September 15, 2020 — The leading article in the newly published volume of the SOF scholarly annual The Oxfordian, by historian Ramon Jiménez, demonstrates that one of the very earliest (perhaps the first) of the plays written by William Shakespeare was The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth — a finding that provides still more evidence that the author “Shakespeare” must have been Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. The full article is freely available in pdf here. The entire new printed Volume 22 of The Oxfordian, with 13 new research papers, essays, and book reviews, may be purchased here for only $9.99.
“There is substantial historical, theatrical, and literary evidence that this short history play was written by the author of the Shakespeare canon, and that he wrote it in the early 1560s, while still in his teens,” according to Jiménez. “Since its anonymous publication in 1598, it has been ignored by most scholars of Elizabethan drama and disparaged by those who took any notice of it. Little effort has been made to ascertain its author, its composition date, or its subsequent influence.”
Famous Victories is the most important play to be composed during the first decade of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It has been called the earliest extant history play to be performed in England. It is also significant because Shakespeare’s finest history plays — the Prince Hal trilogy of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V — are based on the structure, plot, and historical period of Famous Victories. Those elements align almost exactly, except that each episode in the anonymous play has been rewritten and expanded, and many new ones added. The trilogy also retains the distinctively Shakespearean dramatic device of alternating comic scenes with those containing characters from English history — an innovation that first appeared in Famous Victories.
Jiménez’s article should compel literary scholars to identify Shakespeare as the author of this play and should lead to a scholarly reassessment of the consensus that Shakespeare did not generally revise or enlarge upon his early works.
Jiménez’s work, building on his 2018 book Shakespeare’s Apprenticeship, should also force scholars to confront the likelihood that Edward de Vere (Oxford) — the leading alternative candidate for the past century — was the real author behind the “Shakespeare” pseudonym. The likely time frame during which Famous Victories was first written and performed makes it impossible for William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon (born in 1564) to have been the author, but fits very suggestively with the life of Oxford (1550–1604).
Nearly all the characters in Famous Victories reappear in the same roles in one or more of the three Prince Hal plays. For the most part, the characters who reappear in the Prince Hal trilogy say and do the same things that they say and do in Famous Victories. Individual words, phrases, images, ideas, and dramatic devices in Famous Victories reappear throughout the trilogy — and in most cases, they are associated with the same character or situation as in the early anonymous play.
The evidence that Edward de Vere (Oxford) wrote Famous Victories lies not only in the dating of this early play, but in Oxford’s demonstrated authorship of the mature “Shakespeare” canon. The overall case for Oxford, elaborated by Jiménez here, may be organized into several key areas of interlocking and mutually reinforcing evidence:
- Oxford’s contemporaries publicly praised his skill as a playwright and poet, but no play or play list bears his name and we have only a few early poems linked to his name;
- Oxford’s biography is reflected in the Shakespeare plays in terms of incident, plot, and characterization; his travels to France and Italy are reflected in a dozen Shakespeare plays in terms of geography, language, and culture; and
- Oxford’s limited extant early poetry has numerous parallels in the Shakespeare canon and the same is true of his private letters (explore this evidence here).
Elizabethan printer Thomas Creede registered Famous Victories for publication in 1594 and printed it in 1598, but there is no direct evidence of the play’s composition date. The approximate date proposed by Jiménez, 1562–63, is based on statements of Oxford’s contemporaries about his creative activities and level of education, and on the location of the play with respect to the remainder of the Shakespeare canon.
The remaining evidence for a composition date in the early 1560s is the place of Famous Victories in the chronology of the entire Shakespeare canon. The paucity of legal issues and language is convincing evidence, but not the only evidence, that Oxford wrote it before his exposure to the law at Gray’s Inn, where he matriculated in 1567.
Jiménez was honored in 2018 as Oxfordian of the Year. He is an independent historian who received the Award for Distinguished Shakespearean Scholarship from the former Shakespeare Authorship Resource Center at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon.
In addition to Shakespeare’s Apprenticeship (2018), Jiménez is the author of two acclaimed studies of ancient Rome, both book club selections: Caesar Against the Celts (Da Capo, 1996) and Caesar Against Rome: The Great Roman Civil War (Praeger, 2000). He has written many important articles on Shakespeare, including “The Case for Oxford Revisited” (2009), “Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing: Shakespeare in Stratford and London” (2011), “Shakespeare by the Numbers: What Stylometrics Can and Cannot Tell Us” (2011), and “An Evening at the Cockpit: Further Evidence of an Early Date for Henry V” (2016) (showing that Shakespeare’s Henry V was probably written and performed no later than 1584). The latter article builds upon some of Jiménez’s earlier work going back to Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter articles in Summer 2001 (p. 7), Fall 2001 (p. 8), and Spring 2002 (p. 1).
[published Sept. 15, 2020, revised June 2021]
