Shakespeare S Lost Play Edmund Ironside

One of the central assumptions of established Shakespeare scholarship has been that the playwright produced flawless work needing no revision--that if a text was inferior in style, it could be assumed that Shakespeare did not write it. Thus Shakespeare had nothing to do with the "bad" quartos; these were instead the work of "memorial reconstruction," in which actors remembered and subsequently wrote down entire texts composed by others. In this controversial book, Eric Sams suggests that there is no evidence to substantiate memorial reconstruction, that Shakespeare very probably revised his plays repeatedly, and that he may therefore be the author of the "bad" quartos and of other works not attributed to him. Drawing on testimony from Shakespeare's contemporaries and on documents concerning his family, Sams presents a vivid biographical picture of the first thirty years of the playwright's life. He establishes that Shakespeare's origins were humble: his parents were illiterate Catholics and the family trade was farming and animal husbandry. During this period Shakespeare acquired some knowledge of legal practice, served as the legal hand in an attorney's office, married, and moved to London to join a theatre company and to establish a career as an actor and playwright. Sams traces the impact of Shakespeare's upbringing in the plays themselves--not only those of the Folio edition but others, including the "bad" quartos. He finds that these texts are filled with figurative language that would have been gleaned from a rural upbringing and legal experience. Using detailed textual analysis, he argues compellingly that during these early "lost" years, Shakespeare was in fact writing first versions of his later great works.

Using computer analysis, this book confronts the main unsolved mysteries of authorship in Shakespeare's canon, providing some surprising conclusions.

Argues the case for naming Shakespeare as the author of "Edward III," and presents the text of the play with an introduction and notes

Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays examines the changing ideological conceptions of sovereignty and their on-stage representations in the public theaters during the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods (1580–1642). The study examines the way in which the early modern stage presented a critical dialogue concerning the nature of sovereignty through the lens of specifically English history, focusing in particular on the presentation and representation of monarchy. It presents the subgenre of the English history play as a specific reaction to the surrounding political context capable of engaging with and influencing popular and elite conceptions of monarchy and government. This project is the first of its kind to specifically situate the early modern debate on sovereignty within a 'popular culture' dramatic context; its purpose is not only to provide an historical timeline of English political theory pertaining to monarchy, but to situate the drama as a significant influence on the production and dissemination thereof during the Tudor and Stuart periods. Some of the plays considered here, notably those by Shakespeare and Marlowe, have been extensively and thoroughly studied. But others-such as Edmund Ironside, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and King John and Matilda-have not previously been the focus of much critical attention.

This work focuses on thirteen English Renaissance plays: the Anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V and Edward III, the apocryphal plays Sir John Oldcastle and Thomas, Lord Cromwell, the pseudo-Shakespearean Edmund Ironside, and Shakespeare's 1, 2, 3 Henry VI, King John, Richard II, 1, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. Discussed are the spectators in the socially mixed audience who responded differently, depending on individual political biases, and who had to be considered if the plays were to reach the stage.

Explores Shakespeare's plays in their most immediate context: the hundreds of plays known to original audiences, but lost to us.