“The Raigne of King Edward the third:  As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London,” was published in 1596, and ran through two or three anonymous editions before the date of the generation was out which first produced it.  Having thus run to the end of its natural tether, it fell as naturally into the oblivion which has devoured, and has not again disgorged, so many a more precious production of its period.  In 1760 it was reprinted in the “Prolusions” of Edward Capell, whose text is now before me.  This editor was the first mortal to suggest that his newly unearthed treasure might possibly be a windfall from the topless tree of Shakespeare.  Being, as I have said, a duly modest and an evidently honest man, he admits “with candour” that there is no jot or tittle of “external evidence” whatsoever to be alleged in support of this gratuitous attribution:  but he submits, with some fair show of reason, that there is a certain “resemblance between the style of” Shakespeare’s “earlier performances and of the work in question”; and without the slightest show of any reason whatever he appends to this humble and plausible plea the unspeakably unhappy assertion that at the time of its appearance “there was no known writer equal to such a play”; whereas at a moderate computation there were, I should say, on the authority of Henslowe’s Diary, at least a dozen—­and not improbably a score.  In any case there was one then newly dead, too long before his time, whose memory stands even higher above the possible ascription of such a work than that of the adolescent Shakespeare’s very self.

Of one point we may be sure, even where so much is unsure as we find it here:  in the curt atheological phrase of the Persian Lucretius, “one thing is certain, and the rest is lies.”  The author of King Edward III. was a devout student and a humble follower of Christopher Marlowe, not yet wholly disengaged by that august and beneficent influence from all attraction towards the “jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits”; and fitter on the whole to follow this easier and earlier vein of writing, half lyrical in manner and half elegiac, than to brace upon his punier limbs the young giant’s newly fashioned buskin of blank verse.  The signs of this growing struggle, the traces of this incomplete emancipation, are perceptible throughout in the alternate prevalence of two conflicting and irreconcilable styles; which yet affords no evidence or suggestion of a double authorship.  For the intelligence which moulds and informs the whole work, the spirit which pervades and imbues the general design, is of a piece, so to speak, throughout; a point imperceptible to the eye, a touchstone intangible by the finger, alike of a scholiast and a dunce.