Edward III E-Book

William Shakespeare

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

RSC CLASSICS - a series of rarely performed plays from the 16th and 17th centuries, published alongside their resurrection by the RSC in Stratford and the West End in 2002/03. Officially attributed to Shakespeare only in 1998, Edward III is set in the age of chivalry and chronicles the beginning of the 100 Years War. Following the exploits of Edward, the Black Prince, is also acts as a prequel to Richard II. Edited with an introduction by Roger Warren and preface by Gregory Doran. The plays in the RSC Classics series reflect the diversity of styles, themes and subjects of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and include a 'new' addition to the Shakespeare canon.

Leseprobe

EDWARD III

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

THIS EDITION PREPARED BYROGER WARREN

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

CONTENTS

Gregory DoranPlays for a Money-Get, Mechanic Age

Roger WarrenIntroduction

This Edition

Characters

EDWARD III

PLAYS FOR A MONEY-GET, MECHANIC AGE

In his An Expostulation with Inigo Jones, Ben Jonson quarrels with Jones about the growing supremacy of scenery and stage effects over the spoken text, in the masques they produced together at court.

Pack with your peddling poetry to the stage,This is a money-get, mechanic age.

The stage, unlike the court where the masques were held, was a place to go and use your eyes and your ears, a place where language had primacy, where you went to hear a play.

The stages of the Rose and the Globe needed no scenery, that would be conjured by words, words spoken by the actor standing in the centre of a circle of ears. The Swan Theatre in Stratford reproduces just such a relationship between actor and audience: vital, immediate and dangerous.

Since the Swan opened in 1986, we have done many plays from Shakespeare’s time, all Jonson’s major comedies (though none of his tragedies), all the major pays of Marlowe and Webster, as well as plays by Middleton and Ford, Kyd, Tourneur, Heywood and even Shirley and Broome. This season, I have chosen plays with which audiences are likely to be less familiar and which reflect something of the range of the drama of the period, from City Comedy to Revenge Tragedy and much in between.

I’ve included Edward III, recently canonized from the Shakespeare Apocrypha; The Malcontent by the unjustly neglected John Marston (this is his RSC debut); Massinger’s magnificent The Roman Actor (Adrian Noble directed the only other Massinger play we’ve done, A New Way to Pay Old Debts at The Other Place in 1983); Eastward Ho!, a collaboration by Jonson, Marston and George Chapman; and finally, representing the popular genre of travel plays, a discovery, The Island Princess set in the Spice Islands and written by John Fletcher (who collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII or All Is True, which I directed in the Swan in 1996).

This season is unusual not just because of the concentration on these lesser known plays from the repertoire, but because this is the first time we have explored these works with a dedicated ensemble company of 28 actors, who will perform all five plays in close repertoire. The Swan Theatre allows us to achieve this turnover very swiftly.

Though we have often had very large and elaborate scenery in the Swan, it works perfectly well without any; allowing all the flexibility and fluidity of Shakespeare’s theatre. Basically very little set is needed for any of these plays and without much scenery of course we can achieve a much faster turnaround of plays and spend more time rehearsing in the space where we’ll perform. So we have decided to work faster than usual in order to achieve a full repertoire by midsummer. And who knows, perhaps other things will be released by working all together at this pace, a different dynamic, a closer collaborative spirit? These days we are used to discussing character and motivation at length in rehearsal. Neither of these words would have been understood by an actor in Shakespeare’s day. The text was the character. And as far as we can tell there was very little rehearsal at all. Nowadays we are used to letting things cook more slowly in rehearsal, so let’s see what more of a stir-fry mentality can achieve!

It’s a punishing schedule, but our workloads look light in comparison with the actors in Shakespeare’s day. In the 1594-5 season at the Rose Theatre, according to Philip Henslowe’s Diary, the Lord Admiral’s Men performed 38 plays, 21 of which were new! It’s a fascinating statistic and one which reflects the audience’s appetite for drama in that ‘money-get mechanic age’. Jonson’s phrase could well describe our own time, and perhaps begins to suggest why the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries echo and resonate so profoundly with our own.

GREGORY DORAN

March 2002

INTRODUCTION

On 1 December 1595, the publisher Cuthbert Burby entered ‘a book entitled Edward the Third and the Black Prince their wars with King John of France’ on the Register of the Stationers’ Company in London; he duly published The Reign of King Edward III the following year in a Quarto edition which forms the basis for the present performing text. Burby published a second Quarto in 1599, which corrects obvious errors but has no independent authority. The title-page of the First Quarto is uncommunicative: it mentions neither an author (or authors) nor the Elizabethan company who performed it, saying merely that ‘it hath been sundry times played about the city of London’. There are no other references to the play during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

Apart from an unreliable reference in a bookseller’s catalogue of 1656, the first suggestion of Shakespearian authorship did not occur until 1760, when Edward Capell included in a volume preliminary to his complete edition of Shakespeare (1767–8) on the grounds that ‘there was no known writer equal to such a play’ and to allow his readers to form their own opinion about whether the play was by Shakespeare. Those who in the intervening centuries have responded to Capell’s invitation fall into three categories: some flatly deny Shakespeare’s authorship; some believe he wrote the whole play; probably the majority think the play collaborative, with Shakespeare primarily responsible for the episodes concerning Edward’s attempt to seduce the Countess of Salisbury. This view arises from the belief that the Countess scenes are different in kind from the rest of the play. But since the play is in fact all of a piece, as will emerge from the discussion later on, there is no reason why it should not have been conceived and written by a single dramatist.