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Edmund Ironside, or War Hath Made All Friends is an anonymous Elizabethan play that depicts the life of Edmund II of England. At least three critics have suggested that it is an early work by William Shakespeare.
The play was never published in its own era; the unique copy of the text was preserved in MS. Egerton 1994, an important collection of play manuscripts now in the collection of the British Library.[1]
Peter Ackroyd, E.B. Everitt and Eric Sams have argued that this play is perhaps Shakespeare's first drama. According to Sams, Edmund Ironside "contains some 260 words or usages which on the evidence of the Oxford English Dictionary were first used by Shakespeare himself.... Further, it exhibits 635 instances of Shakespeare's rare words including some 300 of the rarest."[2] However, this argument has failed to convince the majority of Shakespearian scholars.
King Canutus (Canute the Great) faces an insurgency of the native English population led by Edmund II. Unbeknownst to them, they face a mutual enemy, a traitorous noble named Edricus, who hopes to take the crown for himself.