Edmund Ironside is an anonymous Elizabethan play that depicts the life of Edmund II of England; however, at least two critics have suggested it is an early work by Shakespeare. Elizabethan theatre is a general term covering the plays written and performed publicly in England during the reign (1558 - 1603) of Queen Elizabeth I. The term can be used more broadly to also include theatre of Elizabeths immediate successors, James I and Charles I, until the closure of public... Edmund II or Eadmund II (c. ...
Authorship
E.B. Everitt and Eric Sams have argued that this play is perhaps Shakespeare's first drama. According to Sams, Edmund Ironside "contains some 260 words or usages which on the evidence of the Oxford English Dictionary were first used by Shakespeare himself.... Further, it exhibits 635 instances of Shakespeare's rare words including some 300 of the rarest."[1] However, this argument has failed to convince the majority of Shakespearian scholars. The Oxford English Dictionary print set The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP). ...
Plot
King Canutus (Canute the Great) faces an insurrgency of the native, English population, led by Edmund II. Unbeknownst to them, they face a mutual enemy, a traitorous noble named Edricus, who hopes to take the crown for himself. Canute (or Cnut) I, or Canute the Great (Old Norse: Knútr inn rÃki, Danish: Knud II den Store, Norwegian: Knut den mektige) (994/995 â November 12, 1035) was king of England, Denmark and Norway and governor or overlord of Schleswig and Pomerania. ...
EdmundIronside is an anonymous Elizabethan play that depicts the life of Edmund II of England; however, at least two critics have suggested it is an early work by Shakespeare.
According to Sams, EdmundIronside "contains some 260 words or usages which on the evidence of the Oxford English Dictionary were first used by Shakespeare himself....
King Canutus (Canute the Great) faces an insurgency of the native, English population, led by Edmund II.
The earlier plays range from broad comedy to historical nostalgia, while the middle-period plays tend to be grander in terms of theme, addressing such issues as betrayal, murder, lust, power, and ambition.
In addition, the fact that Shakespeare did not produce an authoritative print version of his plays during his life accounts for part of the textual problem often noted with his plays, which means that for several of the plays there are different textual versions.
These plays, which blend piety with farce and slapstick, were allegories in which the characters are personified moral attributes who validate the virtues of Godly life by prompting the protagonist to choose such a life over evil.