Edward III: Women and the Making of Shakespeare as Historical Dramatist
Columbia University
If Robert Greene’s sentiments are typical, the character of Queen Margaret helped to make Shakespeare famous, or at least notorious, in the early modern theatre scene. In his Greenes Groatsworth of Witte he refers to Shakespeare as ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie’.1 Greene here parodies Richard Plantagenet’s biting indictment of Margaret before she murders him: ‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!’ (3 Henry VI, 1.4.138).2 Along with the many resentments buried in this passage is Greene’s acknowledgement that this ‘Shakes-scene’ could write powerful verse and create an unforgettable character in the figure of Margaret.
In fact, the ‘bad girls’ of the first tetralogy – Joan of Arc, Margaret of Anjou, Elinor Cobham – hold their own, for sheer memorability, with villains like Richard III and military heroes like Talbot. All of these women are powerful, and all of them are vilified – for cruelty, for witchcraft, for adultery, for pride, for usurping men’s roles and clothes or simply, in Elinor’s case, for being a fashionista who dresses too well. But they are ‘players’, figures who lead armies, defy custom and make things happen. Their prominence, as Phyllis Rackin and I have argued, provides a marked contrast to the diminished roles of women in the second tetralogy.3
Recently, textual scholars have argued that Shakespeare also probably had a hand in another early English history play, the multiply-authored King Edward III, and that within that play he came to write, by desire or assignment, the scenes involving the Countess of Salisbury. Accepting this attribution, I will show how in making the Countess character the young Shakespeare was shaped by the theatre culture around him even as he was beginning to be a writer others would notice and even imitate through parody. I will argue that in writing the Salisbury scenes, Shakespeare (or whoever made the plot from which Shakespeare was working)4 drew on a template established in a number of comic history plays written in the late 1580s and early 1590s. These plays depict the education of a prince by focusing primarily on his overcoming a foolish or ill-considered sexual liaison. By drawing on and modifying that template, Shakespeare was expanding his repertory of ways to represent femininity in the history play genre, an expansion whose effects we can see in the second tetralogy.
Most scholars date Edward III, printed in 1596, as a play written sometime between 1590 and 1595. As theatre historians have shown, this was a period of unusual instability and fecundity in the emerging theatre industry with at least six companies performing in city theatres, a number of playhouses and inns available as performance sites, and a host of playwrights making plays, many working collaboratively. Edward III was created in this tumultuous time of experimentation and risk. Its last three acts – the acts not written primarily by Shakespeare – look a lot like 1–3 Henry VI in their focus on martial exploits and pitched battles for control of France. Heywood’s An Apology for Actors describes the thrilling military actions of this part of Edward III (or of a lost play on the same subject):
What English Prince should hee behold the true portrature of that famous King Edward the third, foraging France, taking so great a King captive in his owne country, quartering the English Lyons with the French Flower-delyce, … would not bee suddenly Inflam’d with so royall a spectacle, being made apt and fit for the like atchievement.5
But Heywood’s description overlooks the play’s first two acts in which a less heroic Edward loses his laser focus on foreign wars because, himself married, he becomes infatuated with a married woman, the Countess of Salisbury, and goes into a lovesick funk. These scenes, I suggest, have their theatrical origins in a string of comic histories that show a king’s entanglement in and renunciation of an inappropriate sexual liaison and then his embrace of a proper dynastic partner. While the basic story of Edward’s encounter with the Countess of Salisbury is drawn from Froissart, its essentially comic theatrical scaffolding – and its emphasis on the education of the monarch – are drawn from elsewhere.
I argue that the matter of Edward III offered Shakespeare the opportunity to write about a successful monarch and about the sexual script that structures such a monarch’s formation as well as about the good women who are essential to that script in ways the ‘bad girls’ of the Henry VI plays are not. For example, in both its opening and closing moments Edward III foregrounds the importance of women as the bearers of genealogical rights and the vessels who carry legitimate children. When Edward announces his intentions to conquer France, he stakes his claim through his mother, Isabel, the daughter of the French King, Philip le Beau. Those claims are treated with the utmost seriousness. To allay the suspicion that the English might simply be refuting the Salic law to serve their own interests, the defence of the English position is put in the mouth of the French nobleman, Artois:
It is not hate nor any private wrong,
But love unto my country and the right
Provokes my tongue thus lavish in report.
You are the lineal watchman of our peace,
And John of Valois indirectly climbs.
What then should subjects but embrace their king?
Ah, wherein may our duty more be seen
Than striving to rebate a tyrant’s pride,
And place the true shepherd of our commonwealth?
(1.1.33–41)6
Here, the French King is the tyrannous usurper and Edward the ‘true shepherd of our commonwealth’. Moreover, the language describing Isabel’s womb is both strikingly beautiful and strikingly horticultural. Artois says: ‘Isabel / Was all the daughters that this Philip had, / Whom afterward your father took to wife; / And from the fragrant garden of her womb / Your gracious self, the flower of Europe’s hope, / Derivèd is inheritor to France’ (1.1.11–16). The womb here is like a garden, and from the soil of that French garden sprang the flower, Edward.
