Henry V: Chronology

A Brief Chronology of Events of Relevance to Shakespeare’s Henry V

Some dates are approximate, especially those of the plays.
1337 Edward III assumes the title King of France, beginning the Hundred Years War (1337–1453).
1340 Geoffrey Chaucer is born.
1346 Edward the Black Prince defeats French forces at the Battle of Crécy.
1347 Calais surrenders to the English.
1348–1350 The Black Death first arrives in England, killing over a third of the population and helping the breakdown of the manorial and feudal systems.
1356 English victory at the battle of Poitiers and capture of King John II of France; England receives Aquitaine and Calais as ransom for the king.
1362 English becomes the official language in courts of law.
1367 Births of Richard, later Richard II, and of Henry Bolingbroke, male heirs to the first and third sons of Edward III.
1376 Death of the Black Prince.
1360 Edward III relinquishes claims to the French throne in return for sovereignty over southwest France.
1362 English becomes the official language in courts of law.
1377–1384 John Wyclif begins the Lollard movement, precursor of the Protestant Reformation.
1377 Edward III dies. His grandson, Richard II, becomes king at the age of ten.
1386 Birth of Henry of Monmouth, later Prince of Wales and King Henry V.
1398 Richard II banishes his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, from England for 10 years.
1399 October: Deposition of Richard II; Henry Bolingbroke crowned King Henry IV.
1400–1415 Revolt and civil wars in England: the scambling and unquiet time.
1400 Richard II dies at Pontefract castle. Henry IV leads unsuccessful campaign against Scotland. Owen Glendower raises rebellion in Wales.
1403 The Percy family joins forces with Glendower and Sir Edmund Mortimer against Henry IV. Hotspur’s army is defeated at battle of Shrewsbury in July.
1413 Death of Henry IV; Prince Henry is crowned King Henry V, has Richard II reburied with honors at Westminster Abbey.
1414 August-September: Henry’s ambassadors claim his right to rule Normandy, Touraine, Maine, and Anjou.
December: Sir John Oldcastle, former friend of King Henry and model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, leads Lollards in open rebellion. The rebellion suppressed in January 1415, and a parliamentary statute is passed against Lollardy.
1415 First French campaign.
July: Southampton Plot foiled.
August-September: Siege of Harfleur.
October 25: Battle of Agincourt.
1416 Henry V begins a second French campaign.
1417 Sir John Oldcastle executed by hanging and burning for heresy and treason.
1419 Rouen surrenders; England regains Normandy.
1420 Treaty of Troyes; Henry becomes regent of France and successor to Charles VI, marrying Catherine of Valois.
1421 Birth of future King Henry VI.
1422 Death of Henry V; Henry VI is crowned at the age of nine months (in infant bands).
1429 Joan of Arc defeats the English at Orléans; coronation of the Dauphin as Charles VII.
1431 Henry VI is crowned King of France in Paris; Joan of Arc is burned at the stake as a witch.
1435 Death of the Duke of Bedford, English regent in France; England fails to compromise at the Arras Peace Conference; Burgundy defects from the Anglo-Burgundian alliance.
1437 Henry VI takes personal control of English government.
1440 Gutenberg establishes the first printing press in Europe.
1455–1487 Wars of the Roses: intermittent civil war between houses of Lancaster and York.
1460 John Skelton and Thomas Linacre are born; The Castle of Perseverance is performed. Edward of March wins the Battle of Northampton and is given control of London; his father the Duke of York lays claim to the throne, but is killed in the Battle of Wakefield.
1461 Henry VI deposed; Edward of March crowned King Edward IV.
1469 Erasmus is born; Niccolò Machiavelli is born.
1470 Henry VI returns to power; William Caxton sets up the first press in England.
1471 Henry VI is re-deposed and murdered in the Tower of London.
1479 The last regular occurrence of bubonic plague; the population begins to recover from its decline in the Late Middle Ages.
1483 Edward IV dies; Edward Prince of Wales accedes but dies before being crowned Edward V; his uncle Richard of Gloucester crowned King Richard III; he puts down a revolt led by Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who is executed. Martin Luther is born.
1485 Richard III dies in the battle of Bosworth Field; Henry Tudor crowned King Henry VII.
1497 A truce is achieved between England and Scotland.
1508 Luther studies and teaches at the University of Wittenberg, which eventually becomes the cradle of the Reformation.
1509 Henry VII dies; his second son, Henry, crowned King Henry VIII.
1515 Martin Luther posts his 95 theses at the castle church of Wittenberg.
1516 Sir Thomas More writes Utopia.
1534 Act of Supremacy: Parliament declares Henry VIII supreme head of Church of England. Act requires oath to the lawfulness of Henry’s second marriage to Anne Boleyn.
1535 Sir Thomas More is executed; Coverdale publishes the first complete English Bible. Plague breaks out for the first of five consecutive years.
1536 Henry VIII orders the dissolution of the monasteries in England.
1547 Henry VIII dies; his son Prince Edward crowned King Edward VI.
1548 Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York.
1552 Edmund Spenser is born; Sir Walter Raleigh is born.
1553 Edward VI dies; his half-sister, Princess Mary is crowned Queen Mary.
1555 Roman Catholicism is officially reestablished by Mary.
1558 Mary dies; her half-sister, Princess Elizabeth, crowned Queen Elizabeth.
1560 Publication of the Geneva Bible.
1563 English church adopts the Thirty-nine Articles.
