[1] All of the external evidence, including the 1656 first edition, assigns the authorship of the play to Thomas Goffe;[2] one modern scholar, however, has argued that this may have been an error for John Gough, author of The Strange Discovery.
[3] The Careless Shepherdess conforms to many of the conventions of the pastoral form as it existed in the years and decades after Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.
At a time when trained scholars at the Universities dismissed stage plays as beneath their notice, the tradesmen booksellers stepped in to make these first efforts to bring a kind of order to the field.
The 1656 quarto of The Careless Shepherdess also provides a preface, or "Praeludium," for the 1638 revival that may have been written by Richard Brome; it features a conversation among four figures — Spruce, a courtier, Spark, an Inns of Court man, Thrift, a London citizen, and Landlord, a country gentleman.
The dialogue casts light on the theatrical conditions of the day, and is often quoted and discussed in the scholarly and critical literature on English Renaissance drama.