Old Fortunatus

[1] Fortunatus, a beggar, meets the goddess Fortune, and she offers him a choice between wisdom, strength, health, beauty, long life, and riches.

Not only has Andelocia now lost both purse and hat, he has also been turned into a horned beast by injudiciously eating apples from the tree planted by Vice.

Fortune takes back the marvellous purse, and appeal is made from the stage to Queen Elizabeth to decide whether Virtue or Vice has been the victor.

[2] When Charles Lamb drew the public's attention to the best Elizabethan and Jacobean plays in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1808) he included substantial extracts from Old Fortunatus, and declared that the man who wrote it "had poetry enough for any thing.

"[5] Later in the century James Russell Lowell called the play "a favourite of mine", while George Saintsbury wrote that it was "to the last degree crude and undigested, but the ill-matured power of the writer is almost the more apparent.

"[6] The literary historian Adolphus William Ward balanced the work's vices and virtues: The construction of this drama is necessarily lax; the wild defiance of the unities of time and place accords well with the nature of the subject; but as the author seems so strongly impressed by the moral of his story, he ought not to have allowed the virtuous and the vicious son of Fortunatus to come alike to grief...Altogether this romantic comedy attracts by a singular vigour and freshness; but its principal charm lies in the appropriately naif treatment of its simple, not to say childlike, theme.