While the pregnant womb of Edward’s mother is only narrated and not directly embodied on stage, the same is not true for his wife. In Act IV an English nobleman reports to Edward that while Edward has been in France, David of Scotland has been beaten:
by the fruitful service of your peers
And painful travail of the queen herself,
That, big with child, was every day in arms,
Vanquished, subdued, and taken prisoner.
(4.2.43–6)
Here the maternal body is figured not only as a generative body but as a warrior’s body. Pregnant but in arms, the Queen has helped to vanquish England’s long-standing northern foes. In Act V she appears in France, still pregnant, when the Black Prince arrives victorious over his French enemies to be reunited both with his father and his mother.
Edward III, then, is bookended by the beautiful image of Isabel’s fragrant womb and by the striking presence of the pregnant Philippa onstage with her husband and eldest son – a carefully staged embodiment of the successful dynastic family. Moreover, this positive representation of women’s generative power is both reinforced and complicated by other parts of the play. In Acts I and II, after the initial account of England’s claim to France, King Edward has his dangerous and prolonged encounter with the Countess of Salisbury in which he tries to get her to commit adultery with him. This part of the play, I suggest, employs a dramatic template familiar from Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, his The Scottish History of James IV, and the anonymous Fair Em, probably all late 1580s and early 1590s plays. In each, a King or a Prince is overcome with foolish or ill-considered sexual desire that must be vanquished before he and his realm can prosper. In each case the monarch’s sexual desire is ultimately directed towards an appropriate dynastic mate, an action that also reincorporates him into a homosocial network of male peers, advisors, and allies.
Consider James IV. In the opening scene James has just married Dorothea, his English queen, but announces in an aside in the chapel where he was married that his ‘wandering eyes bewitch’d [his] heart’ and ‘The Scottish Ida’s beauty stale [his] heart’ (1.1.81 and 84).7 Fair Ida resists the King’s blandishments, and James eventually returns his heart to Dorothea, but not before Scotland totters from what his counsellors call James’ ‘heedless youth’ (2.2.210) and the power he gives to Ateukin, a fake wizard whom he commands to win Ida to him. Only in Act V, upon learning of Ida’s marriage to the virtuous Lord Eustace, does James have a miraculous change of heart, recall his love for Dorothea, and curse his own lust and the evils of sycophants and flatterers who supported him in his misdeeds. Similarly, in the anonymous Fair Em William the Conqueror sees the image of a woman in a shield, goes to the Danish court to marry her, but on seeing her face to face decides she is ‘sluttish’ and fixes his heart on Marianna, a virtuous woman betrothed to another. Eventually, William, through a disguise plot, is brought to recover his original love for Blanche, the King’s daughter whose face he had seen in the shield, thus making an appropriate dynastic union, just as James had made in wedding Dorothea.
The play most similar in structure, as well as theme, to Edward III, however, is Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Besides the magician plot, there is another involving Henry III’s son, Prince Edward. Edward is destined for marriage with Eleanor, daughter to the King of Castile. But while hunting in the English countryside, Edward falls suddenly and hopelessly in love with Margaret, the Fair Maid of Fressingfield. She, in turn, falls in love with Lacy, the Earl of Lincoln and Edward’s friend. Only in the middle of the play does Edward undergo a sudden transformation as he listens to Margaret and Lacy both plead for death so that the other can be spared. In an aside the Prince says:
Edward, art thou that famous Prince of Wales
Who at Damasco beat the Saracens,
And brought’st home triumph on thy lance’s point,
And shall thy plumes be pull’d by Venus down?
Is it princely to dissever lovers’ leagues,
To part such friends as glory in their loves?
Leave, Ned, and make a virtue of this fault,
And further Peg and Lacy in their loves.
So in subduing fancy’s passion,
Conquering thyself, thou get’st the richest spoil.
(8.112–21)8
Edward eventually makes a proper dynastic marriage to Eleanor of Castile.
In each of these plays, the education of a monarch or a monarch-to-be requires that he learn to curb his sexual passion for an inappropriate sexual partner, no matter how attractive and virtuous she may be. In every instance, the women the monarch illicitly desires are chaste; none is a sexual temptress or adulteress. But none of them, even those of high social standing, is an appropriate partner for the monarch whose marriage choices in each case must cement a foreign connection and extend his country’s international alliance structure.
