Edmund Ironside (play)

Edmund Ironside, or War Hath Made All Friends is an anonymous Elizabethan play that depicts the life of Edmund II of England. At least three critics have suggested that it is an early work by William Shakespeare.

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.

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." Sams dates the play to 1587, noting that the play's presentation after that period until the death of Elizabeth I would have been illegal because of an edict that was passed that would have applied to a scene featuring a brawl between two archbishops. He further argues that the play's strong similarities in both line and plot to Titus Andronicus, and the latter's plays high number of mentions of the Roman setting may indicate that Titus is something of a rewriting of Edmund Ironside. His appendix notes correlations of images and ideas that are found only in Shakespeare's plays and not from any known playwright of the era, such as serpents stinging via their tongues and reporting of Judas Iscariot saying "all hail," which is non-Biblical, but also found in such plays as Henry VI, Part 3.

Edmund Ironside tells the story of a battle between two men who both want to be king of England: Edmund Ironside, who is a native, and noble, and Canutus, who is a Danish prince, and treacherous. A third important figure is Edricus, who is duplicitous, plays each side against the other, and who also wants the crown. Edricus occasionally finds himself alone onstage and boasts about his villainy in the manner of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Canutus is concerned that the native English population is rebelling against him in support of Ironside.

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