The Fairy Knight, or Oberon the Second is an early Stuart era stage play, a comedy of uncertain and problematic authorship.
Scholars and critics have widely rejected any application of this assignment of authorship to the extant text; in the words of Gerald Eades Bentley, "nothing in the manuscript sounds like Ford or Dekker...."[1] Many doubt that the play licensed by Herbert in 1624 is the same as the manuscript play; the critical literature often describes the Ford/Dekker Fairy Knight as a lost work.
Fredson Bowers advanced a hypothesis that Thomas Randolph wrote the existing Fairy Knight.
Since the MS. includes a 1658 epitaph (on the "virtuous lady Frances Monson"), critics tend to place the authorship of the play sometime between the mid-1630s and 1658[4] – generally too late for Randolph, who died in 1635.
The play draws upon the fairy lore of the folktales and legends of the British Isles, and so can be classed with similar works like Drayton's Nymphidia.