Thursday, December 13, 2018

Neville Paradigm: Nevilles in Henry V

As I have explained in several previous posts, if the Neville hypothesis is correct, then people should have been uncovering evidence of it for centuries. They didn't have the theoretical framework to interpret that evidence.

One strong evidence is the pro-Essex political message that many people have discovered in Shakespeare's plays, especially in Henry V. I posted about a paper from 1995 that makes this point beautifully.

I have just uncovered another similar paper. It is from 1929. The argument doesn't completely make sense, because after all, how could Shakespeare have known that Henry Neville was an Essex partisan writing Henry V in 1599? However, under the Neville Paradigm, this makes perfect sense, if Neville wrote the play himself:

Sharpe, Robert Boies. “We Band of Brothers.” Studies in Philology, vol. 26, no. 2, 1929, pp. 166–176. JSTOR,

The paper begins by saying how pro-Essex interpretation of Shakespeare (around 1929) was becoming popular:

 Miss Albright's important addition to the rapidly growing body
 of comment upon the pro-Essex spirit in Shakespeare's plays
 is to me especially interesting because of a remark which she
 makes upon the family interest to be found in the histories, by
 certain members of the Essex party: "... My present
 purpose is to show how Shakespeare's partisanship reveals itself in
 his account of the battle of Agincourt

Then he explains how a Neville ancestor/relative was added to Henry V:

 The Earl of Westmorland was an ancestor of Charles Blount,
 Lord Mountjoy, a highly important figure in Essex's calculations
 at and soon after his return from Ireland. The contemporary
 Earl, Charles Neville, was grandson of the first Earl of Rutland,
 and thus related to a family which was very friendly to both Essex
 and Southampton. He had been forced to flee the country by the
 failure of the Catholic uprising of 1569; there was hope for such
 exiles in the Essex policy of toleration. A relative, Edmund
 Neville, confined in the Tower as a result of the same uprising, was
 liberated soon after 1595. A Sir Henry Neville, who was just
 Shakespeare's age, was ambassador to France and was knighted in
 1599. He was in the confidence of Southampton and took some
 part in the Essex plot; he was imprisoned for a while, then re-
 leased with a fine. His danger is alluded to in one of Jonson's
 epigrams. Honor may have been reflected from the title of West-
 moreland to the family name of Neville in this case at least as easily
 as dishonor in the case of the Greys and the Earl of Kent.

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