A king fit for a Shakespeare play

As technology opens up new possibilities in historical research, it’s an exciting time. But let’s also take a moment to remember the more eccentric Shakespeare authorship theorists — whose takeaway from this might be that the Earl of Oxford wrote Edward III.

The poet Thomas Gray summed up the highs and lows of Edward’s reign thus: “Amazement in his van, with Flight combin’d,/And Sorrow’s faded form, and Solitude behind.”

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2 min readOct 22, 2026 06:16 AM IST First published on: Oct 22, 2026 at 06:16 AM IST

The 2001 film A Knight’s Tale is set in the (13)70s, so naturally its soundtrack is full of classic rock and funk hits from the (19)70s. But for all its anachronisms, it gets some things right about the reign of Edward III of England — for instance, the Black Prince competing in disguise in a tournament, something his father, the king, is known to have done. This was part of Edward’s project to live up to the chivalric ideal of kingship, which he did so well that Ian Mortimer titled his 2006 biography The Perfect King. It was one of the most consequential reigns in English history, from great victories in France to the Black Death. The poet Thomas Gray summed up the highs and lows of Edward’s reign thus: “Amazement in his van, with Flight combin’d,/And Sorrow’s faded form, and Solitude behind.”

Such a king deserves a Shakespeare play, one might think. Arguably, there is one. Weighing in on a long-running debate over the authorship of the play Edward III, a forthcoming study using computerised linguistic analysis concludes that William Shakespeare was the principal author — and his collaborator was Christopher Marlowe.

As technology opens up new possibilities in historical research, it’s an exciting time. But let’s also take a moment to remember the more eccentric Shakespeare authorship theorists — whose takeaway from this might be that the Earl of Oxford wrote Edward III.