[1] Scholars who have supported this attribution include Jonathan Bate, Edward Capell, Eliot Slater,[2] Eric Sams,[3] Giorgio Melchiori[4] and Brian Vickers.

The play contains several gibes at Scotland and the Scottish people, which has led some critics to suggest that it incited George Nicholson, Queen Elizabeth's agent in Edinburgh, to protest against the portrayal of Scots on the London stage in a 1598 letter to William Cecil, Lord Burghley.

In the final sequence, the Black Prince states: "So that hereafter ages, when they read / The painful traffic of my tender youth, / Might thereby be inflamed” (scene 18).

However, when she sees that Edward finds the plan morally acceptable, she ultimately threatens to take her own life if he does not stop his pursuit.

Prince Edward broods on the morality of war before achieving victory in the Battle of Poitiers against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Painter's version of the story, derived from Froissart, portrays Edward as a bachelor and the Countess as a widow, and concludes with the couple marrying.

Painter's preface indicates that he knew that this was "altogether untrue", since Edward had only one wife, "the sayde vertuous Queene Philip", but reproduces Froissart's version with all its "defaults".

In fact, Poitiers took place ten years after the earlier victory and capture of Calais.

Some critics view the play as not up to the quality of Shakespeare's ability, and they attribute passages resembling his style to imitation or plagiarism.

[20] John Jowett and Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett, while not rejecting the possibility of Kyd's authorship, find that the evidence is insufficient.

Citing Jowett's Shakespeare and the Text,[21] Proudfoot and Bennett[22] identify multiple assumptions made in the attribution, crediting the first three to Jowett: that Kyd's known oeuvre (consisting of only The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and an English translation of French playwright Robert Garnier's Cornélie) is a sufficient body of evidence for comparison, that "rarity" of n-gram patterns is definable and doubtlessly characteristic, and that scenes within collaborative plays are always by one author acting alone.

Proudfoot and Bennett add to these that selection bias prejudges outcome, making the methodology only somewhat more sophisticated than "parallel passage" strategies of old despite the inclusion of more text in the analysis.

Based on Mueller's work, the top ten plays with n-gram links to Edward III range from 6% to 4%:

They also note that Kyd's plays do not score that high on Mueller's scale, The Spanish Tragedy at 24th, Soliman and Perseda at 33rd, and Cornelia at 121st.

Nashe was known primarily as a playwright, but Summer's Last Will and Testament is his only theatrical work of undisputed authorship still extant.

If this hypothesis has any interest, then it may be in confronting the question of how the selection of material from Froissart for Edward III came to be as it is and not otherwise.

The fact that it is purely speculative may serve to illustrate the tantalising gap that remains between the playtext that has survived and the attempt to locate it among what little is known of the writers and players who brought it into being.

"Any case for Peele", write Proudfoot and Bennett,[30] "would take as its point of departure the fact that his known plays share several concerns with Edward III: David and Bethsabe revolves around adulterous love and its consequences; the action of Edward I dramatises the creation of the title of Prince of Wales (of which the Black Prince was only the third holder); while The Battle of Alcazar dramatises sixteenth-century warfare—the anachronistic model for the battle narratives in Edward III, with their pikes and naval gunnery."

[36] In 1977, the play was incorporated into the marathon BBC Radio dramatic series Vivat Rex as Episodes Three: "Obsession" and Four: "The Black Prince" with Keith Michell as "Edward III", Christopher Neame as "Edward the Black Prince" and Richard Burton as "The Narrator".

The American premiere of Edward III was staged by Pacific Repertory Theatre as part of the company's Carmel Shakespeare Festival in 2001.

The production was directed by Anthony Clarke and starred David Rintoul as King Edward and Caroline Faber as the Countess.

The production mixed costuming and set elements that included medieval armor and weaponry with 19th century style military uniforms.

Other notable features included by Artistic Director Jon Ciccarelli were a Viking party scene that bridged the Edward-Countess meeting scene with the Lodowick monologue and included an historical dramatization of Edward's founding of the "Order of the Garter" stressing the mutual attraction between Edward (Ben Forer) and the Countess (Rachel Matusewicz).

The cycle was called Tug of War: Foreign Fire and concluded in a follow-up cycle called Tug of War: Civil Strife which included Henry VI, Part 2, Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III.