Abstract
Dick Dotterer met the challenges of the play’s double structure, its compressed history, and its stylized battle sequences with skill and energy… As King Edward, Edward Dloughy convincingly embodied the aura of royal command that was an ever-present element in the play… The “Countess” scenes… were skillfully performed. The ironies, the maneuvering, the finessing on his part, and real or pretended naïvete on hers, combined to engage the audience in the Countesss moral dilemma: whether to obey her king by yielding to his adulterous demand or to obey her conscience by defying him… [T]he action bristled with his strategic ploys and her adroit defensive countermeasures. Edward’s corruption of Warwick… was equally impressive… The Countesss ultimate triumph with her own strategy of threatened suicide was thus the more effective because of the audiences identification with her and her father’s anguish throughout these scenes. Dotterer’s treatment of the scene in which Edward “dictated” his love poem to… Lodowick (Barry Vincent) demonstrated again the value of this play as theatre… The entire scene… was played primarily for the comic insights it provided into the character of Edward… Much of the last part of the play centered on the exploits of Prince Edward, proving his valor in battle to the great pleasure of his father. Dotterer artfully managed the compressed action… focusing appropriately on the testing of young Edward on the field. The Princes victories over incredible odds, reminiscent of those famous victories of Henry V, are theatrically impressive in the text, and this cast conveyed the suspense and climax of each one with intelligence and verve. (Joseph H. Stodder, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 [1987]: 246–48)
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© 2010 Katharine Goodland and John O’Connor
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Goodland, K., O’Connor, J. (2010). Edward III. In: A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance, 1970–1990. A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-60041-0_42
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