These comic histories are, I argue, part of what went into the making of the first part of Edward III and determine its comic arc. The play did not have to dramatize Edward’s northern adventures at all, though they are mentioned in Holinshed and elaborated in Froissart and Painter’s Palace of Pleasure. But one way in the early 1590s to dramatize a successful king was to stage his triumph over inappropriate sexual passion. This is exactly the narrative that organizes the first part of Edward III that scholars now attribute to Shakespeare. Riding north to relieve the Scottish siege of Roxburgh Castle where the Countess of Salisbury is courageously holding out, Edward falls passionately in love with her, only later coming to his senses. Several things, however, are unique about Edward III’s handling of this familiar dramatic template. First, the last three acts of the play show a king actually ruling well, an outcome more implied than demonstrated in many of the comic histories I discussed above. Having passed the sexual test that seems the pre-condition for successful rule, King Edward goes on to lead his armies to victory in France and resecures his dynastic family. Second, Edward’s marriage is of long standing and neither newly achieved nor in prospect. That means that the fruits of a dynastic marriage are on stage for all to see in the person of his son.
Like the other plays in this grouping, Edward’s pursuit of the Countess reveals both a lack of personal self-control and a danger to all the relationships that support his rule. Like Margaret, Ida and Marianne, the Countess of Salisbury is chaste, comparing herself at one point to Abraham’s wife Sarah in her faithfulness to her husband. But Edward presses his suit recklessly, even pressuring her father, Warwick, on his allegiance to the King, to command the Countess to comply with the King’s wishes. His behaviour alarms his counsellors, alienates his supporters and threatens to abort the French campaign.
Edward’s reversal of perspective begins when, unexpectedly, the son, Prince Edward, arrives at Roxburgh Castle with men he has gathered for the French invasion. The sight of his son’s face fills Edward with piercing remorse because the son’s face recalls that of Edward’s wife, the Prince’s mother:
I see the boy. Oh, how his mother’s face,
Modelled in his, corrects my strayed desire,
And rates my heart, and chides my thievish eye,
Who, being rich enough in seeing her,
Yet seeks elsewhere
(2.2.75–9)
A moment later, after Edward greets his father, the King resumes his aside:
Still do I see in him delineate
His mother’s visage: those his eyes are hers,
…
Away, loose silks of wavering vanity!
Shall the large limit of fair Bretagne
By me be overthrown, and shall I not
Master this little mansion of myself?
Give me an armour of eternal steel,
I go to conquer kings.
(2.2.86–97)
Usually early moderns assumed that the mother provided the matter upon which the form of the father was imprinted, but this scene reverses expectations. Edward’s son bears the impress of the mother’s features, and that son will bear Edward’s lineage into the future.
I argue, then, that Edward III shows the effects of having been written in the vibrant theatre culture of the early 1590s, and it riffs on several received ways of dramatizing English kingship. It shows, I have suggested, familiarity in the Salisbury scenes with the protocols of comic history in the Robert Greene mode. The first two acts recall and modify the story of a King led astray by desire, the sturdy resistance of a virtuous woman, and the eventual reformation of the monarch. This story is then sutured onto a more martial story, familiar from the battle scenes of 1 Henry VI, about struggles for territory in France and the consolidation of manhood in battle. Unlike the bad marriages of Henry VI and Edward IV and the threatening women of the Henry VI plays, Edward III features two virtuous wives, Salisbury and Philippa, and presents the fruits of dynastic union in the person of the valorous Black Prince.
If I am right that Edward III reveals its origins in the theatre culture of the early 1590s, it also has its effects on later drama. When Shakespeare created Prince Hal, he took his storyline of the reformed Prince from Holinshed and also from the first half of The Famous Victories, but the comic histories and Edward III also played a role, particularly in marking the culmination of reform in the acquisition of a French princess in a dynastic union. As in the comic histories, Hal must end a dangerous infatuation before he can be a successful ruler. But Shakespeare’s innovation was to make that infatuation centre – not on a virtuous woman – but on a vice-ridden, but charismatic older man. Whether we see the tavern world as homoerotic or simply homosocial, Falstaff’s hold on Hal has to be broken before the young king can establish ties with the ‘right’ kind of homosocial community: his counsellors, the Lord Chief Justice, the peers of England, and his brothers. With that rapprochement, Hal is set to be a legitimate King whose comic education narrative ends with marriage to the French Princess. Henry’s marriage to her fulfils the cultural logic of the stage’s representation of comic kingship, though it does not erase the fact that Katherine of France is given by her father as a prize of war to her country’s conqueror. One need not demonize women to treat them as the second sex, but that is another story.
Notes
1Robert Greene, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), 4: 241–2.
2The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn, eds Greenblatt, Howard, Cohen and Maus (eds) (New York), p. 340.
3Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (New York, 1997).
4For the idea of the plot as a document preceding what was often the collaborative writing of a play, see Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 8–33.
5Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors (London, 1609), B4r.
6All quotations from the play are taken from King Edward III, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge, 1998).
7Robert Greene, James the Fourth, in Ashley Thorndike ed., Minor Elizabethan Drama (London: Dent and Sons, 1958), p. 235.
8Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Daniel Seltzer (Lincoln, NE, 1963), pp. 50–1.