Sources
Like most of Shakespeare's history plays, the source is Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, while Jean Froissart's Chronicles is also a major source for this play. Roger Prior has argued that the playwright had access to Lord Hunsdon's personal copy of Froissart and quoted some of Hunsdon's annotations. A significant portion of the part usually attributed to Shakespeare, the wooing of the Countess of Salisbury, is based on Novel 46, "The Countesse of Salesberrie" by William Painter in Palace of Pleasure. Unlike Painter, who wrote Edward as a bachelor and the Countess as a widow, the author of the play is aware that both are married at the time, and Edward tries to get the countess to make a pact with him in which each kills the other's spouse and tries to make it look like a double suicide. Melchiori (p. 104) points out the similarity of the playwright's language to that of Painter in spite of the plotting differences.
Read more about this topic: Edward III (play)
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