Famous Victories_. Oldcastle
was a historical personage quite unlike Falstaff, and it is supposed
that the change was made to spare the feeling of Oldcastle's
descendants.

+Henry IV, Part II+.--This part is less a play than a series of loosely
connected scenes. The final suppression of the rebellion, which had
been continued by the Archbishop of York, the sickness and death of
Henry IV, and the accession of Prince Hal as Henry V, are matters
essentially undramatic and incapable of unified treatment, while the
growing separation of Hal and Falstaff deprived the underplot of that
close connection with the main action which it had in the preceding
play. Feeling the weakness of the main plot, Shakespeare reduced it to
a subordinate position, making it little more than a series of
historical pictures inserted between the scenes in which Falstaff and
his companions figure. He enriched this part of the play, on the other
hand, by the introduction of a number of superbly poetical speeches,
the best known of which is that beginning, "O Sleep, O gentle Sleep."
To the comic groups Shakespeare added a number of new figures, among
them the braggart Pistol, whose speech bristles with the high-sounding
terms he has borrowed from the theater, and old Justice Shallow, so
fond of recalling the gay nights and days which are as much figments of
his imagination as is his assumed familiarity with the great John of
Gaunt. By placing more stress upon the evil and less pleasing sides of
Falstaff's nature, Shakespeare evidently intended to prepare his
readers' minds for the definite break between old Jack and the new
king; but in this wonderful man he had created a character so
fascinating that he could not spoil it; and {158} the king's public
rejection of Falstaff comes as a painful shock which, impresses one as
much with the coldly calculating side of the Bolingbroke nature as it
does with the sad inevitability of the rupture.

+Source and Date+.--The sources for this play are the same as those of
its predecessor. Although the first and only quarto was not printed
until 1600, there is a reference to this part in Jonson's _Every Man
Out of his Humour_, which was produced in 1599. It must, therefore,
have been written shortly after Part I, and it is accordingly dated
1598.

+Henry V+.--In this, which is really the third play of a trilogy,
Shakespeare adopted a manner of treatment quite unlike that which
characterizes the other