The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll - Authorship

Authorship

The matter of the play's date impinges on the question of its authorship. There is no external evidence for any specific author; the style of the play is reminiscent of the works of John Lyly and George Peele, and each has been suggested as the author of Dodypoll. The song "What thing is love?" is used in Act I of Dodypoll; that song is thought to derive from Peele's play The Hunting of Cupid. Yet Peele died in 1596, and Lyly had retired from playwriting in the early 1590s, making both of them problematic candidates for the authorship of Dodypoll. Ernest Gerrard proposed a complex scheme, in which Dodypoll was an old play by Lyly, written c. 1592, and then revised by Thomas Dekker and collaborators (perhaps Henry Chettle, John Day, and/or William Haughton) in 1599. Lack of supporting evidence has prevented most scholars from accepting such a genesis for the play.

Marshall Nyvall Matson, a modern editor of Dodypoll, has argued that no convincing case for any given author, for revision, or for derivation from a previous source, has yet been made. The scholarly consensus tends, at least for the time being, to accept the play as an anonymous work.