• Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Longmans, Green 1953), xii, 184pp.
• Shakespeare and the Confines of Art [Shakespeare, Critical Studies XI] (London: Routledge 1968), 170pp. {Notes, pp.[163]-67.
• Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge UP 1979; rep. 1983, pb. 2010), xiii, 264pp. [see details].
• Shakespeare: A Writer’s Progress (Oxford UP 1986), vi, 204pp. [see extract]
• Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition; A Winter Progress (2005) [see details];

• ed. with Colin Gibson, The Plays and Poems of Fhilip Massinger, [5 vols. (Clarendon Press 1976);
• ed., with Clifford Leach and T. W. Craik, The Revels History of English Drama (Methuen 1981) [see details].

• ed. Pericles, Prince of Tyre ][New Penguin Shakespeare] (Harmonsworth: Penguin 1976).
• with Kenneth Muir, Aspects of Othello: Articles Reprinted from the Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge UP 1977), x, 110pp. [contribs. incl. Helen Gardner and Ernest Jones].
• ed. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark [New Cambridge Shakespeare Ser.] (1985; rep. 2003)

• ‘An approach to the problem of Pericles’, in Shakespeare Survey, 5 (1952), pp.25–49.[an epoch-making study of the authorship problem in that play]
• ‘Frank O’Connor at Trinity’, in M. Sheehy (ed.), Michael/Frank: Studies on Frank O’Connor with a Bibliography of his Writing (Dublin, 1969), pp.120–36.
• The Journals of Captain Cook, 1768-79 (London 1999).
• Hunt for the Southern Continent (penguin Journeys);
• The Story of Sea-Voyage Narratives in Eighteenth=century Engalnd [Cambridge Studies] (Cambridge UP 1994).
• Last Voyages: Cavendish, Hudson, Ralegh (Swansea U.), &c.
• Nationalist Theatres: Shakespeare and Yeats [Hourglass lects.];
• The Story of the Voyage: Sea Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England
  (Cambridge, 1994).
• Sea-Mark: the Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton (Liverpool, 1997).
• with Inga-Stina Ewbank & G.K. Hunter, ed., Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir (cambridge UP 1980), viii, 247pp. [see contents]

Problem I: unrecognized inconsistencies. In his introductory chapter Professor Edwards sets down what I take to be his intentions:

“Shakespeare’s England and Yeats’s Ireland have not been chosen for study just because the interaction between theatre and nation are there particularly strong and fruitful. It is a single subject that I propose, the beginning and the end of a single historical cycle. We have to look at the association of the theatre first with the beginnings of a nation and an empire, and then with the most important moment of its decline and disintegration. If there had been no inauguration of Great Britain, no conquest ofIreiand, no institution of an overseas empire, all of which were seen in Shakespeare’s lifetime, there would have been no separatist and nationalist movement needing its spiritual voice in Yeats’s lifetime. With a strong cyclical view of history, Yeats saw the vigour of a renovated Irish culture, drawing strength from deep uncontaminated roots, superseding an effete, cosmopolitan, commercialised English culture, and creating a new beginning like the English Renaissance. It doesn’t look like that now. The Irish literary renaissance was a golden sunset, not a golden dawn. Its originating cause was the policy of the late Tudors and early Stuarts in Ireland, and it provided the conclusion of that policy.”

Yet in his retrospect at the end of the book he takes a good deal of this opening statement back, first by saying that “it was not the purpose of this book to establish a thesis about theatre and nation or to make, though they have not been avoided, large historical generalisations,” then by offering this final statement: “Such argument as this book maintains relates to a parallelism between Shakespeare and Yeats, at either end of a single historical process leading from the institution of the United Kingdom and the British Empire to their dissolution in our time. Shakespeare created Yeats, for Yeats without the idea of the Irish nation is meaningless, and the Irish nation limped into being because Elizabeth and James subjugated and colonised Ireland.”
 I find these statements inconsistent, ifnot contradictory. So far as I can see, Edwards offers not just one thesis in his first statement but several: one about a single historical cycle involving two national theaters; another about the connection between the national movement in nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland and British imperialist ventures in Ireland and America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; a third about the natu re of the Irish literary renaissance; and a fourth about its cause. Even after he disclaims offering (or, to use his word, “establishing”) a thesis in his retrospect, he waters his historical process down to a parallelism, but mentions still another thesis, to the effect that the Yeats we know was created by his reading of Shakespeare because his idea of the Irish nation was derived from Shakespeare’s history plays. So - still another thesis - “the Irish nation limped into being because Elizabeth and James subjugated and colonised Ireland.” Such easy historical causation leaves me breathless. Far from having no thesis, Thresold of a Nation has too many for its own good, and Professor Edwards has either contradicted himself about having them or allowed some inconsistency to remain in his treatment of them. Problem 2: inadequately defined terms. What do “nation” and “empire” really mean as Edwards uses them? And that perplexing metaphor “threshold”? [...]

