Historian Ramon Jiménez talks about his new edition of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth on the new installment of The SOF Interviews.
“Since its anonymous publication in 1598, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth has been ignored by nearly all scholars of Elizabethan drama, and roundly disparaged by those who took any notice of it,” he said. “It has not only been misattributed or declared anonymous, it has been misdated by more than twenty years, and its substantial influence minimized or dismissed entirely. But there is substantial historical, theatrical and literary evidence that it was written by the author of the Shakespeare canon, and that he wrote it in the early 1560s, while still in his teens.”
The interview, with SOF president Bob Meyers, sets the record straight. The true author was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As Jiménez shows conclusively, Oxford later based his finest history plays—Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V—on the structure, plot, characters and historic period of Famous Victories. The unforgettable comics of the Prince Hal plays―Sir John Falstaff, Ned Poins, Tom and Mistress Quickly―all originated in this first history play. Jiménez introduces the play and has edited it from the perspective an Oxfordian perspective. The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth is available on Amazon.
Jiménez, the author of “Shakespeare’s Apprenticeship” (McFarland) and two books on the Roman republic, says, “It would be hard to find another important literary composition that has been as ill-treated by orthodox scholars as this short, fast-moving work that is rightly called a farce in a history play.”
