Cyrus Hoy - Böcker

The text is taken from the Norton Critical Edition and includes a preface and footnotes by Byrus Hoy, professor emeritus at the University of Rochester. The preface speaks to the choice of text—primarily the second quarto with reliance on the folio as necessary—and places it in the context of its times and of the evolving criticism of the play.

Four of the plays in this volume are based on important source materials, so that the relationship of plays to sources looms large in Cyrus Hoy's introductory essays. There is an extensive account of the relation of The Shoemakers' Holiday to Deloney's Gentle Craft. The Introduction to Old Fortunatus relates in detail that play's relationship to the German Volksbuch, and to the German Comoedia von Fortunate und seinem Seckel und Wünschhütlein (1620), a redaction of Dekker's play. The Introduction to Patient Grissil relates Dekker, Chettle and Haughton's play to the tradition of the Griselda story generally. The chronicle-history sources (Foxe, Grafton, Stow, Holinshed) of Sir Thomas Wyatt are surveyed in the Introduction, in his Introduction also, Professor Hoy considers the play's relationship to the lost play, Lady Jane, by Dekker, Chettle, Heywood, Webster and W. Smith. Satiromastix has no known source, but as Dekker's contribution to the stage quarrel of Marston and Jonson, this is a play that has always had particular interest for the student of Elizabethan theatrical history, and Professor Hoy therefore bestows on it the most elaborate Commentary in all these four volumes.

Companion guide to the second volume of Dekker's plays, with introductions and commentary on The Honest Whore Pt 1, The Honest Whore Pt 2, The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James, Westward Ho, Northward Ho and The Whore of Babylon.