How Good Is It?
SIMON, JOHN
How Good Is It? Shakespeare's Edward III Edited bv Eric Sams Yale. 242pp. $30.00. Reviewed by John Simon In 1596 Cuthbert Burby published an anonymous play bearing the title and legend, "The...
...Its references to the Spanish Armada suggest 1588 or '89 as the time of composition...
...verse two has an anapest in the middle...
...One of Shakespeare's great achievements was to show how comedy infiltrates the most dramatic, indeed tragic, situations, thereby making the starkest tragedies so much more human...
...Well before the middle, the delightful Countess disappears entirely...
...But is that enough for an effective structure...
...Each of these verses has an anapest to relieve us from the iambs, but the relief in both cases comes in the second hemistich...
...Most off-putting, however, is the recurrent piling up of garrulous near-synonyms, as in this from Warwick about his daughter, "whose beauty tyrant's fear.../ hath sullied, withered, overcast and done," followed closely by the Countess' "the ground undecked with nature's tapestry/ seems barren, sere, infertile, fruitless, dry," which wallows in full-fledged redundancy...
...For an intelligent assessment of the controversy, see Paul Dean's review of the book in the November New Criterion...
...I find it flawed and largely unsatisfying, but still of considerable interest...
...If he finally has sense enough to stop trying to seduce the Countess, he does not as a result grow in stature, vividness, or simple humanity...
...Audley is a walking (or, at play's end, stretcher-borne) commonplace...
...1 think not, which brings me to the several main flaws of the entire play...
...And so in the earlier parts King Edward is obsessed with the fair and wise Countess, whom he frees from the military siege of David, the treacherous Scottish King, only to subject her to an amatory siege of his own...
...Metrically, the play makes some progress from the doggerel of the early scenes, clockwork iambic pentameter with little flexibility...
...Take this, from Edward in II, ii: "I go to conquer kings and shall I not then/ subdue myself and be my enemy's friend...
...It is by contrasting Edward III with that highly accomplished play that the shortcomings of the earlier work become manifest...
...the rest B, by some other hand...
...Reviewed by John Simon In 1596 Cuthbert Burby published an anonymous play bearing the title and legend, "The Raigne of King Edward the third: As it hath been sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London...
...Sams, incidentally, is a retired civil servant and former music critic, but we won't hold that against him...
...Nevertheless, Edward III is nothing the fledgling playwright need have been ashamed of...
...for the Countess' wooing, William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, a fiction...
...But then, no one evolves, not even the King...
...There are, however, felicitously executed bits of plotting for example, when Edward coerces the Earl of Warwick, father of the Countess, to act as his pimp (II, i), so that the scene where he most disgustedly urges his daughter to yield achieves a perverse piquancy...
...There are instances enough where an image, a confrontation, a sentiment bespeaks the future riches...
...Edward himself is married to Queen Philippa, a woman of parts...
...do show improvement...
...The married Countess is as virtuous as she is enchanting...
...Verse one begins with a spondee...
...That liberty augurs well for the dramatist who was to make English blank verse into one of the supreme poetic meters in any language...
...Let me cite but one impressive example...
...Take, for instance, "Deck an ape/ in tissue and the beauty of the robe/ adds but the greater scorn unto the beast...
...This, at most, reverberates...
...No one here, not even the Countess, exudes a strong personal aroma or, otherwise put, is memorable...
...First, the lack of characterization...
...specific rather than generic...
...Usually singled out are the Countess scenes all of Act I except Scene i, all of Act II and Act IV, Scene iv...
...No, dear Artois, but choked with dust and smoke...
...They exit, and the next scene begins with Artois, a French turncoat, concerned about Prince Edward: "How fares your grace...
...It contains elements of worth, even if not enough to constitute a significant enrichment of the canon...
...Rather, the method is to elaborate a stock figure as best possible, disguising cliches with high-flown tropes...
...The volume makes a strong case that has a growing number of scholarly adherents...
...The only external evidence that it is by Shakespeare is its ascription to him in the 1656 catalogue of his plays by Rogers and Ley...
...it does not create a world...
...Its sources are threefold: for the war scenes, the chronicles of Froissart and of Holin-shed...
...Contesting the claim is John, the French King, who upholds hereditary sovereignty based exclusively on the male line...
...in verse two it occurs daringly inside the final foot: "a knight/ hood, / / man...
...It has never been included in an edition of his works, although that fine early editor Edward Capell pronounced it "thought to be writ by Shakespeare," based on the quality of the writing...
...This is clever, and as close as the play gets to wit...
...Of course, there is no compelling reason for B not to be the unre-vised remnants of an earlier version, or simply passages where Shakespeare was not in top form...
...Eric Sams, whom the jacket copy laconically describes as an authority on the "dating and identifying of Shakespeare's plays," has now brought out (after many articles and previous books) Shakespeare's Edward III, a text and critical commentary that categorically assigns the manuscript to Shakespeare alone...
...But even she speaks mostly rhetoric rather than fully humanized speech...
...It seems to me that interweaving is not achieved that lightly...
...There is a subplot: the King's tough love for his son, Edward the Black Prince, whom he sends out to win his spurs in the fighting, but refuses to help when in mortal danger...
...It hinges on David's language containing "such tartan stuff as 'bonny' or 'whin-yard,' " not good for a lot of laughs...
...This is pleasantly free...
...Later scenes, though never nearly so various as Shakespeare's blank verse came to be...
...How much better this would sound if one anapest came earlier on...
...Edward III has all along been held the most estimable of the totally disputed plays—i.e...
