Shakespeare and the Middle Ages by Perry Curtis; Watkins John;

Author:Perry, Curtis; Watkins, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford

Edmond Ironside and the National Character in the Elizabethan Succession Crisis

If it is not just another name for Fair Em, it would be interesting to see the William the Conqueror play listed in Henslowe’s diary.23 These are apparently the only plays written on the subject of William the Conqueror. Indeed, since Fair Em could accurately be described as an anti-Conquest play—it imagines the undoing of the social violence done by conquest—there is really no extant play dealing centrally with the story of the Norman Conquest. This is odd, since playwrights and audiences were evidently interested in Saxon material and since early modern playwrights seem to have been eager to stage the stories that stood as precedents for edgy constitutional inquiry. My hypothesis about the absence of any ‘Chronicle History of William the Conqueror’ is that (Hayward notwithstanding) the story of the Norman Conquest was in fact felt to bring too much disparagement to the national honor to be a popular tale. Hence, too, Shakespeare’s apparent unwillingness to stage a successful French invasion at the end of King Lear, or the way he has the French refer to their English opponents as ‘Norman bastards’ (3.5.10) in Henry V: undoing the shame of William’s conquest is part of the project of Shakespeare’s most jingoistic play.24

But concerns associated with William’s conquest—concerns, that is, about the continuity of native liberties and their constitutive relationship to national identity—are handled quite explicitly in Edmond Ironside and The Love-sick King, two plays featuring the conquering Danish king Canute (who ascended to the English throne 50 years before William). In each of these plays the conquest of Canute threatens a tradition of native liberty imagined in each case as specifically Saxon in nature. Each play, moreover, is animated by tension between the idea of conquest as a rupture that threatens to undo native character and the idea of incorporation as articulated by Hayward and staged in Fair Em. Edmond Ironside—which is based primarily on Holinshed—manipulates its source in order to emphasize the absorption of Canute into the English institution of monarchy; and this plot structure is replicated in The Love-sick King, a later play that may or may not owe the conceit to its Elizabethan predecessor.

Though the association between Normans and Danes may seem odd to modern readers—the Danish yoke?—it is common enough within the popular historical imagination of Elizabethan England. We can see this in the comic plotting of Fair Em, where William absorbs the Danes and is himself absorbed by the Saxons. Here is what Holinshed’s Chronicles have to say about the death of Edmond Ironside and the subsequent reign of Canute:

With this Edmund, surnamed Ironside, fell the glorious majestie of the English kingdome, the which afterward as it had beene an aged bodie being fore decaied and weakened by the Danes, that now got possession of the whole, yet somewhat recovered after the space of 26 yeers under king Edward, surnamed the Confessor: and shortlie thereupon as it had beene falne into a resiluation [relapse], came to extreame ruine by the invasion and conquest of the Normans.

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