The Maid's Metamorphosis

The Maid's Metamorphosis was entered into the Stationers' Register on 24 July 1600, and published later that year in a quarto printed by Thomas Creede for the bookseller Richard Olive.

The title page of the first edition states that the play was acted by the Children of Paul's, one of the companies of boy actors popular at the time.

Individual scholars have discussed Lyly, John Day, Samuel Daniel, and George Peele as possible authors, though no conclusive argument has been made and no consensus has evolved in favour of any single candidate.

The author of The Maid's Metamorphosis "borrowed incidents, characters, speeches, words, phrases and rhymes" from Arthur Golding's 1567 English translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The local Duke, Telemachus, is incensed at his son Ascanio's devotion to the low-born Eurymine and his refusal of all the advantageous matches the father has tried to arrange.

A comedy scene that follows provides for an appearance of singing and dancing fairies, and for the type of bawdy humor typical of Elizabethan drama.

Joculo and other comic characters have an encounter with Aramanthus, a wise hermit (a figure common in pastorals) who can foretell the future and reveal hidden things.

(This is another common feature of the pastoral form, and seen in other plays of the era, like John Day's Law Tricks, Jonson's Cynthia's Revels, Peele's The Old Wives' Tale, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.)