1564 William Shakespeare born in Stratford-upon-Avon (baptized 26 April). Christopher Marlowe born in Canterbury.
1568 The Bishops’ Bible is published.
1569 The Northern Rebellion attempts to replace Elizabeth with the Catholic Mary Stuart.
1571 Elizabeth’s marriage with the Duke of Anjou and Alençon (later Henri III) proposed.
1572 Leicester’s Men play at Stratford (Shakespeare is 8 years old). Ben Jonson is born.
1573 Leicester’s Men, led by James Burbage, perform in Stratford.
1574 James Burbage gets license to open a London playhouse.
1575 Queen Elizabeth on progress visits Kenilworth Castle, near Stratford.
1576 James Burbage builds The Theatre.
1577 Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland is published (revised edition 1587). The Curtain theatre opens in London.
1578 John Lyly’s Euphues is published. James VI becomes King of Scotland.
1580 John Stow’s Chronicles of England is published. Thomas Middleton and John Webster are born.
1582 Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway.
1583–1584 Plots against Elizabeth on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots.
1583 Susanna Shakespeare born.
1585 Births of Shakespeare’s twins Hamnet and Judith; Earl of Leicester sent to aid the Dutch against the Spanish.
1586 Pope Sixtus V offers Philip of Spain one million crowns for a successful invasion of England.
1587 Mary Queen of Scots is executed (8 February). Christopher Marlowe writes Tamburlaine. The Rose theatre is built on the Bankside in London. The companies of Earls of Essex and Leicester act at Stratford.
1588–1594 Shakespeare moves to London; family remains in Stratford.
1588 War with Spain ends with the destruction of the Spanish Armada fleet in July.
1588–1592 Shakespeare writes or revises 1 Henry VI, The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (2 Henry VI), The Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York (3 Henry VI), which oft our stage hath shown.
1590–1594 Richard III.
1592 Robert Greene attacks Shakespeare in print, parodying 3 Henry VI. Lord Strange’s men, possibly including Shakespeare, appear at Court and at the Rose. Severe plague in London (15,000 people die); plays restricted in the latter half of the year.
1593 Venus and Adonis. Plays are restrained throughout the year because of plague; the acting companies face hard times. Marlowe is murdered. The play of Sir Thomas More is written with contributions possibly from Munday, Chettle, Heywood, Dekker, and Shakespeare.
1593–1603 Shakespeare writes the sonnets.
1593–1595 The Taming of the Shrew, The Rape of Lucrece.
1594 Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s collaboration with George Peele, is performed and published. The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth written; Shakespeare joins the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The first of four years of crop failure and grain shortage. Marlowe’s Edward II is published.
1594–1596 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet.
1595 Richard II. The bow and arrow are abolished as weapons of war.
1596 Death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet (August); campaign against Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s planned Blackfriars theater (November). The Swan Theatre is built on the Bankside. Henry Carey, Lord Chamberlain, dies. His son George Carey, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, assumes patronage of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and they become known as Hunsdon’s Men.
1596–1597 1 Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice.
1597 Earl of Essex sent to Ireland to put down a rebellion led by the Earl of Tyrone.
1597–1598 The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, 2 Henry IV; the latter written with an epilogue promising a new play to feature Falstaff accompanying Henry V to war in France.
1598 Famous Victories printed by Thomas Creede.
1599 Land for the Globe theatre is leased to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men; Shakespeare is listed as one of the leading shareholders (21 February). Henry V (March?), As You Like It, Julius Caesar; Shakespeare’s company moves to the Globe.
1600 The first quarto of Henry V is printed by Thomas Creede. The Fortune Theatre is built.
1600–1602 Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well.
1601 Shakespeare’s father dies. Essex stages abortive rebellion and is executed.
1602 Second quarto of Henry V printed.
1603 Elizabeth I dies (25 March); company becomes the King’s Men (19 May); James VI crowned James I of England (25 July). During the winter season, Shakespeare performs in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, the last record of him acting. Plague rages in London; theatres remain closed until April 1604.
1603–1604 Measure for Measure, Othello.
1604 James I attempts a compromise with English Catholics and Puritans at the Hampton Court Conference. England makes peace with Spain.
1605 The Gunpowder Plot is foiled (November 5).
1605–1606 King Lear.
1606–1607 Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles.
1608 Coriolanus. Shakespeare and six associates lease the Blackfriars theatre for a twenty-one year period (9 August).
1609–1611 Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.
1609 Shakespeare’s Sonnets are published.
1613 Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen are written in collaboration with John Fletcher. Shakespeare in retirement, living in Stratford. Globe burns during a performance of Henry VIII.
1616 April 23: Shakespeare dies.
1619 Third quarto of Henry V printed.
1623 First folio of Shakespeare’s plays printed.

