SOURCE: Champion, Larry S. “‘Answere to this Perillous Time’: Ideological Ambivalence in The Raigne of King Edward III and the English Chronicle Plays.” English Studies 69, no. 2 (April 1988): 117-29.

In this essay, Champion uses the example of the anonymous play The Raigne of King Edward III to argue that the chronicle play resonated in different ways with different strata of the audience.

The Raigne of Edward III, published anonymously in quartos of 1596 and 1599, has been described as ‘one of the finest examples of the chronicle history plays’,¹ ‘the most academic and intellectual’² and the ‘most interesting and controversial’ play in the Shakespeare Apocrypha.³ The association with Shakespeare dates back to Edward Capell in 1760, and subsequent critical arguments have been mounted both for his sole authorship (most recently Wentersdorf, O'Connor, Hart, and Bell)⁴ and for his role as collaborator or reviser (Muir, Kozlenko, Chambers, Ward, Koskenniemi, Mincoff, Leech).⁵ The play...