[4] The title page makes no attribution of authorship; it does state that the play was "sundry time" performed by Queen Elizabeth's Men.
The play has been called a "comedy, or, more properly, tragicomedy",[5] though it falls securely into the category of romance, an enormously popular genre in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
In his Defense of Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney generally defended the poets and poems of his era from their critics; but in a famous and often-quoted passage he also ridiculed the fanciful and wild romances then common on the popular stage, in which: ...you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he commeth in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived.
When the heroine Neronis (daughter of Patranius, late King of the Isle of Strange Marshes) enters the Forest of Marvels in male disguise, she speaks this: As hare the hound, as lamb the wolf, as fowl the falcon's dint, So do I fly from tyrant he, whose heart more hard than flint Hath sack'd on me such hugy heaps of ceaseless sorrows here,
That sure it is intolerable, the torments that I bear.The meter has a jog-trot rhythm to a modern ear, but poets like Sidney and Arthur Golding employed it for works of serious intent.
The source for the basic story is the Roman de Perceforest, an extensive prose romance that has come down to us in four manuscripts dated to the fifteenth century.
As medievalist Sylvia Huot sums it up and documents, "Perceforest is the undisputed source for the Elizabethan play Clyomon and Clamydes, composed about 1576–77 and printed in 1599.
Clamydes, son of the King of Swabia, has a problem: he cannot marry his beloved, Juliana, until he slays a dragon that has been killing and eating maidens and matrons.
Sir Clyomon sets off on his knightly adventures, which lead him to the Macedonia of Alexander the Great (a figure commonly featured in chivalric romance).
But he falls victim to the spells of the evil magician Bryan Sans Foy, who steals Clamydes' arms and apparel (and his dragon's head).
(Neronis is "the earliest known example of a girl disguised as a page"[14] in English Renaissance drama, making her the ancestress of Lyly's Gallathea and Phillida, Shakespeare's Rosalind and Viola, and all their successors.)