* Lord Abergavenny is a character in William Shakespeare's play Henry VIII.

Nelson publicly encouraged this close bond with his officers and on 29 September 1798 described them as " We few, we happy few, we band of brothers ", echoing William Shakespeare's play Henry V. From this grew the notion of the Nelsonic Band of Brothers, a cadre of high-quality naval officers that served with Nelson for the remainder of his life.

In addition to the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry V, in which Oldcastle is Henry V's companion, Oldcastle's history is described in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's usual source for his histories.

Shakespeare's desire to burlesque a hero of early English Protestantism could indicate Catholic sympathies, but Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham was sufficiently sympathetic to Catholicism that in 1603, he was imprisoned as part of the Main Plot to place Arbella Stuart on the English throne, so if Shakespeare wished to use Oldcastle to embarrass the Cobhams, he seems unlikely to have done so on religious grounds.

Judging by the number of reprints, Hamlet appears to have been Shakespeare's fourth most popular play during his lifetime — only Henry IV Part 1, Richard III and Pericles eclipsed it.

William Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part II contains a wry comment about people who claim to be related to royal families.

* In William Shakespeare's history play Henry IV, Part 2, Prince Harry refers to Murad as " Amurath " in Act V Scene 2 when he succeeds his father, King Henry IV, in 1413:

Glyndŵr has remained a notable figure in the popular culture of both Wales and England, portrayed in William Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part 1 ( anglicised as Owen Glendower ) as a wild and exotic man ruled by magic and emotion (" at my nativity, The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, Of burning cressets, and at my birth The frame and huge foundation of the earth Shaked like a coward.

Owain is perhaps best remembered outside Wales as the mysterious Welshman of ' Owen Glendower ' in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 who claims to be able to " call spirits from the vasty deep ," and proves later on that he can, at least, summon unearthly music.

He is also a character in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and was the hero of James Hill's UK TV movie Owain, Prince of Wales, broadcast in 1983 in the early days of Channel 4 / S4C.

In 1874, German literary historian Karl Elze dated both The Tempest and Henry VIII — traditionally labeled as Shakespeare's last plays — to the years 1603 – 04.

" In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff and three roguish friends of Prince Hal also waylay unwary travellers on the highway from Gravesend to Rochester, a scene also present in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fift.

His symbol, also the symbol of Wales, is the leek ( this largely comes from reference in Shakespeare's Henry V, VI 1 ).

* July 12 – Laurence Olivier's film Henry V, based on Shakespeare's play, opens in London.

Falstaff is an operatic commedia lirica in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi, adapted by Arrigo Boito from Shakespeare's plays The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV.

Shakespeare's plays about the lives of kings, such as Richard III and Henry V, belong to this category, as do Christopher Marlowe's Edward II and George Peele's Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First.

Because Shakespeare was dead, the folio was compiled by John Heminges and Henry Condell ( fellow actors in Shakespeare's company ), and arranged into comedies, histories and tragedies.

At the siege of Harfleur, Henry utters one of Shakespeare's best-known speeches, beginning " Once more unto the breach, dear friends ..."

The idea, or possibility, of female centaurs was certainly known in early modern times, as evidenced by Shakespeare's King Lear, Act IV, Scene vi, ln. 124 – 125:

" In the 1951 season at Stratford, he gave a critically acclaimed performance and achieved stardom as Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 opposite Anthony Quayle's Falstaff.

One prototype for this version of the town drunk is supplied by Shakespeare's Falstaff, who appears in both parts of Henry IV and in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The historical parallels in the succession of Richard II may not have been intended as political comment on the contemporary situation, with the weak Richard II analogous to Queen Elizabeth and an implicit argument in favour of her replacement by a monarch capable of creating a stable dynasty, but lawyers investigating John Hayward's historical work, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IV, a book partly derived from Shakespeare's Richard II, chose to make this connection.

He cited to this effect William Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice published in 1600 ( Act IV, sc.

From 1995 to 2000, Kaufman directed three independent films distributed in limited theatrical releases: Tromeo and Juliet, a loose parody of Shakespeare's play ; Terror Firmer, a slasher film loosely based on Kaufman's book All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger, and an independent film sequel to The Toxic Avenger trilogy titled Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV.

The dramatic reading in the mix towards the end of the song is a few lines of Shakespeare's King Lear ( Act IV, Scene VI ), which were added to the song direct from an AM radio Lennon was fiddling with that happened to be receiving the broadcast of the play on the BBC Third Programme.

