THE PLEASANT COMEDY OF OLD FORTUNATUS.
The Pleasant Comedy of Old Fortunatus was first published in 1600, having been produced at Court on the Christmas before. The play as it stands is an amplification and a recast of an earlier play, The First Part of Fortunatus, which had been performed at Henslowe’s Theatre about four years previously. This had long been laid aside, when the idea seems to have occurred to Henslowe to revive it in fuller form, and Dekker was commissioned to write a second part, with the result that he recast the whole in one play instead, adding the episode of the sons of Fortunatus to the original version. So far, the whole play was taken from the same source, the old Volksbuch of “Fortunatus,” which, first published at Augsburg in 1509, was popular in various languages in the sixteenth century. An interesting account of this legend and of its connection with the play, is given in Professor Herford’s “Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century,” from which the present note on the play is largely drawn. When Dekker had completed his recast of the play, it was immediately ordered for performance at Court, and further scenes, in this case altogether extraneous to the original story—those, namely, in which Virtue and Vice are introduced as rivals to Fortune—were added with a special view to this end. Otherwise the play is pretty faithful to the story, even in its absurdities. It is worth mention that Hans Sachs had already dramatized the subject in 1553, which may have had something to do indirectly with the production of the first English version.
In the original quarto of 1600, Old Fortunatus is not divided into acts and scenes, and the division is here attempted for the first time. It has been necessary also in some instances to supply stage directions.