The entry, made for John Jackman, referred to manuscripts of two plays by ‘Tho: Dekker’, these being ‘The Wonder of a Kingdom’ and ‘a Tragedy called The Noble Spanish Soldier’.
The play was printed in a quarto version in 1634, probably by John Beale, on behalf of Vavasour, who initialled the foreword entitled ‘The Printer to The Reader’.
(3) In 1601, theatre manager Philip Henslowe made part payment for an anonymous play called 'The Spanish Fig', no text of which survives under that name.
(4) In April 1624 a poster appeared in Norwich advertising a touring play, being 'An excellent Comedy called 'The Spanish Contract’ to be performed by Lady Elizabeth's men, a company with which Dekker is believed to have had connections.
Various critics, such as Fleay and Bullen, have tried to make sense of all of them by postulating, largely without evidence, a variety of permutations of collaboration and revision so as to give all of the authorship candidates a role in the production of the text we now have.
The most persuasive contribution however, comes from Julia Gasper who, building on work by R. Koeppel, convincingly identifies the source of NSS as being Volume V of Jacques-Augueste de Thou's Latin 'Historiarum Sui Temporis', published in 1620.
With respect to the relationship with other plays, any connection with 'The Spanish Fig’ would seem to be ruled out on the grounds that it pre-dates the publication of de Thou's Historiarum.
One such theory, put forward by Tirthanker Bose,[2] is that 'the Spanish Contract’ is a version of NSS, reworked as a comedy and thus is an intermediate stage on the road to 'The Welsh Embassador'.
Gasper points out that this scene in NSS contains elements from de Thou, not to be found in The Parliament of Bees, principally the need to intervene on behalf of Onaelia.
Furthermore, textual scholarship is happy to place NSS within the Dekker cannon, while, as Hoy says 'no scholar has ever succeeded in demonstrating Rowley's share in the play’.
More likely perhaps, it could be the result of the editorial confusion which led to the title page being headed 'The Noble Soldier' and also pervades the compilation of the cast list.
In reality, the play reflects the seventeenth century fashion for mixing elements of tragedy and comedy in a style first identified by Sir Philip Sydney in 1579 as being 'mongrel tragicomedy’;[4] thus while death intrudes on the final act, it only strikes unsympathetic characters.
There is also regular light relief provided by two comic characters, Cornego and Cockadillio, as well the cameo appearances of Signor No and Medina as a French Doctor.
[5] Although the book from which this extract was taken, 'The Prince', had yet to be published in English, the ideas it contained (or at least a caricature of them) had been in circulation for many years following its initial publication in Italy in 1531.
These were often treated with profound suspicion by the English who saw the advocacy of the use of manipulation and deception to maintain power as being the idea of a disreputable foreign country.
Planned by the King in an attempt to achieve reconciliation and remove the threat of Onaelia by marrying her off, it represents a means of bringing almost the entire cast on stage to witness the meting out of justice.
It is ironic that the King's scheme is undermined, not by his political rivals but by his allies, The Queen and Malateste, who do not believe that the marriage will provide a stable settlement and instead seek to pursue a deadlier course of action.