[1] The play has been often cited as a possible influence on Shakespeare's Richard II, as well as Henry IV, Parts 1[2] and 2,[3] but new dating of the text brings that relationship into question.
[9] Moreover, events depicted in Woodstock are covered as well in Richard II (such as the farming out of the kingdom and the death of Green), so that play cannot be a sequel in the ordinary meaning of the term.
[16] Egan claimed that Ian Robinson supported the attribution of the play to Shakespeare in a 1988 publication, Richard II and Woodstock,[17] but he cited no other adherents to this view.
[21] Ule and Baker date it more precisely to about 1582; they believe it was written by Christopher Marlowe while he was at Cambridge, shortly after he had completed other plays they attribute to him such as Timon, and The Famous Victories of Henry V.[22] Corbin and Sedge, while cautioning that "[d]ating by suppositions of literary or theatrical influence is ... a hazardous business," nonetheless state that "in so far as literary influence may help dating, it would seem probable that Woodstock was written, and perhaps staged, some time before 1595.
MacDonald P. Jackson argues that "Woodstock's contractions and linguistic forms, expletives, metrical features and vocabulary all point independently to composition in the first decade of the seventeenth century", a conclusion which would make the play's relationship with Richard II that of a "prequel" rather than a source.
[24] Royal Blood: The Rise and Fall of Kings was a 10-play series of Shakespeare's history plays staged chronologically over four seasons by the Pacific Repertory Theatre from 2001 to 2004, which included the American professional premieres of both Edward III and Thomas of Woodstock.
[25][26] The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., staged Richard II in 2010 with director Michael Kahn's incorporation of a significant part of Thomas of Woodstock at the start of the play.
On 20 December 2013 the Royal Shakespeare Company gave a rehearsed reading of the play at London's Barbican Centre in the context of its ongoing performances of Richard II.
The text was significantly cut by the director (for example the subplot involving Nimble and the blank charters was excised) to highlight the relationship between the two plays.
[27] There is a full chapter about this anonymous play in Kevin De Ornellas, The Horse in Early Modern English Culture, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013.