Quidditas

Volume 8 Article 29

1987

Review Essay: Eric Sams, ed, Shakespeare's Lost Play "Edmund Ironside"

Charles L. Squier University of Colorado-Boulder

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Recommended Citation Squier, Charles L. (1987) "Review Essay: Eric Sams, ed, Shakespeare's Lost Play "Edmund Ironside"," Quidditas: Vol. 8 , Article 29. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol8/iss1/29

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oldier in the service of Catholic Venice. Honor as a wa r hero, coupled with knowledge of Desdemona' innocen e. leads Othello to a Stoic and honorabl uicide. Mind-moving literary criticism o curs when a writer leads the reader along, uch as Wymer does with hi rich, five-page di cour e on Othello. Readers are Jes apt LO be convinced when Wymer, arguing that paradox is at the heart of Christian do ·trine ab ut despair, jams together in one paragraph reference · to Chaucer, Morality pl ays, hake peare, and Luther. uch wide] s altered allusions, in terms of writer, genres, and time periods, leave the reader bewildered and ceptical. At thi (a nd other) poinLS in the book, one i tempted LO pencil in marginalia requesting omi ion. Wymer can make his case or the paradox of Chri tian and toical doctrine in a few pages, 1101 man . In hon, when W)'mer dwell upon a uicide, he argues well and write we ll. When he con truct · a pastiche of prim, r and second• ary o ur e , his argument b ome clouded and hi s writin g smells of th scholarl y inkhorn.

William Mccarron FA ad my

Eric am , ed., Shakespeare's Lo I Play "Edmund lro11side," 1. fartin' Press, 19 5.

In 1927 Eleanore Boswel l publi ·heel for the Maloru: ociet an edition of Edmund !ro11Side, an ano nymous lat ixteemh- err tury chroni I hi tory pla from Egerton I 994 in the British Librar . In The Yo1111g "hakespeare: Sllldies i11 Do 11111e11lary Evide11ce, A11glisticr,, II. 1954, E. B. Everitt attributed the pla 10 hake peare and, till cl aiming hake peare as the author, published a modernized edition of Edmund Ironside in Six Early Play Related lo the hakespeare Ca11011. Anglistica. XI V, 1965. Everi11's attribution received litLle credence, and it 1·cmained for the musi ologi L Eric Sams to re pen the case in 1982 in the pages of th Times Literary 11pple111ent. hakespeare ·s Lost Play "Ed11111.11d Ironside," a h brid edition some, here between Boswell 's diplomatic edition and Everitt' rnoderniwtion, wa achieved, in ams' words, by "depun tuating Everiu and de a1 itali ·in , 13os, ell" (53). It is am's corrvic• tion that "the Ironside case, now reinforced and returning LO th<: charge. "'ill . .. strike very ra ti o nal and fair-minded reader as ex treme] ' trong·· ( I); that William Shakespeare wrote Edmund lnmside, in hi · ow n hand, the ame hand that wro1e Hand D in the manu cript of ir Thomas More; and that Edmund lro11side , as written and acted irca 158 . Boak Reviews 215

