Shakespeare's 'Edward III': An Early Play Restored to the Canon.

Eric Sams, ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. ix + 242 pp. $30. ISBN: 0-3000-6626-0.

This is a compelling book and as significant in the development of the Shakespeare canon as Steven Urkowitz's monumental publication in 1980 on the revision of King Lear. Whereas Urkowitz challenged one's belief in the presence of a subsuming original now lost, Eric Sams challenges those hesitant to identify Edward III, first published anonymously in 1596, as wholly Shakespeare's. Uncertainties over collaboration, plagiarism, and memorial reconstruction, however, have kept it outside the canon. But Sams argues that once Shakespeare arrived in London he wrote the play in about 1589, returning to rewrite the second act (in much the same way he returned to the 1608 Quarto of Lear) after Titus Andronicus was published in 1594 and infusing it with large chunks of exceptional poetry found in his sonnets. Consequently, the remainder of the play seems to have been written by a lesser hand than the second act, which indeed some academics have ascribed to Shakespeare. While undoubtedly the debate on whether or not the play is Shakespeare's own, unaided work will continue in academic circles, Sams's learned analysis of the text's internal evidence ensures that those who wish to refute him are forced to engage in an intelligent and persuasive argument.

Drawing on the First Quarto (1596), the second edition (1599), and the third (Capell 1760), Sams provides an accessible text of the play - modern in spelling and punctuation, speech-prefixes in full, act and scene divisions in square brackets - augmented with a cogent synopsis, copious notes, useful index, and extensive bibliography. But particularly valuable are three chapters that comprise both a judicial review of previous commentary and a detailed analysis of textual links between Edward III and Shakespeare's canon.

In fact, Sams's forty-two pages of proposed canonical links - arranged alphabetically with each entry linked concurrently to several texts - lend to the idea that Shakespeare did not write his plays linearly from first line to last, nor did he produce one text after another chronologically, but instead that he was a reviser, who constantly thought in terms of joining together discrete elements from all his texts, thus creating what can best be called a hypertextual - yet cohesive - narrative to his composing process, a method in which he displayed any number of relationships at once. Hence, a profusion of links exist not only between the Sonnets and the second act but also between the entire canon and the second act and between the canon and the rest of the play. Additionally, among the plays acts similar links appear, making them both inter- and intratextual, and thus strongly suggesting that the author of Edward III was no mere imitator, nor were authors writing in collaboration. The evidence to date points in Shakespeare's direction only. When one embraces the concept of nonlinear narrative and dispels the illusion of linear writing and of strict chronology in the production of texts, questions that also might be raised on the play's date(s) of authorship in relation to the composition of the sonnets (ca. 1593-1603) seem moot. Edward III and the Sonnets interlink and inform each other.

I find myself overwhelmed by the evidence, its careful presentation and objectivity. As a result, I am eager to have Edward III on disc so that I and others may continue seeking linkage with Shakespeare. In the words of Sams, "The case now needs to be reopened and its contents redisplayed for a new generation of readers" (160). Appropriating Edward III electronically will prove to be an expeditious and advantageous way to build upon Sams's indispensable achievement.

CHRISTOPHER T. NIELSON Widener University