William Butler Yeats remarked in 1889 that there is “no fine nationality without literature ... [and] no fine literature without nationality.” In a series of self-contained but related essays, Philip Edwards tests the validity of this assertion specially concerning the interactions between drama and society in the age of Shakespeare and in the age of Yeats He pointedly does not attempt to establish a general thesis about theater and ntion; not is he attempting to write the dramatic history of either period. Instead, in Part One he explores the significant and changing relationship of the English professional ltheatrer to the Court and State betweeen 1576 and 1642, especially the sense of national destiny in the Elizabethan history play; and in Paret Two he examines the influence of Elizabethan literary consciousness on the twentieeth-century Irish theater in general and on Yeats in particular. Ironically, as Professor Edwards observes, the study documents in one playwright after another the growing disillusionament, bitterness, or at least ambiguous skepticism of those who initially “responded enthsuiastically to the idea of providing by means of a theatre a spiritual core to a nation”s progress..
 The new English nation, more particularly, gave fresh vitality to [380] the 380 earlier concept of sacred kingship through emphasis upon strong central government occasioned by the struggle against the power of the feudal lords on the one hand and of the papacy on the other. Not surprisingly, the concept of monarchy provides the great theme and symbol for both the physical and the spiritual perils of the age. In both Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s stage worlds the agonists are the self-made, conquering, military hero and the legitimate, ordained ruler, the one satisfying “the age’s craving for individualist self-expression” and the other “its deep reverence for order and tradition” (p.55). Tamburlaine, for example, sympathetically depicts the glowing mind of the ambitious shepherd along with his ultimate inability to render valid his kingship by the mere titanic quality of his life. In Edward II the focus is not so much on Edward’s unfitness to rule as on the despicability of Mortimer’s lust for power. The Shakespearean struggles between Henry VI and Richard III and between Richard II and Henry IV are set along similar, if more ambiguous, lines. And Henry V, in addressing the larger “idea of the justice of invasion where there is an ancient right to a territory” (p.74), reflects as well on the morality and practicality of the British conquest of Ireland. Since the play was written at a time when England was excited by the possibility of imposing her peace upon the Irish after so many years of bloody struggle, Shakespeare’s insistence on the fragile and transient nature of England’s peace with France in the final lines of the play is especially ironic. The Tempest deals with rights to territory ...

‘It is the purpose of this book to give a general account of all Shakespeare’s writings, prefaced by a sketech of his life. The risks of attempting to compress Shakespeare into two hundred pages are obvius enough, but perhaps the loss of detail will be forgiven in the interests of trying to see Shakespeare whole. This book stresses the inter-relationshp of all he wrote, poems, sonnets, comedies, histories, tragedies. His work is a unity, and the meaning of each part is enlarged by recognizing that unity. Muriel Bradbrook once spoke of the “modifying and shaping power which his work as a whole seems to exert upon each of its parts.” The meaning of Two Gentlemen of Verona is not complee until the Tempest has been written.
 The brief account of Shakespeare's life with which the book opens is particularly concerned with the choices open to Shakespeare as a writer at the end of the sixteenth century, and I suggest that in assessing his commitment to the theatre we should look at the different kind of evidence provided by the sonnets, the great length of many of the plays, and the enigmatic countenance of his extraordinary last plays. The second chapter treats the community of theme which binds Shakespeare's writings together, concentrating on family, sexual, and social relationships. The third chapter is mainly about the non-dramatic verse, especially the sonnets, with a consideration of some attitudes to language expressed or implied in the plays.
 The chapters which follow discuss the plays. Accepting that all classifications and divisions are temporary and provisional, I have used the familiar groupings of comedy, history, and tragedy, but I have added the category of tragicomedy, in which I include the middle or “dark” comedies and the late “romances”. This grouping of the middle and later comedies is essential to my argument. I believe it helps us to understand what preoccuped Shakespeare in his final plays, and how those plays include, comment on, and round off the arguments and transactions of the earlier works. The chapter on the tragedies is shaped by a concept of tragic commitment and its two faces of love and violence.’