Cannons, Arden of Faversham, Troublesome Reign of King John, and King John

This is a topic I'll be exploring in-depth,  but I thought I'd share some initial thoughts here.

"Mayfield manor and park had come into Neville hands through Neville’s mother, Elizabeth Gresham, and included a furnace used for casting iron ordnance." (History of Parliament)

So through most of the 1580s and 1597, Sir Henry Neville was intimately involved in the manufacture of ordinance (cannons). I'll be arguing that cannon imagery is a hallmark of Shakespeare's works, and this imagery is multi-faceted; it extends even to the manufacturing process. It spans the entire canon, from the first published poems to the last plays. This emphasis has been noted by others, but the Neville connection explains it.

Cannons and Plays of Unknown Authorship

When trying to determine whether a certain apocryphal work was actually written by Shakespeare/Neville, my first check is always for cannon imagery.

John Casson suggests that the Troublesome Reign of King John was written by Neville/Shakespeare. A quarto of this play was published in 1591, so this would make it one of the earliest plays. The idea would be that the later King John, written 5-10 years later, was a revision of this play. Attributing The Troublesome Reign to Shakespeare is nothing new; the 1611 Quarto lists "W. Sh" as the author, etc.

So here is a passage from that 1591 Quarto extended gorgeous evocative metaphor involving cannons:

The troublesome Raigne
Curse, ban, and breath out damned orisons,
As thick as hailestones fore the springs approach:
But yet as harmles and without effect,
As is the eccho of a Cannons crack
Dischargd against the battlements of heauen.
But what newes els befell there Philip?

(Note that "orisons" appears four times in the play and appears in several Shakespeare plays including Henry VI, Part III and Romeo and Juliet. A search on EEBO shows it to be a relatively uncommon word.)

Conventional wisdom is that George Peele wrote the play. (Please read his Wikipedia entry and note the great detail they offer on this playwright's educational background and family life.) In his other works, George Peele mentions cannons A LOT, but always in the same simple manner:

Miscellaneous Poems
The roaring cannon, and the brazen trump, 
To hear the rattling cannons roar, and the hilts on helmets ring
Flies like a bullet from a cannon's mouth

Battle of Alcazar
With men and ships, courage and cannon-shot
The Christians with great noise of cannon-shot
With cannon-shot and shouts of young and old

And here is Shakespeare's canonical King John, note the specific reference to iron, the use of the technical term "ordinance", etc.:

The cannons have their bowels full of wrath,
And ready mounted are they to spit forth
Their iron indignation 'gainst your walls:
All preparation for a bloody siege
All merciless proceeding by these French
Confronts your city's eyes, your winking gates;
And but for our approach those sleeping stones,
That as a waist doth girdle you about,
By the compulsion of their ordinance
By this time from their fixed beds of lime
Had been dishabited, and wide havoc made
For bloody power to rush upon your peace.
But on the sight of us your lawful king,
Who painfully with much expedient march
Have brought a countercheque before your gates,
To save unscratch'd your city's threatened cheeks,
Behold, the French amazed vouchsafe a parle;
And now, instead of bullets wrapp'd in fire,
To make a shaking fever in your walls,
They shoot but calm words folded up in smoke,
To make a faithless error in your ears:
Which trust accordingly, kind citizens,
And let us in, your king, whose labour'd spirits,
Forwearied in this action of swift speed,
Crave harbourage within your city walls.

Both examples from King John plays are very Neville/Shakespearean. They are creatively evocative. The second example from the canonical Shakespeare work refers to "iron" and uses the technical term "ordinance," very in-line with the experiences and vocabulary of Henry Neville. The George Peele examples are decidely not.

It is important to note that the references to cannons in any play about King John is completely anachronistic. No cannons were used in Europe at that time. The repetition of this anachronism in both plays increases the likelihood that they were written by the same author (though the use in the first play might not be quite technically anachronistic).

Another play thought perhaps to be written by Shakespeare, Arden of Faversham, also has a striking cannon metaphor that includes "forge". Note the similarities with the passage from Troublesome Reign of King John above.

Mosbie. Such deep pathaires, like to a cannon’s burst
Discharged against a ruinated wall,
Breaks my relenting heart in thousand pieces.
Ungentle Alice, thy sorrow is my sore;
Thou know’st it well, and ’tis thy policy
To forge distressful looks to wound a breast
Where lies a heart that dies when thou art sad.
It is not love that loves to anger love.

Edward III is another play that has been thought to be apocryphal though is largely accepted now as part of the canon. Here we have "ordinance" as well as some so-so cannon imagery. Note the parallel with Hamlet's "brazen cannon" and "brazen ordinance" below:

And every Barricado's open front
Was thick embossed with brazen ordinance;

Anon the death procuring knell begins:
Off go the Cannons, that with trembling noise
Did shake the very Mountain where they stood;
Then sound the Trumpets' clangor in the air,
The battles join: and, when we could no more
Discern the difference twixt the friend and foe,
So intricate the dark confusion was,
Away we turned our watery eyes with sighs,
As black as powder fuming into smoke.