It is generally conceded that the play had to have been performed prior to September of 1588 due to the fact that Richard Tarleton referred to acting in it and he died in that month. The title page of the first quarto, published in 1598, indicates that the play was performed by the Queen's Majesty's Players2 troop which was formed in 1583 and effectively disbanded in January of 1594. For reasons also provided in the Man Who Was Falstaff, and too long to include here, I assign the date of 1585 plus or minus two years.
As for declaring Vere the author, just two of those many reasons will have to make the point for present purposes. 1) The play opens with Prince Hal's company of roisterers — among which is the historical figure Sir John Oldcastle, baron of Cobham — committing a robbery of the King's receivers at Gads Hill. No record exists of Prince Hal (Henry V) being associated with any such thing. But there is a record of Edward de Vere's servants committing just such a robbery near Gads Hill. 2) The playwright is a great fan of the earls of Oxford. The Earl of Oxford of the time is portrayed as being the constant companion and courageous advisor of Henry IV. He is a constant presence on stage. The actual Earl, however, was an orphaned minor child under care miles away from the king. At Agincourt, in the play, he is given charge of the planting of the famous stakes — a task actually given to Thomas Erpingham. After the victory, he is present at the presentation of Princess Katherine to the victorious Henry V. The actual Earl had been ordered to turn back to relieve the English forces being laid siege at Harfleur.
Of course, Shakespeare carried over the robbery into his Henry IV, Part 1. He added much more theatrically and personally mature comic touches that do not exist in the original. All of the play is far better written. But the original play was well-written for 1585, and highly popular. The Elizabethan theater was rapidly undergoing a revolution. Styles were much cruder in the mid- and early-1580s — including the comic scenes. The style of plays grew vastly more sophisticated over a single generation — a generation that spanned the mere eleven-or-so years between The Famous Victories and Henry IV.
As for Henry's roisterers, in the Famous Victories, the character Derrick became the character Pistol in Shakespeare's The Chronicle History of Henry the Fift. Shakespeare having, in the meantime, grown in the habit of adapting historical chronicles, by the likes of Holinshed and Hall, to structure the central plots of his history plays, Sir John Oldcastle did not return until Henry IV, Part 1. His heirs, the Cobham family, strenuously objecting to him being portrayed as frequenting such company, attacked the play so successfully that the old knight was renamed Falstaff.3 As often happens in such wholesale revisions, the resulting script shows traces of Oldcastle still and a few of his biographical details are carried over into Falstaff.
I've shown that Shakespeare's original Henry the Fift, however, was actually written prior to the Henry IV plays.4 There was no Falstaff in it at all. The character Pistol played the role later transferred to Falstaff, in Henry IV, after which he was given a reduced role made up of leftover bits and pieces of the original Derrick character, in Famous Victories, and a small amount of new material. The Henry the Fift we know from the First Folio was likely a major revision of the original — the most popular and patriotic of the day — to play at the grand opening of “this Woodden O,”5 the Globe Theater, in May of 1599.
The labyrinthine history of the Henry plays has many aspects. The relationship to the life of Edward de Vere becomes even clearer if we recognize that Vere transferred his biography to Prince Hal (Henry V) because he identified with him. Hal was his hero. A considerable part of what is historical fiction in Henry the Fift is, it turns out, fact from Vere's own youth.
The range of correspondences is striking. And some is a bit more conjectural.
In The Famous Victories, Hal is constantly in the company of two characters: Ned (being the common nickname for Edward and Edmund) and Tom. In Henry IV Ned becomes Ned Poins. The name Poins is an alternative spelling of the surname Poyntz. The historical record shows no evidence that Henry V had among his friends anyone named Ned Poyntz. Tom lacks a surname thus cannot be verified. The assumption might then be that here again we have two close friends of the young Edward de Vere.
But neither do we know of a Ned Poyntz in Vere's biography and Tom has no surname. We might hope that future discoveries will resolve the question. Or perhaps the historical record already gives us at least a strong hint or two.
Young Edward de Vere grew frustrated that the Queen had not given permission for him to travel to the continent. In 1574, he left to the Netherlands anyway. It was the scandal of the day and a tutor from his younger days, Thomas Bedingfeld,6 was dispatched to bring him back.
Upon his return to England, the Queen was on her annual Progress. On this occasion she choose to progress to the city of Bristol. Her itinerary scheduled lodging at Acton Hall7, on the outskirts of the city, including August 13th. The Hall had surely been preparing for weeks for the visit thrilled to host the Queen and her court.
Edward de Vere, in the meantime, had been ordered to attend the Queen. He and Bedingfeld departed London on August 5th.8 On August 13th, while at the Hall, the Queen's Council adjourned specifically regarding his matter.
Acton Hall was the seat of the Poyntz family — landed gentry, of long standing, who had risked a great deal in support of Elizabeth's claim to the throne. Far the two most common names in the family for some hundreds of years were Nicholas and Edward.
The second son of the reigning patriarch, Nicholas Poyntz, was named Edward. His wife was pregnant with that Edward, or had just delivered, at about the time of the Queen's visit. A week later, at Bristol, Vere was given an audience to receive his penance for his rash behavior. How many cousin Edward Poyntzs were present, at the time, to receive the Queen we cannot say.
Nicholas Poyntz's father, also named Nicholas, had a son by Joan Berkley, named Edmund. It was his third son.9 When Nicholas died, Joan married Sir Thomas Dyer, father of Edward Dyer the courtier poet. Edmund died in 1568, at the age of 28, in Paris, France. In 2 Henry IV, II.ii.64-5, Ned says: “the worst that they can say of me is, that I am a second Brother”.
