Production
Eastward Ho was entered into the Stationers' Register on 4 September 1605 and printed later that year in a quarto issued by the bookseller William Aspley, printed by George Eld. The three authors are identified on the title page, as is the playing company that staged the work, the Children of the Queen's Revels. Aspley issued a second quarto in the same year, 1605.
Scholars who have tried to determine the respective contributions of the three authors have not reached a full consensus of opinion. Marston is normally assigned Act I; Chapman's hand is seen in Acts II and III; Jonson is usually associated with Act V. Individual scholars, from F. G. Fleay to T. M. Parrott to Percy Simpson, have produced their own specific and unmatching divisions of authorship. Scholars generally do agree, however, that scene III,iii, the scene with the Scots reference that caused the trouble, was written by Chapman; yet Chapman blamed Marston for the lines that caused offense: "if Chapman spoke the truth, Marston must have interpolated the obnoxious clauses".
The printed text of 1605 does not represent the full and offensive stage production of that year, though critics have disagreed as to whether the hostile official reaction was provoked more by the stage version or by the text. Eastward Ho borrows from and alludes to the dramas of the popular theatre in knowing ways, as plays of the fashionable boys' companies often did; scholars have traced references to The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine, and especially Hamlet. Eastward Ho has been called "one of the best made of Elizabethan comedies", with a "clear-cut strength and simplicity of structure" rare in dramas of its time.
The play has also inspired the Industry and Idleness series by William Hogarth which also contrasts two apprentices and their lives
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