Edward III of England is the central character in the play "Edward III", sometimes attributed to William Shakespeare, he also appears as a boy in "Edward II" by who, also known as Kit Marlowe, was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era?
Cultural depictions of Edward III of England Edward III of England is the central character in the play "Edward III", sometimes attributed to William Shakespeare. He also appears as a boy in "Edward II" by Christopher Marlowe. Edward is also the protagonist of William Blake's early drama "Edward the Third", part of his "Poetical Sketches", published in 1783. George Bernard Shaw portrayed Edward for dramatic purposes as, in Shaw's preface to "The Six of Calais", "behaving himself like an unrestrained human being in a very trying situation".
Sources of Hamlet The sources of "Hamlet", a tragedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601, trace back as far as pre-13th century Icelandic tales. The generic "hero-as-fool" story is so old and is expressed in the literature of so many cultures that scholars have hypothesized that it may be Indo-European in origin. A Scandinavian version of the story of Hamlet, Amleth or Amlóði (Norse for "mad", "not sane") was put into writing in the 12th century by Saxo Grammaticus around 1200 AD in the "Gesta Danorum" (from which Shakespeare borrowed). Similar accounts are found in the Icelandic "Saga of Hrolf Kraki" and the Roman legend of Lucius Junius Brutus, both of which feature heroes who pretend to be insane in order to get revenge. A reasonably accurate version of Saxo's story was translated into French in 1570 by François de Belleforest in his "Histoires Tragiques". Belleforest embellished Saxo's text substantially, almost doubling its length, and introduced the hero's melancholy.