As for the character Tom, until his final scene the reader can only wonder why he is in the play at all. His brief lines seem like padding at best. That final scene, however, brief as it is, tells us why he is in the play.
Hen 5. Ah Tom, your former life greeves me,
And makes me to abandon & abolish your company for ever
And therefore not upon pain of death to aproch my presence
By ten miles space10
As I have pointed out, in my Edward de Vere's Retainer Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff, shortly after having grown to the age to take control of his earldom Vere discharged Churchyard.
Falstaff, it may be remembered, was strangely in the habit of threatening to “have ballads” on persons who he felt had slighted him.
and I have not Ballads made on you all, and sung to filthie tunes, let a cuppe of sacke bee my poyson11
Even noblemen like Henry's younger brother, Prince John of Lancaster, were not secure from the threat.12
Vere knew this from personal experience. Tom Churchyard published a poem about the dismissal that accused the young Earl of cruelly abandoning him knowing he was desperately ill and particularly in need of help.13
In the Famous Victories Vere seems only to have had time to refer to the event with a few lines. In Henry IV, he fully explains his side of the story and repeats the final scene.
King ...I banish thee, on paine of death,
As I have done the rest of my Misleaders,
Not to come neere our Person, by ten mile.
For competence of life,...14
Notwithstanding Churchyard's defamatory poem, it is clear from the Henry IV plays that Edward de Vere found Thomas Churchyard to be a fascinating character. There are signs that he and the old soldier may have worked together on at least one project after their war of words.
As long as we are at it, yet another character name was changed before the text we have of Henry IV, Part 1 was finalized. Again, hurried revision has left traces of him arranging for the Gads Hill robbery. He did not, however, appear in The Famous Victories.
His name is John Rossill (Russell). John Russell, as it happens, was the name of the husband of Lady Elizabeth Russell, the sister-in-law of William Cecil, the 1st Baron Burghley, who constantly wrote letters to Cecil complaining bitterly of Edward de Vere's behavior and his treatment of Anne his wife. In the years following Anne's death, in 1588, Lady Russell repeatedly lobbied to forbid their three daughters from being allowed unsupervised in Vere's vicinity.
Lady Russell was the wife of John, Lord Russell, heir to the Earldom of Bedford. She also complained bitterly when her husband, John, died before inheriting the earldom and she was forbidden to style herself the “Dowager Countess of Bedford”. She did so, anyway, and was fiercely protective of the Russell name. The slightest hint of disrespect was known to throw her into a state of apoplexy presumably shortening her life.
1Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Edward de Vere's Retainer, Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff (2017). https://www.amazon.com/Edward-Veres-Retainer-Thomas-Churchyard-ebook/dp/B077LVLXY2/
2 THE FAMOUS VICtories of Henry the fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court: As it was plaide by the Queen's Majesties Players. 1598.
3 A New Variorum of... The Second Part of HENRY THE FOURTH. Epilogue. “One word more, I beseech you: if you be not too much cloid with Fat Meate, our humble Author will continue the Story (with Sir Iohn in it) and make you merry, with faire Katherine of France: where (for any thing I know) Falstaffe shall dye of a sweat, vnlesse already he be kill'd with your hard Opinions: For Old-Castle dyed a Martyr, and this is not the man. My Tongue is wearie when my Legs are too, I will bid you good night; and so kneele downe before you:...”
4See my Edward de Vere's Retainer, Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff (2017). https://www.amazon.com/Edward-Veres-Retainer-Thomas-Churchyard-ebook/dp/B077LVLXY2/
5The Life of Henry the Fift (Folio, 1623). Prologue. l.13.
6Edward de Vere had arranged for the publication of Bedingfeld's Cardanus Comforte the year before, in 1573, and supplied a prose dedication. The Comforte has become known as “Hamlet's book,” as several Hamlet speeches are based upon it, or upon the original De Consolatione, by Hieronymous Cardanus. It is also the inspiration for Macbeth's “walking shadow” speech.
7Folgerpedia 1574. Citing Royal Treasury Records and Works Accounts. “Aug 13, Fri IRON ACTON, Gloucs; Sir Nicholas Poyntz. Iron Acton manor-house; owned by Sir Nicholas Poyntz (c.1528-1585), formerly an Esquire for the Body to the Queen; a widower in 1574. ‘After dinner the Council sat about the Earl of Oxford’. The Earl came before the Queen at Bristol, August 21.”
See also “THE POYNTZ FAMILY. By the Rev. H. L. THOMPSON, M.A., Rector of Iron Acton” (1879). Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, Vol. IV. (1879-80) 73-85.
8Folgerpedia 1574. Citing Nelson, 113, 115,. Citing letter of Lord Burghley to Sir Francis Walsingham, Theobalds, 3 August 1574 “‘He and Mr Beningfield departed this afternoon to London...to make him some apparel meet for the court’. The Earl left London on August 5.”
9Mclean, John. Historical and Genealogical Memoir of the Family of Poyntz (1886). 96.
10Famous Victories, IX.57-60.
11A New Variorum of... The First Part of HENRY THE FOURTH, II.ii.43-4.
12A New Variorum of... The Second Part of HENRY THE FOURTH, IV.iii.46-9.
13See my Edward de Vere's Retainer, Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff (2017). https://www.amazon.com/Edward-Veres-Retainer-Thomas-Churchyard-ebook/dp/B077LVLXY2/
14Variorum 2 Henry IV, V.v.71-4.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
- Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.
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