ABSTRACT
The play contains allusions to conditions in 1596. There is no necessary reference in I. I to the campaign against Spain and Essex's Cadiz expedition which sailed inJune; but early in 1596 there were complaints about the maltreatment of impressed men by army officers, and Sir John Smithe1 was up before the Star Chamber on 19June for inciting Essex recruits to mutiny. In September when a hundred men were to be levied in Northamptonshire for service in Ireland the Council's order insisted that they should be serviceable men, not the baser sort, and declared that the Queen had chosen a captain of good family to lead them, to ensure that they should be used well. Falstaff's attitude to his soldiers (IV.2) would be topical in 1596/7.2 The price of corn rose very high in 1596, and the reference to Robin Ostler's death, 'Poor fellow! never joyed since the price of oats rose' (II.I.12), seems to allude to a fairly recent change. The substitution of 'Falstaff' for 'Oldcastle' has often been ascribed (though without any real evidence) to
complaints by the Cobhams who were Oldcastle's descendants.1 William Brooke, 7th Lord Cobham, the Lord Chamberlain, died on 5 March, 1597. If he protested, the play must have been written some time before that, but any complaint might have been made by his heir Henry Brooke, who was an enemy of Essex. 2
There can be little doubt that Shakespeare conceived his Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V plays as a group and that he intended to follow out the fortunes of Bolingbroke and his son even while he was writing Richard II. The father-son relationship exercised Shakespeare's mind so strongly in Richard II that he gave two scenes (V.2, V.3) to that between Edmund of York and his son Aumerle, who bursts in to Henry IV's presence to confess his treachery just as the King is complaining of his own 'unthrifty son' (V.3). Henry pardons him as he later pardons his own erring heir. The expansion of this theme in Richard II probably derives from the dramatist's foreknowledge of what is to come in Henry IV. Already in that scene the King compares the Prince with Hotspur and treats them as about the same age, although Percy (1364-1403) was in fact two years older than the King and twenty-three years older than Hal. This initiates a comparison which becomes conscious rivalry in Henry IV, Part I, and culminates in the Prince's slaying of Hotspur at the Battle of Shrewsbury, a climax for which there is no warrant in the chronicles except possibly an ambiguous sentence in Holinshed. Before Richard II was finished it was already in Shakespeare's mind to show two sides of the Prince, his youthful escapades and the heroism befitting the future Henry V. Other links with Richard II include the relations between Bolingbroke and his early supporters, Northumberland and Worcester. Also specific prophecies and promises are made in the earlier play which reach their full significance only
