Talk:Edward III (play)

Untitled
This is a really interesting article, and I don't want to touch it myself as I don't know enough about it. However, I have two questions: Could we hear more about the history of its discovery, so as to shed light on these two points? Deb 22:02 Feb 10, 2003 (UTC)
 * I understood that Shakespeare was only thought to be co-author of this play with some other unknown playwright.
 * The article seems to imply that the play is now universally accepted as being by Shakespeare, but I think there is still some debate over it.

Plays not by Shakespeare?
I teach 10th grade English in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Over the past several weeks I have had several debates with a certain student (you know the kind) that swears by the moon that Shakespeare didn't write a lick of his plays. He states that all of the plays were plagerized and Shakespeare was a hack.

I don't know how accurate articles on Wikipedia are, but this interests me greatly. It is interesting that perhaps all this talk about Shakespeare's Plagerism is just puffing up these two plays that he may not have wrote the enterty of but just helped on. It will be interesting to bring this point up in class.

More information if anyone has it. Dante —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dante99 (talk • contribs) 22:23, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
 * I would be fascinated to hear this student's opinion of Plutarch's Lives, Holinshed's Chronicles, King Leir, Arthur Brooke's Romeo and Juliet poem and all the other works that Shakespeare 'simply plagiarized'. This student must have a lot of respect for these works and must know them in a lot of detail for him/her to be so certain that Shakespeare simply copied them without changing anything. It must be wonderful to be as well-read as this student. The Singing Badger 23:09, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

edward iii- not the play.
i want to know about the man not the play! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.179.118.24 (talk) 17:00, 8 March 2007 (UTC).
 * See Edward III of England. Thanks.  Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 05:03, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

The criteria against Shakespeare and against his authorship of some plays is flimsy
The most recent version of the Riverside Shakespeare includes Edward III in it. Furthermore, I just want to examine some of the issues with this play (and with Cardenio):

1) It was published anonymously (although this was not uncommon in the 1590s).

The point was already made for me, it was not uncommon in the 1590s for plays to be untitled.

2) It is not mentioned in Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia (1598), a work that lists most of Shakespeare's early plays.

Not every play Shakespeare wrote had to be listed in a book for him to have written it.

3) John Heminges and Henry Condell did not include the play when they compiled the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays in 1623.

They also failed to include Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsmen which we now know as plays written by Shakespeare.

4) Many critics view the play as not worthy of Shakespeare's writing ability.

No one not even Shakespeare) can a hit a home run every time. Honestly, the man wrote Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest and Twelfth Night but he is still human -- he should be permitted mistakes.

Just some thoughts. Ladb2000 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ladb2000 (talk • contribs) 04:47, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Who is thought to be the principal author?
The question that gets me is who is the principal author of the play? There doesn't seem to be much interest in this as there is to whether Shakespeare wrote parts of it. But if it's a play that's worth reading, I'd really like to know who the principal author was. I think Anthony Munday has been proposed, and George Peele has been completely rejected, but that makes me just wonder even further who the "not Shakespeare" parts are by. --Scottandrewhutchins (talk) 22:24, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I added an attributions section based on the New Cambridge Edition edited by Giorgio Melchiori. I don't know if anything new has come to light in the ten years since its publication, but I would assume that it has. --Scottandrewhutchins (talk) 02:37, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

It has been established, with a great degree of certainty, that Christopher Marlowe, not Shakespeare, is the author of "Edward III." I am surprised that the author of the article about this play is ignorant of A. D. Wraight's research into this matter:

http://www.themarlowestudies.org/wraight-EdwardIII.html 19:44, 18 November 2011 (UTC)daver852 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.215.210.156 (talk)
 * It should be pointed out that Wraight is a Marlovian who claimed with equal assurance that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare's sonnets. To my knowledge, outside of the Marlowe Society itself, this "great degree of certainty" is unshared by contemporary scholars, who give passing mention of Wraight's work in describing the history of the authorship discussion, and then move on without engaging it. The interesting above-cited article, which summarizes, excerpts from, and comments on Wraight's work, seems to me, subjectively, to testify to its coterie scholarship: the astonishment at the blindness of all other scholars so far, the spinning out of long strands of inference from a few minute quotations, an inability to recognize the disparity between the weight of the evidence offered and its power to convince a neutral reader. This is not to say that she is wrong, but that it is inaccurate to characterize her eccentric claim as established--or influential, or even controversial among mainstream scholars, including those who argue for signs of Marlowe's hand in the work. Jackaroodave (talk) 11:24, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Publication history
The article mentions the first folio and the second quarto, but never gives a publication history or list of early editions. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:15, 25 June 2023 (UTC)