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Histories

 

"Only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendent and knower, would seem to to be the true author of these amazing works--works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded literature."

--Walt Whitman, "What Lurks Behind Shakspere's Historical Plays?" Originally published in The Critic, September 27, 1884.

 

It is a cliche that the Shakespeare history plays betray a distinctive "Lancastrian" bias, lionizing the Lancastrian faction in figures such as John of Gaunt, Henry IV and Henry V, but portraying York monarchs such as Richard III as more evil than they actually were, and even ommitting entirely the careers of important and sucessful York monarchs such as Edward IV.

In fact, Shakespeare's history plays, as these preliminary essays in this section of our classroom suggest, display a much more specific, idiosyncratic, even subversive "Oxfordian" historical bias, indicating the author's particular preoccupation with events and circumstances which were of special concern to the alleged author, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford:

As Daniel Wright's essay shows, the author embroiders and even invents incidents to make Oxford's ancestors appear more heroic than they appear in convential sources such as Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587) or Halle's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1550);

Richard Desper's elegant little essay solves a particular linguistic-historical puzzle in the text of Henry V. The solution discloses the author's subversive innuendo regarding the controversial history of his own warrrior-ancestors at the battle of Barnet. We truly wonder what orthodox scholars can say in reply to Desper's original and brilliant analysis in "Stars or Suns?"

Finally, Ramon Jimenez, a member of the Shakespeare Fellowship and Trustee of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, attributes the curious and anonymous Elizabethan history play, The Famous Victories of Henry V, to Edward de Vere. The implications of this attribution are not insignificant in view of the fact that orthodox scholar Seymour Pitcher, writing in 1961, attributed the anonymous play to the "young Shakespeare." Jimenez' essay also argues convincingly that Shakespeare's Henry V was not written, as orthodox scholars claim, in 1599 -- but most likely c. 1583. A freelance author, Jimenez is the author of Ceasar Against Rome: The Great Roman Civil War and Caesar Against the Celts.