understanding the assignment.

LODOWICK:          Write I to a woman?

KING EDWARD:  What beauty else could triumph on me

or who but women do our love-lays greet?

What, thinkest thou I bid thee praise a horse?  (24)

Lodowick is, I suppose, thinking of the previous king, but the horse shows how the scene works, the constant comic swing from love sonnet rhetoric to its deflation.  The scene is clearly written by someone familiar with the ongoing Elizabethan sonnet craze.  It is an extended mockery of sonnet writing.

One good joke is that the secretary does not get more than two lines written, and those are useless for the king’s lustful purpose.

LODOWICK:  What is the other fault my sovereign?

KING EDWARD:  Read o’er the line again.

LODOWICK:                                                     ‘More fair and chaste’

KING EDWARD:  I did not bid thee talk of chastity

To ransack so the treasure of her mind

For I had rather have her chased than chaste.

Out with the moon line, I will none of it

and let me have her likened to the sun

say she hath thrice more splendour than the sun

that her perfections emulate the sun

that she breeds sweets as plenteous as the sun

that she doth thaw cold winter like the sun

that she doth cheer fresh summer like the sun

that she doth dazzle gazers like the sun

and in this application to the sun

bid her be free and general as the sun

who smiles upon the basest weed that grows

as lovingly as on the fragrant rose.  (25-6)

It is a brilliant, funny scene all the way through.  I read Edward III in the 1996 Eric Sams edition titled Shakespeare’s Edward III: An early play restored to the canon, where the bulk of the book is devoted to demonstrating how the entire play was written by Shakespeare.  I am not sure why he wants to give those dull – let’s say, functional – last three acts to Shakespeare, but I do not need his sections on “The Image Cluster” and “Words Beginning with ‘un-‘” and so on to remember that in Sonnet 130, the hilarious insult poem where the Dark Lady has bad breath and an annoying voice, “[m]y mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” emphasis mine, or to see that “basest weed” appear in Sonnet 94, where it “outbraves his dignity.”  And I am looking at Sonnet 94 because later in the scene the father of the Countess urges her to be virtuous by literally quoting the final line of Sonnet 94, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (32).

If Shakespeare wrote the scene, it is an ingenious self-parody.  It is so good I would be happy to give it to him, although the "chaste / chased" pun is a little obvious for him.  But then I feel a little bad for the anonymous hack playwright who, reading some version of Shakespeare’s sonnets, circulating in manuscript, thought it would be hilarious if the moony king in the play he was working on was an incompetent sonnet writer.  It’s the best thing the poor guy ever wrote and we want to attribute it to, who else, Shakespeare.

My fundamental problem with a lot of the attribution arguments is that they do not seem to recognize that playwrights can imitate, parody, mock, and plagiarize each other.  Counting words that begin with “un-“ is thin, thin, thin evidence.  But the scene even if not by Shakespeare is highly Shakespearian, a delight to read, and recommended to anyone who likes such things.  What you do with the rest of Edward III is your business.