Sir John Oldcastle of Martyrs". Oldcastle was also a minor character in the early Elizabethan history play the "Famous Victories of Henry V" (c. 1586?), which is generally thought to have been one of Shakespeare's sources for his plays on Henry IV and Henry V. The genesis of "Sir John Oldcastle" is crucially linked to the fact that when Shakespeare's "Henry IV" plays premiered on stage in 1597–98, the character Sir John Falstaff was called Sir John Oldcastle. This is indicated by abundant external and internal evidence. The change of names, from "Oldcastle" to "Falstaff," is mentioned in seventeenth-century works by Richard James
A Yorkshire Tragedy A Yorkshire Tragedy A Yorkshire Tragedy is an early Jacobean era stage play, a domestic tragedy printed in 1608. The play was originally assigned to William Shakespeare, though the modern critical consensus rejects this attribution, favouring Thomas Middleton. "A Yorkshire Tragedy" was entered into the Stationers' Register on 2 May 1608; the entry assigns the play to "Wylliam Shakespere." The play was published soon after, in a quarto issued by bookseller Thomas Pavier, who had published "Sir John Oldcastle," another play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, in 1600. The play was reprinted in 1619, as part of William Jaggard's False Folio.