The battle itself and many of the key people involved appear in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.

In Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Portia disguises herself as Balthazar in Act IV, scene i.

The play anachronistically places Sir John Falstaff, who had previously appeared in Shakespeare's plays about the medieval King Henry IV and set circa 1400, in the contemporary setting of the Elizabethan era, circa 1600.

Most critics consider Merry Wives to be one of Shakespeare's weaker plays, and the Falstaff of Merry Wives to be much inferior to the Falstaff of the two Henry IV plays.

He appears in William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2 as John of Lancaster, and in Henry V and Henry VI, Part 1 as Duke of Bedford.

The entertainment includes a performance of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 by the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

The wording derives from a passage in Act IV, scene III of William Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Lost, in which the King of Navarre says " Black is the badge of hell / The hue of dungeons and the school of night.

His theory was based on perceived analogies between Oxford's life and poetic techniques in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets.

There are several works about Falstaff, inspired by Shakespeare's plays:

For example, in the 17th century cross dressing was common in plays, as, for example, evident in the content of many of William Shakespeare's plays ( and by the actors in the actual performances, since female roles in Elizabethan Theater were always performed by males, usually prepubescent boys ).

In 1598, Francis Meres published his Palladis Tamia, a survey of English literature from Chaucer to its present day, within which twelve of Shakespeare's plays are named.

Traditionally, editors of Shakespeare's plays have divided them into five acts.

For example, in Shakespeare's day, plays were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle in his Poetics: that a drama should focus on action, not character.

Finally, in a period when most plays ran for two hours or so, the full text of Hamlet — Shakespeare's longest play, with 4, 042 lines, totalling 29, 551 words — takes over four hours to deliver.

It became the first of Shakespeare's plays to be presented with movable flats painted with generic scenery behind the proscenium arch of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre.

* William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and the films made from these two plays ( played by Marlon Brando and Robert Speaight, respectively ).

One year later, the play was included among the plays in the First Folio of Shakespeare's collected plays.

The Oxfordian case is based on purported similarities between Oxford's biography and events in Shakespeare's narrative works ; parallels of language, idiom, and thought between Oxford's letters and the Shakespearean canon ; and marked passages in Oxford's Bible that appear in some form in Shakespeare's plays.

Following earlier anti-Stratfordians, Looney argued that the known facts of Shakespeare's life did not fit the personality he ascribed to the author of the plays.

Its distributor, Sony Pictures, advertised that the film " presents a compelling portrait of Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare's plays ," and commissioned high school and college-level lesson plans to promote the authorship question to history and literature teachers across the United States.

One major evidential objection to the Oxfordian theory is Edward de Vere's 1604 death, after which a number of Shakespeare's plays are conventionally believed to have been written, according to 300 years of orthodox scholarship.

While there is no documentary evidence connecting Oxford ( or any authorial candidate ) to the plays of Shakespeare, Oxfordian researchers, including Mark Anderson and Charlton Ogburn, believe the connection is provided by considerable circumstantial evidence inferred from Oxford's connections to the Elizabethan theatre and poetry scene ; the participation of his family in the printing and publication of the First Folio ; his relationship with the Earl of Southampton ( believed by most Shakespeare scholars to have been Shakespeare's patron ); as well as a number of specific incidents and circumstances of Oxford's life that Oxfordians believe are depicted in the plays themselves.

Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were dedicated to Southampton ( whom many scholars have argued was the Fair Youth of the Sonnets ), and the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays was dedicated to Montgomery ( who married Susan de Vere ) and Pembroke ( who was once engaged to Bridget de Vere ).

Almost half of Shakespeare's plays are set in Italy, many of them containing details of Italian laws, customs, and culture which Oxfordians believe could only have been obtained by personal experiences in Italy, and especially in Venice.

Mainstream scholars stress that any supposedly special knowledge of the aristocracy appearing in the plays can be more easily explained by Shakespeare's life-time of performances before nobility and royalty, and possibly, as Gibson theorises, " by visits to his patron's house, as Marlowe visited Walsingham.

For mainstream critics, the most compelling evidence against Oxford ( besides the historical evidence for William Shakespeare ) is his death in 1604, since the generally-accepted chronology of Shakespeare's plays places the composition of approximately twelve of the plays after that date.