...In any event, though the "good" parts are markedly better, they still leave me unmoved...
...In this passage, more perhaps than anywhere else, the young author flexes his muscles and foreshadows what he will become...
...Characters instantly fade from memory...
...True, the Countess has some personality, and the way she resolves the problem with the King has a certain daredevil charm...
...A battlefield scene (IV v) ends with John, the French King, urging on his men: "Away, be gone, the smoke but of our shot/ will choke our foes though bullets hit them not...
...Nor is there any life in the battle scenes...
...Or this: "He that hath far to go tells it by miles/ if he should tell the steps it kills his heart...
...We gave him arms today/ and his laboring for a knighthood, man...
...That good old knight is an individual in speech and deed...
...At Derby's puzzled response, he snaps back, "I mean the Emperor, leave me alone...
...So, too, later on, when the wounded Audley proclaims his willingness to consign his flesh "to darkness, consummation, dust and worms...
...The caesura in verse one is conventionally medial...
...The story line concerns Edward Ill's unsuccessful attempt to seduce the married Countess of Salisbury, and his successful military campaign in France, culminating in the battle of Crecy...
...It seizes the empty boast of the French and tosses it back at them, as if to say "Sticks and stones may break our bones, but hyperbolic braggadocio never...
...They are mostly limited to lengthy speechifying and verbose descriptions of events, instead of their actual enactment, as in the later histories...
...it would have passed for a superior effort from many another Elizabethan dramatist...
...Later, in II, v, Edward refuses to go to his sorely beleaguered son's relief, as Derby urges him to do: "Tut, let him fight...
...That is a splendid but, alas, rather isolated touch of ingenuity...
...Yet consider the awkwardness of not even giving her a Christian name...
...A great warrior, the Black Prince triumphs over enormous odds and victoriously survives...
...Sir Thomas Erpingham is his opposite number in Henry V, but with what a difference...
...Badly wanting is a sense of humor...
...His claim to the throne of France is based on being the son of the French Princess Isabel, daughter of Philip the Handsome and wife of Edward II...
...that includes even such a gallant warrior as the Black Prince, who is meant to evolve before our eyes from untried youth into conquering hero...
...What Shakespeare save in a glimmer here, an inkling there had not yet discovered or mastered was how to find the idiosyncratic idiom, the individuating traits that make a courtier, a knight, a queen, etc...
...This need not be as obvious as the porter scene in Macbeth or Osric's shenanigans in Hamlet...
...Already we are in the realm of the opening scene of Henry V, with its debate about the Salic Law...
...Not unless parallels or contrasts are much more tightly and philosophically managedor, at the very least, both sections of the play are brilliant in themselves, which is hardly the case here...
...The idea for the play almost certainly derives from that admirable but somewhat naive medieval French annalist Jean Froissart, who declared, "Toute joie et toute honour/ Viennent d 'armes et d'amour"all joy and all honor stem from warfare and love...
...As Sams would have it, a character's evaluation of the would-be seduction as "a lingering English siege of peevish love," and another character's much later self-description as wooing death with a careless smile, establish the interpenetration of armes and amour: "Thus the two main threads of love and war are interwoven...
...But in the later histories it is always a whole comic subplot, involving characters such as Falstaff, the Boar's Head gang, and even Prince Hal, the future Henry V Eric Sams tries to compare David, the briefly appearing Scottish King, to such comedic triumphs as Pistol and Parolles, but his argument is weak...
...Are you not shot my lord...
...Yet, on the debit side, much of the play's diction is grandiose and stilted, and finally lifeless...
...The play's major problem is that the wooing scenes and the later war scenes must be related, otherwise the structure is nonsensical...
...If the Countess is confined to the first two acts (the division into acts and scenes is, as always, the modern editor's), and the remaining three acts are strictly martial, just where is the weaver's hand...
...To which the Black Prince replies...
...These are sometimes labeled A, for Shakespeare's...
...it may be the black comedy of the Goneril-Edmund-Regan triangle in Lear, or the Hamlet-Polonius relationship, or the figure of Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida...
...Yet if such a relationship exists, it remains unclear, and the action splits into seemingly separate halves, neither of them sufficiently fleshed out...
...Another more frequent, but less potent, redeeming feature is the fineness of individual lines, or small clusters of lines, that intermittently reveal incipient mastery...
...Everything is stasis: What little change there is, the playwright arbitrarily imposes...
...So Lord Audley is a loyal old retainer of the King, staunch and intrepid to his end, and that may or may not be a consequence of the wounds dwelt on in IV, viii...
...the ones some consider wholly or partly by Shakespeare, and others reject altogether...
...One might, stretching things a bit, esteem the entire person of the Countess a capital invention...
...Most readers of this magazine, I imagine, are like me less interested in Sams' elaborate arguments to prove authenticity than in the play itself: What is Edward III, and how good is it...
...even in the midst of battle there is flowery language...
...There may be a rationale or rationalization that allows similarities between amorous and armed conquest to be postulated, and failure in the one may be made up for by success in the other...
...Would Katharine in Henry V be as rounded a creation if referred to only as Princess or Princess of France...
...And he proceeds to rationalize, "Thus from the heart's abundance speaks the tongue/ Countess for Emperor and indeed why not?/ She is as imperator over me...
...Again (in II, ii), Edward commits an interesting Freudian slip when the Earl of Derby talks to him about the Emperor, and the abstracted King replies with something about the Countess...
...The others, Edward included, are almost completely rhetorical, often euphuistic, declaimers...
...It is true that some portions of the play are better than the rest...
Vol. 79 • December 1996 • No. 9
