“Was there ever . . . such stuff as great part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so!” Thus King George III. If His Majesty jibbed at Hamlet or The Tempest, what would he have said to Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester, with the Love of William the Conqueror? Or to A Most Pleasant Comedy of Mucedorus, the King’s Son of Valentia, and Amadine, the King’s Daughter of Aragon: with the Merry Conceits of Mouse? These plays are among no fewer than forty-two which have, at various times, been wholly or partly ascribed to Shakespeare in addition to the thirty-six printed in the First Folio of 1623. Many are now known to be by other dramatists, or to have been given to Shakespeare on patently absurd grounds—some on no grounds at all. C. F. Tucker Brooke edited fourteen of the “doubtful” plays in The Shakespeare Apocrypha (Oxford, 1908), a volume which, amazingly, has never been updated, although editions of individual plays have continued to appear. Only two additions to the corpus established by the First Folio have won general scholarly acceptance: Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both believed to be only partly by Shakespeare (though Dr. Sams insists that Pericles is his throughout), but omitted from the Folio not on that account—since it included Henry VIII—but perhaps because of copyright difficulties. Apart from these, “Hand D” in the manuscript of the collaborative play Sir Thomas More has long been accepted as Shakespeare’s.

Not all the plays printed by Tucker Brooke are lacking in literary or theatrical merit.

Not all the plays printed by Tucker Brooke are lacking in literary or theatrical merit. Arden of Faversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy—domestic tragedies based on contemporary scandals—retain a grim, terse power, and M. L. Wine, who edited Arden for the prestigious Revels series, would not rule out the possibility of Shakespeare’s having had a hand in it. The strongest case for Shakespeare’s authorship, however, has been made out for Edward III, a history play of remarkable distinction which fuses a chronicle dramatization of Edward’s military conquest of France and the soldierly apprenticeship of the Black Prince with a romance plot in which Edward attempts to entice the Countess of Salisbury to become his mistress but is convinced by her argument that he is abusing his royal power in seeking to compel her to commit adultery. The play probably dates from circa 1590; there are some allusions to the Armada which must have been topical, and it was entered on the Stationers’ Register in 1595, published a year later, and reprinted in 1599. Dr. Sams suggests that a first draft was made in about 1589 and revised some four years later (a ballad, apparently drawing on the play, was registered in March 1593), thus accounting for any stylistic discontinuities. No author is named on the title page; it was ascribed to Shakespeare only in 1656 and first properly edited, as “a Play thought to be writ by Shakespeare,” by Edward Capell in 1760. Tucker Brooke attributed it to Peele. There have been four published editions subsequent to his, none wholly satisfactory, and one advertised as “forthcoming” by Richard Proudfoot in 1985 has yet to appear. Previous commentators, somewhat impressionistically, have detected a Shakespearean quality in act 1, scene 2, the whole of act 2 (the “Countess scenes”), and act 4, scene 4 (which shows the Black Prince and Lord Audley braving apparently certain doom on the battlefield of Crécy). I shall call these Part A, and the rest Part B. The Oxford Shakespeare omitted the play, although the editors have since repented. Sams is not the first to claim that Shakespeare wrote all of it, but he is the first to provide such a battery of evidence.

Sams is far from being a newcomer to the twilight world of the Shakespeare apocrypha. In 1985 he published an edition of the anonymous manuscript play Edmund Ironside, dating it circa 1588 and claiming it as Shakespeare’s. The academic profession responded with a withering contempt which did it no credit. Sams responded in turn with shrill petulance—which did him no credit either—but also with a torrent of other publications, most recently The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years (1564–94) (Yale, 1995), which oppose a number of scholarly orthodoxies. He believes Shakespeare commenced as a dramatist much earlier than is usually supposed, that none of the plays before The Two Noble Kinsmen was collaborative, and that a number of texts traditionally explained as “bad quartos” or memorial reconstructions of Shakespeare were in fact early drafts.