Prosopography

Challen Wright

Chris Horne

Donald Bailey

Eric Rasmussen

Eric Rasmussen is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada. He is co-editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works and general editor, with Paul Werstine, of the New Variorum Shakespeare. He has received the Falstaff Award from PlayShakespeare.com for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year in 2007, 2012, and 2013.

James D. Mardock

James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonsonʼs representation of urban space as an element in his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in early modern English drama.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He is the Founding Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, of which he was the Coordinating Editor until 2017. In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Nicole Vatcher

Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.) in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was womenʼs writing in the modernist period.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

William Shakespeare

Orgography

Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE1)

The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was a major digital humanities project created by Emeritus Professor Michael Best at the University of Victoria. The ISE server was retired in 2018 but a final staticized HTML version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project is still hosted at UVic.

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Henry V: Chronology
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online platform.
Series
Source
This file has been converted from IML, the SGML markup language of the Internet Shakespeare Editions platform. IML files do not indicate the copy or copytext transcribed. LEMDO acknowledges that we are not the main source of transcription, and that we do not know the witness transcribed in this transcription. As time permits, we will compare this transcription to an open-access digital surrogate and align the transcription that surrogate. If you have worked on ISE and/or may have an idea as to the source of this file, please contact lemdopm@uvic.ca.
Born digital.
Editorial declaration
Edition Released with LEMDO Editions for Peer Review 0.1.5
Encoding description Encoding description coming soon.
Document status draft, peer-reviewed
License/availability
Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, James Mardock. The critical paratexts are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the editor, NISE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of NISE, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom.