Henry IV, Part 1 of Patay, and whom Shakespeare had previously represented in "Henry VI, Part 1". Fastolf had died without descendants, making him safe for a playwright's use. Shortly afterward, a team of playwrights wrote a two-part play entitled "Sir John Oldcastle", which presents a heroic dramatisation of Oldcastle's life and was published in 1600. In 1986, the Oxford Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare's works rendered the character's name as Oldcastle, rather than Falstaff, in "Henry IV, Part 1" (although not, confusingly, in "Part 2"), as a consequence of the editors' aim to present the plays as they would have appeared during their original
Sir John Oldcastle play, which has not survived; because of this fact, the extant play has sometimes been called "Sir John Oldcastle, Part I" or "1 Sir John Oldcastle.") In 1664, the play was one of the seven dramas added to the second impression of the Shakespeare Third Folio by publisher Philip Chetwinde. Like other subjects of Elizabethan history plays, Sir John Oldcastle was an actual person, a soldier and Lollard dissenter who was hanged and burned for heresy and treason in 1417 — thus earning himself a place in the seminal text of the Protestant Reformation in Tudor England, John Foxe's "Book