The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1597, after which controversy over the original naming of Falstaff (he was originally the historic Sir John Oldcastle, which presumably did not please Oldcastle's descendants) forced Shakespeare to rename the character. It appears that the joke in V,v,85–90 is that Oldcastle/Falstaff incriminates himself by calling out the first letter of his name, "O, O, O!," when his fingertips are singed with candles—which of course works for "Oldcastle" but not "Falstaff." There is also the "castle" reference in IV,v,6. 18 January 1602 was the date the play was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company. The first quarto was
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