Edmund Ironside, or War Hath Made All Friends is an anonymous Elizabethan play that depicts the life of the Anglo-Saxon king Edmund II of England. At least three critics have suggested that it is an early work by William Shakespeare.
Overview
Edmund Ironside, or War Hath Made All Friends is an anonymous Elizabethan play that depicts the life of the Anglo-Saxon king Edmund II of England. At least three critics have suggested that it is an early work by William Shakespeare.
Text
The play was never published in its own era; the unique copy of the text was preserved in MS. Egerton 1994, an important collection of play manuscripts now in the collection of the British Library.
Authorship
E. B. Everitt, Eric Sams, and Peter Ackroyd 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."
