Edward III

Edward III by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The strongest part of the play is the bits purportedly by Shakespeare – the scenes in which a King demands that a countess sleep with him, and how the countess manages to navigate the conflicting allegiances to her husband and her sovereign. The drama of the scenario is all the more effective for the bits of absurd situational comedy that peep through, like Edward switching from writing love poetry to pretending to study maps and military manoeuvres when someone walks in. That moment effectively collapses the pull between human desires and political duties.

The countess escapes the King’s clutches with a bit of legalese about the precedence of oaths – a theme that is picked up in the rest of the play, where kings give orders that overrule the commitments they and their officials make, and have to be talked back into respecting the rules. Everyone ultimately does what they are supposed to do, which is why Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II are more interesting histories, as these Kings push the system past breaking point and lose their lives as a result.

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