The literary scholar George Richard Hibbard says "No earlier English comedy has anything like the intellectual content or the social relevance that it has.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 28 October 1600, and was published before the end of that year in a quarto printed by Simon Stafford for the bookseller Walter Burre.
The text refers to a progress through the English countryside by Queen Elizabeth I, and also to an outbreak of bubonic plague and a severe drought that lowered the level of the River Thames to an unusual extreme.
[2] The play was not performed by professional adult actors in one of the London theatres, which in any case were closed due to the plague epidemic in 1592.
[3] Nashe developed Summer's Last Will and Testament out of the interlude form that was popular in the royal and noble courts of sixteenth-century England; and he anticipates the masque that would evolve during the Jacobean and Caroline eras.
The presences of Bacchus, satyrs, nymphs, hunters, reapers, maids and clowns and Morris dancers (complete with hobby horse), give the play a strongly pastoral feeling.