Shakespeare and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth

Para1The full title of this anonymous play, as it appears on the title page of the 1598 quarto, is The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth: Containing the Honourable Battel of Agin-court. It was written some time before 1594 (when printer Thomas Creede entered it in the Stationers’ Register), and if a 1613 anecdote about the famous clown Richard Tarlton performing the role of Derrick can be trusted, it was performed by the Queen’s Men in the mid-1580s (Tarlton’s Jests sig. C2v). Along with Holinshed’s Chronicles, the play provided the source material for Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays as well as for Henry V (Bullough 4.159).
Para2Famous Victories, which may be the first professionally performed example of the English history play (McMillin and MacLean 89), seems to have inspired the blending of comic and tragic modes that characterize Shakespeare’s Henry plays, and it has many direct analogues to specific scenes, particularly the comic ones. Shakespeare’s cowardly, thieving clowns, his treatment of Prince Hal’s involvement in highway robbery and conflict with the chief justice, the tennis ball scene, the leave-taking of the common soldier, the capture of a French prisoner by an English coward, and the wooing of Catherine during treaty negotiations are all inspired by the earlier play. There are also important differences in tone and characterization; Famous Victories presents a version of the Agincourt campaign simpler both in its facts and its ethical justifications.
Para3So similar in structure is Famous Victoriesto Shakespeare’s plays that it has been argued that it is an early Shakespearean draft (see Pitcher). On stylistic grounds this seems unlikely, and it is more probable that Shakespeare used the play as a rough outline for his histories. The title page of the play’s second quarto, printed in 1617, makes the claim that it was Acted by the Kinges Maiesties Servants, so it is possible, as Andrew Gurr has argued, that Shakespeare’s company had acquired the playbook and the right of performance in 1594 when it merged with the Queen’s Men. Whether or not his company owned Famous Victories, though, Shakespeare would certainly have been familiar with a dramatized version of Henry V’s life in the mid-1590s, as he was preparing to write Henry IV and Henry V.
Para4For a fully collated and annotated edition of Famous Victories, see the forthcoming edition of the play for the Queen’s Men’s Editions.

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

Bibliography

Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. 8 vols. London: Routledge and Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–1975. WSB ay78.
McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean. The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. WSB aw359.
Pitcher, Seymour M. The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship of The Famous Victories. New York: SUNY Press, 1961.
Tarlton, Richard. Tarlton’s Jests. London, Thomas Snodam for John Budge, 1613. STC 23683.3. ESTC S106896.

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 Shakespeare and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth
Type of text Paratext
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
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This document was written by James D. Mardock and originally published digitally by the Internet Shakespeare Editions and in print by Broadview Press. It has been converted from IML (the SGML markup language of the Internet Shakespeare Editions platform) into LEMDOʼs customization of TEI-XML and copyedited by Janelle Jenstad and the LEMDO team for republication in the New Internet Shakespeare Editions anthology.
Born digital.
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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.