The consensus against Sams on these points, although still formidable, is not as absolute as it once was. Within the last two years Alan Hughes and Jonathan Bate, in separate editions of Titus, have argued for a date of composition around 1593, but both concede that this may have been a revision of an earlier draft (which Hughes is even willing to assign to 1588), and both believe the play to be Shakespeare’s sole work; Michael Hattaway, the most recent editor of the Henry VI trilogy (with which Edward III has strong links), thinks all three plays had been written by 1592, again by Shakespeare alone. Unfortunately, in the case of King John, another play reminiscent of Edward III, there is no agreement: A. R. Braunmuller’s edition plumping for 1595–6, L. A. Beaurline’s for 1590. The date you choose depends partly on whether you think The Troublesome Reign of King John (printed 1591) is Shakespeare’s source or derives from him; for Sams it is Shakespeare’s early version. Finally, Laurie E. Maguire in Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The “Bad” Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge, 1996) concludes that the quarto versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI, which differ widely from the Folio texts, are not memorial reconstructions, and she has telling criticism to make of that whole theory. With such tacit support, Sams may feel the academic tide is turning.

Sams is unquestionably industrious and energetic. He provides a fairly lightly edited text of Edward III, sixty-seven pages of notes tracing minute links between its language and that of Shakespeare’s known works, a further sixty pages of discussion of its critical reception and further evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship, and appendices on the implications for study of Edmund Ironside and Sir Thomas More. Since even those who deny Shakespeare the whole play admit that his hand is detectable in both plot areas (the Countess and the French wars), there is a prima facie case to answer.

Sams rejects the division between Parts A and B, surely rightly. Like Henry V (which, interestingly, dates from the same year, 1599, in which Edward III was reprinted), Edward III juxtaposes themes of sexual and martial conquest, government of self and state, and princely education in chivalry, the Countess parts and the French parts being analogous. Sams is able to show parallels to the canonical plays throughout the text. These parallels are not just a matter of a word occurring in two texts, but of repeated sequences of words and corresponding sequences of thought and imagery. Cumulatively they carry a great deal of weight. Other evidence which seems to me to be persuasive includes the use, in Part B as well as A, of the copy of Froissart’s Chronicles owned by Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain of whose company Shakespeare was a member; allusions to other Shakespeare plays and poems pre-1594 (the direct quotation of a line from the then unpublished Sonnet 94, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” is only the best known example), together with the glancing references to Edward III in Shakespeare’s later histories, especially, again, Henry V—all of which look like mischievous self-allusions; use of image-clusters and stylistic features urged by other writers as typically Shakespearean when found in authentic plays; and evidence from vocabulary.

This last has become dauntingly technical in recent years with the advent of computer linguistics.

This last has become dauntingly technical in recent years with the advent of computer linguistics. Eliot Slater, in The Problem of “The Reign of King Edward III”: A Statistical Approach (Cambridge, 1988), showed from an analysis of rare-word usage that there was an overwhelming probability of Edward III’s being wholly by Shakespeare, Part A having close affinities with King John (for which he accepted a date in the mid-1590s), Part B with Titus and the Henry VI plays. Slater’s findings have been disputed by other stylometrists but, as Sams reports, they have made no strong case against Edward III. Besides, Sams has abundant examples of words occurring in the play which are listed as Shakespearean coinages and/or unique to him both in the Oxford English Dictionary and in Onions’s Shakespeare Glossary. Most telling, perhaps, is the argument from palaeography. Sams enumerates twenty-six features common to Hand D in the More manuscript, which have been used to show that it is Shakespeare’s, and the manuscript which may be inferred to underlie the printed text of Edward III.

