ABSTRACT
Woodstock is an excellent play which combines some good comedy with a serious treatment of the conflict between upstarts and older nobility with particular reference to the life and death of Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Gloucester, whose fate is often referred to in Richard II. The play gives a composite picture of the reign, and extends from 1382, before the King's marriage to Ann of Bohemia, to 1399. Richard had two groups of favourites. The first included Tresilian, De Vere, Michael de la Pole, and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. These were overthrown by the Lords Appellant in 1388, when Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick triumphed. In 1389, when the King assumed power he cast off the control of his uncles and ruled alone, and reasonably well, until the death of his wife brought 'a change in the King and in the fate of the nation' (Vickers). After his second marriage to Isabella, daughter of Charles VI, he became extravagant and arbitrary. He quarrelled with Gloucester and, fearing that the latter was conspiring with Arundel and Warwick, he seized them, and sent Gloucester to Calais, where he was murdered while indictments were being laid before Parliament. Sir William Bagot, Sir Henry Green, and Sir John Bushy (Speaker of the House) did not come into public prominence as the King's
men until this Parliament (September, 1397). After this Richard's extravagance continued and his exactions included the 'blank charters' which he issued in 1397-8. He showered titles on his supporters, and Bushy, Green, Bagot and Sir William Scrope (made Earl of Wiltshire) were hated as his special favourites. 'Bushy and Bagot were to many but reincarnations of Vere, and, with the new Earl of Wiltshire, were the young men who induced their master to forsake the counsel of the old men' (Vickers, 294).