The text of the play is accompani ed by a polemica l imroduction; notes, which near! all point to Shakespearean parallels; and a lengthy commen­ tary de igned 10 ap the argument of the introduction, text, and notes with further eviden e, largely of a parallel nature, divided into topic headings covering Book , Life, cenes and haracters, Chains of Association, ingle Images and ymbols, Rh etorical De ices, Ver e, and ocabulary. Wh e,·e there is a parallel or the slightest pos ibility of a parallel, Sams sure!)• and dog­ gedly finds and list it, no mailer what the ev idemial we ight: Ironside: "cau ele night"; Titus: "tl y causeles " (34 , 35): Ironside: ·· 1 am comented"; Shrew: "I am coment" (244). Shakespeare's Lo. I Play ""Edmund Ironside" is ratJ1er more than a labor of love, but for all the undeniable effon and reading beh ind it, the mass ive, not to sa ob ·essive, collection of parallels, and for a ll of Sam 's i mpa sioncd advocacy, the ca e is, at best, not proven. At the level of the look-wa lk-and• tal k-like-a-duck-ergo test ·om readers (I for one) will find Edmw,d Ironside a weak, poorly 1,ritten play by an author or author familiar with and intluenced by the early works of Shakespeare, one of the man humdrum plays de igned to fill the ever hungry maw of the Elizabethan stage. Apart from the feel of the play, it i by no mean certain that, as am asserts, Hand D of t.he Sir Thomas More manuscript i hakespeare' . (Carol . Chill ington, for example, makes a compelling argument that Hand D is not hake pea re's in "Play,Hights at \~ ork: Henslowe' , Not hakespeare' ," Book of Sir 71wmas More, English Literary Renaissance, X:3, _Autumn, 1980.) he copia of lhc parallel citations would be convincing onl if the date is ab ol utcly establi ·hed a before I ' 9, o that the parall el can be certainly demonstrated nol to be echoes of hakespeare. Even if computeri zed statisti cs show "that Lhc vocabul ar of Edmund /ro'IISide fa ll s within earl -Shakespearean parameter '' (369) Lh cjury must, nevcrthele s, remain out. Detailed discussion of all of Sam 's argumems i for someone el e, somewhere else. Typical as enions such as "The figure of Edricus is a di rect link between the Vice of the old morali ty play and su h elf-as enive sol il o­ quizing villain as Aa ron,Joan of Arc, Richard Ill and lago. What could be more hakespcarean?" ( . 9) don't make a ·wallow, much les · a ·ummer. Moreover, there i no eXLernal evidence whatever 10 link Edmund Ironside with Shakespeare. Sams dismisses doubters as the " elf-a ppointed guardians of the gateway. the professed and professional sceptics" ... Shake­ spearean of "the strato phere" and add re cs himself to the "Shake ·peareans in the treet" (2). Believe as you list, but it is difficult to sec what the Shake peareans of the street arc to do wit h an edition of a bad, (presumably) ixteemh-century play edited on the principle of"depunctuating Everitt and decapitalising Bo we ll ," and equipped with polemi cal foornotes which seldom el ucidate the text. T he Shakespcaream of the stratosphere can read 2 16 Book Reviews

Edmund Ironside in lhe Malone Sociely edition; those in the street are probably best advi ed nol lo read it at all.

Charles L. quier Universit of olorado-Boulder

Mary Beth Ro e, ed., Women -in the Widdle Ages and the Re11aissa ,ice, Syracuse niversity, 1986.

T his interdiscipli na1·y coll e tion of eleven essays presents, in large part, the frui ts of a conference, "Changi ng Perspectives on Women in the Renaissance," held at The ewberry Library in 1983. The volume contains both hi storical and literary ·tudies, al though literar ·ubjecl' tend to predominate, as do Renaissance ubject in omparison to medieval. he influence of pioneering feminist hi torianjoan Kell is readil apparent in the interdisci plinary approach, in the emphasis pl a eel on examining the inlluence of sexual ideologies, and in the basi notion of using public and private spheres as an analytical framework. The e ays fa ll into two distin t groups. The lirst examines the effects on women of a patriarchal sexual ideology. The initial e say explore a ig­ nilicant social change that began concurrently with the advent of the Renaissan e, namely that women's roles and activities were increasingly forced out of what was becoming defined as the public sphere of life. Another essay investigates the pos ibilicy that medieval nuns committed self­ mutilation in order to afeguard the state of virginity, which the Church deemed cs ential to their being. Yet another uses gender di tinCLion to examine stati tics that relate to accusation and punishment during the Italian Inquisition. Two selections analyze well-known texts b men, Shakespeare's Coriolanus and.John Foxe' Acts and Monuments, in order to suggest how these texts reOecL an ambiguou auitude toward women. The la I e say in the first part looks at the politica l u es of androgynou images by drawi ng a parallel bet1 een hakespeare's comic heroines (acted by bo s) and Elizabeth l's self­ defined image as "prince." The second ha.If of the b ok contain essays that examine texts by women (Marger Kemp, Sister Beatrice del era, the Counle s of Pembroke, Madeleine and Ca1herine des Roches, 1he Duchess of 1ewcastle, Ann Fanshawe, Alice Thonon, and Anne Halkett). The e "'omen's wr itings illustrate various responses to the problem of attempting to create a self:identit through literary endeavor usually reserved for men. As this collection illu ·trale:,s, medieval and Renaissance women were not attempting to contradicL the prevailing patriarchal ideologie ; nevertheless, their lives reveal a struggle to reconcile their personal li ves with the live