Published in 1979: No earlier edition of this play offers a satisfactory text because an old-spelling critical edition requires a conflation of the author's autograph manuscript and the first printed edition of 1639. Further, this play, while illustrating Caroline skepticism concerning the character of a personage long famous in narrative and dramatic literature as well as in history, departs from the literary tradition of the preceding three centuries. An account of the reasons for its departure invites consideration of its sources, but more important, of the beliefs of the dramatist's contemporaries as shown in both life and literature.

Published in 1979: No earlier edition of this play offers a satisfactory text because an old-spelling critical edition requires a conflation of the author's autograph manuscript and the first printed edition of 1639. Further, this play, while illustrating Caroline skepticism concerning the character of a personage long famous in narrative and dramatic literature as well as in history, departs from the literary tradition of the preceding three centuries. An account of the reasons for its departure invites consideration of its sources, but more important, of the beliefs of the dramatist's contemporaries as shown in both life and literature.