I find it hard to deny that Sams has proved his case and that, consequently, Edward III is Shakespeare’s unaided work. He then “seeks to show that Ironside is from the same hand as Edward III; so all who accept the latter as partly or wholly Shakespearean should also in equity accept the former, ‘execrable’ or not, in its entirety.” This is not quite logical, since it would be open to someone who denied Shakespeare’s sole authorship of Edward III to attribute parallels in Ironside to his collaborator; but I have ruled that position out. Eliot Slater, in an appendix to his book on Edward III, supported the Shakespearean authorship of Ironside having applied his rare-word tests to that play; he found it correlated very closely with Titus, 1 and 3 Henry VI. Again the handwriting evidence is strong–perhaps more so since we have the Ironside manuscript and need not infer it from a printed text. Many of the Hand D features Sams has identified as Shakespearean in Edward III are also found in Hand D and Ironside; and the imagery as well as much of the stagecraft of Ironside correlates more closely with Titus Andonicus, the Henry VI trilogy, and Richard III than with any later work in the canon. Its villain, Edricus, anticipates Aaron in Titus, or Richard III himself. Sams’s conclusion is, as before, that Ironside was written by Shakespeare in about 1588 and that he reworked its materials in the better-known plays.

Why should anyone want to deny this? Because, critics say, it does not “feel” as though Shakespeare could have written Ironside; it is too poor a play, too unlike him in theme and treatment.¹ Sams is uncompromising here, quoting the dictum of Samuel Schoenbaum (whom he elsewhere attacks) that “intuitions, convictions and subjective judgments generally, carry no weight as evidence. This no matter how learned, respected or confident the authority.” Yet it is not just a matter of the quality of a single text. T. S. Eliot well says, in his essay on John Ford, that “the full meaning of any one of [Shakespeare’s] plays is not in itself alone, but in that play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of Shakespeare’s other plays, earlier and later: we must know all of Shakespeare’s work in order to know any of it”—a view he later distills into the aphorism, “the whole of Shakespeare is one poem.” A massive sense of coherence emerges from a reading of all thirty-seven canonical plays. I would connect this with the tradition, which like Sams I accept, that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic: his mind has as much organic unity as that of Aquinas. Sams’s detective work has, at some stage, been caused by his response to what he perceives as Shakespearean “fingerprints” in the plays; he is saying, “This feels like Shakespeare,” and I think it reasonable to concede some validity to the opposite feeling. After all, when the early Christian Church had to decide which of the many gospels were going to be sanctioned as canonical and which rejected as suspect, the decisions were surely made—divine guidance apart—on the grounds of just such hunches and intuitions, rather than statistical or manuscript considerations. (I sometimes indulge the wicked fantasy that Sams is working on an edition of the Gospel of Thomas, designed to prove its Shakespearean authorship.)

Of course it would be absurd to say that Shakespeare never wrote badly: but, in fact, much of Ironside is not written badly; and if one accepts a date of 1588 or 1589, it is perfectly plausible to say that this is early Shakespeare rather than someone else recollecting or imitating later Shakespeare. The neo-Senecan mode and archaic diction, tolerable in the late 1580s, would have been fustian a generation later. Sams rightly regrets that so few critics have any expertise in palaeographical skills such as the dating of paper; an expert ought to examine and report on the likely dating of the Ironside manuscript. Moreover, in the British Library’s MS Egerton 1994, the manuscript collection which contains Ironside, is an anonymous history play on the reign of Richard II, generally known as Woodstock. This, too, is of unusually high quality, and Ian Robinson, in a pamphlet now out of print (“Richard II ” and “Woodstock,” Brynmill Press, 1988) felt inclined to give it to Shakespeare. Again, a comparison of its manuscript features with those of Edward III, Ironside and Hand D seems overdue.

Robinson’s one doubt about Sams’s case for Ironside is whether it matters that Shakespeare wrote it or not (Robinson has a low opinion of the play). I should say it mattered a great deal, that we cannot know too much about Shakespeare’s working practices,² and that Sams and his enemies would serve us all much better if they could discuss things in a calm frame of mind. As things stand, Heminges and Condell’s confidence, in their preface to the First Folio, that Shakespeare’s “wit can no more lie hid than it could be lost,” rings more than a little hollow.

Notes
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