[2] The play was revived onstage during the Restoration, by the Duke's Company at their theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields; Samuel Pepys saw it on 22 February 1668.
Albumazar was entered into the Stationers' Register on 28 April 1615, and was published soon after in a quarto printed by Nicholas Okes for the bookseller Walter Burre.
Though consensus scholarship accepts the attribution of Albumazar to Tomkis, a few individual commentators have proposed alternative hypotheses of authorship – one even assigning the play to Shakespeare.
The protagonist of the play is based on a historical figure named Ja'far ibn Muhammad Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, known in the West as Albumazar; he was a ninth-century mathematician and philosopher who also worked as an astrologer (just as Johannes Kepler cast horoscopes while revolutionising astronomy).
[4] In addition to purely literary sources, Tomkis also exploited Galileo Galilei's revolutionary book on his astronomical discoveries, Sidereus Nuncius, "The Starry Messenger" (1610).
(The earliest English commentators on Galileo wrote before the telescope had even acquired its name; in his 1620 masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, Jonson called the instrument a "trunk," or tube.)
In keeping with his satirical intent, Tomkis gives a fanciful rather than realistic portrayal of the telescope, describing it as "an engine to catch starres" and "arrest" planets in their motions.
In a related flight of fancy, Tomkis's fraudulent astrologer produces a comparable instrument for extending the range of human hearing, which he calls the "otacousticon" – and which turns out to be an artificial pair of ass's ears.
He bamboozles his victims with verbose gibberish ("excentricals, / Centers, concentrics, circles, and epicycles," and "with scioferical instrument, / By way of azimuth and almicantarath," and "Necro-puro-geo-hydro-cheiro-coscinomancy," and much more) while setting them up to be robbed by his confederates.