The play Edward III has recently become accepted as part of Shakespeare's canon of plays. It was considered an anonymous work, and that is how it was first published, but in the late 1990s it began to be included in publications of the complete works as co-authored by Shakespeare.[76] Scholars who have supported this attribution include Jonathan Bate, Edward Capell, Eliot Slater,[77] Eric Sams,[78] Giorgio Melchiori,[79] Brian Vickers, and others. The play, printed in 1596, contains language and themes that also appear in Shakespeare's sonnets, including the line: "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds", which occurs in sonnet 94 and the phrase "scarlet ornaments", which occurs in sonnet 142.[80] The scene of the play that contains those quotations is a comic scene that features a poet attempting to compose a love poem at the behest of his king, Edward III.[81] At the time Edward III was published, Shakespeare's sonnets were known by some, but they had not yet been published.[78]
Colin Burrow, FBA, is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and an Emeritus Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is an expert in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with research interests in relationships between English and classical literatures, the theory and practice of imitation, the theory and practice of editing, education, non-dramatic verse, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and in early sixteenth century literature. His books include Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (OUP, 1993), Edmund Spenser (Northcote House/British Council, 1996), an edition of The Complete Sonnets and Poems for the Oxford Shakespeare (OUP, 2002), an anthology of Metaphysical Poetry (Penguin, 2006), Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (OUP, 2013) and Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (OUP, 2019). He edited the complete poems of Ben Jonson for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. He reviews regularly for The London Review of Books on early modern topics and also on contemporary fiction.
Rupert Brooke was born August 3, 1887, at Rugby, Warwickshire, and educated there and at King's College, Cambridge, which he left with a degree in 1909. His first book of verse, Poems, came out in 1911. After studying briefly in Munich in 1912, he returned to live in England at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire. The next year he travelled abroad in Canada, the United States, and the south seas, particularly Taihiti, where he loved a native woman named Taata Mata. At the start of War World I, Brooke joined the Hood Battalion of the British Naval Division and served in the attack on Antwerp. Over the winter he trained at Blandford Camp in Dorsetshire. His five famous war sonnets appeared in New Numbers in early 1915. They sold in such great quantity that the journal exhausted its war supply of paper and closed down. Brooke left by sea with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force for the Dandanelles in early 1915. At the rank of sub-lieutenant, he died of blood poisoning at sea near Scyros on April 23, 1915, and was buried there. His book, 1914 and Other Poems, was published posthumously in 1915. The nation canonized Brooke after his death, but history ultimately chose Wilfred Owen's anti-war lyrics over Brooke's patriotic war sonnets. This reaction has obscured his merits in poems such as "Heaven," "Tiare Tahiti," and "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester."
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