It is in essence a revenge tragedy, on the model of The Spanish Tragedy, complete with the amputation of hands and the mutilation of noses. It also marks, in Edricus, the first appearance of the theatrical Shakespearian villain:
They cannot so dissemble as I can
Cloak, cozen, cog and flatter with the king
Crouch and seem courteous, promise and protest…
The genuine Shakespearian note once more emerges, the words an obvious preliminary to those of Richard III. Edmund Ironside has been described as the first English history play, but in fact that honour can be claimed by the unknown play on the exploits of Henry V staged at the Red Bull. But Edmund Ironside is the first history play derived from an imaginative reading of historical sources; the story is in part based upon Holinshed’s Chronicles, the source from which King Leir also springs. It uses Ovid. It uses Plutarch. It uses Spenser. It is permeated by legal and biblical phraseology in a manner to which successive generations of Shakespearian scholars have become accustomed. It incorporates “low” comedy in prose beside high rhetoric in verse, placing both in an intriguing perspective. It shares the same misunderstandings of classical mythology as does the work of the young Shakespeare. It uses the imagery of “butchery” for the first time in English drama, imagery which became something of a Shakespearian speciality. It has the phrase “all hail,” and the immediate reference to Judas, which is a hallmark of Shakespeare’s plays.2 There is also an odd interpolation on the subject of the parting of a newly wedded couple:
as sadly as the late espoused man
Grieves to depart from his new-married wife.
How many sighs I fetched at my depart
How many times I turned to come again …
All the characteristics conspire to make one pertinent question. Who else but the young Shakespeare could possibly have written it in 1588? Marlowe, Kyd, or Greene? None seems so appropriate or so convincing as Shakespeare himself.
Edmund Ironside can be adduced, then, as evidence of the young Shakespeare’s talent for re-creating historical narrative on stage. Other dramatists copied him, Marlowe’s Edward II being the most famous example, but none had his instinctive ability to create memorable action out of the sometimes laboured descriptions of the chroniclers. He was able to depict character in expressive speech, to summarise the manifold causes of action with significant detail, and to invent memorable plots. His greatest and earliest gift, however, was perhaps the introduction of comedy as a respite from tragical or violent action. He had a perfect “ear” for variation and change.
These early plays are not admitted into the official Shakespeare “canon.” Many scholars believe there is no evidence, external or internal, to indicate who wrote them. Could it be simply that they are not considered sufficiently “Shakespearian”? But Shakespeare himself was not immediately “Shakespearian.” Early Wilde was not “Wildean,” and the young Browning was not in the pattern of the mature Browning. Shakespeare’s plays were published long after they were written and performed; many were not printed until after his death. He had time, in other words, to revise and embellish.
His earliest plays are written in the approved “new” style of his contemporaries; they are fluent, even if on occasions they show facility rather than inventiveness. They use end-stopped declamatory verse with Ovidian and Senecan flourishes; they include Latin tags and general classical allusiveness. They are also written with great spirit and bravura, as if the words and cadences emerged effortlessly from some source of overflowing energy and confidence. But he was also learning his craft all the time, and the astonishing fact of his early development is the speed of his progress. He learnt from the reactions of the audience, and the responses of the players; the range of his language was immeasurably enlarged and deepened as he experimented with the various forms of drama. He was highly attuned to the language all around him — the poems, the plays, the pamphlets, the orations, the speech of the street — and he absorbed everything. There was perhaps no greater assimilator in the history of English drama.
It has also been plausibly conjectured that in 1588 Shakespeare wrote another play, based upon the chronicles, which was later published as The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England. Shakespeare’s King John is certainly closely modelled upon it, to the extent that it can best be seen as a revision or adaptation of the older play. There is not one scene in King John which is not based upon an original scene in The Troublesome Raigne. One nineteenth-century critic remarked that “Shakespeare has no doubt kept so closely to the lines of the older play because it was a favourite with the audience.”3 It is much more likely, however, that he kept closely to the earlier scenes because he had written them. Otherwise once more we are presented with the strange anomaly of Shakespeare extensively purloining the work of an unknown and unnamed writer and passing it off under his own name. He even copied the historical errors of the original.
The later publishers of The Troublesome Raigne, in 1611 and in 1622, were in no doubt about the matter; they accredited it as the work of “W Sh” and “W. SHAKESPEARE” without ever being corrected. It is sometimes suggested that sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century publishers were in some way incompetent or negligent, and that they regularly put false names on their title pages. This is in fact not the case. They were stringently regulated by their guild, the Stationers’ Company, and could incur large fines for any breach of standards. There were of course occasional rogue printers who would try to pass off inferior work as that of “W.S” or some other suggestive name, but the printer of the 1611 edition of The Troublesome Raigne, Valentine Simms, was well known to Shakespeare and was responsible for the first editions of four of his plays. He would not have put “W Sh” on a book without some warrant for doing so.
The play itself takes its place in the continuing rivalry between the playwrights of the period. It is written in two parts, imitating Marlowe’s Tamburlaine of the previous year. But its address to “the Gentlemen Readers,” printed as a prologue in imitation of the prologue to Tamburlaine, criticises “the Scythian Tamburlaine” as an “Infidel” and thus an inappropriate subject for the stage of a Christian country. Where in his own prologue Marlowe scoffs at the “jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,” the author of The Troublesome Raigne is at some pains to compose many such rhymes. The Troublesome Raigne was in turn parodied by Nashe in the following year. All this was part of the battle of the young writers, which in this period was conducted at a level of comic aggression and burlesque. It gives Shakespeare a context, however, and a character.
But the extant play does provide difficulties of identification and interpretation that, incidentally, throw light upon the dramatic conditions of the period. There is one scene in The Troublesome Raigne, concerning the pillaging of an abbey for its gold, which is utterly unlike anything Shakespeare ever wrote. It is a comic scene, but of a very degraded kind. So we might infer that someone else added this scene — perhaps the comic actor who played one of the parts. It was quite usual for the comedians to write their own lines. The fact that Shakespeare did not include this scene in his revised King John suggests that it was not his work. So we have a play of mixed parentage.