The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll was entered into the Stationers' Register on 7 October 1600, and was published before the end of that year, in a quarto printed by Thomas Creede for the bookseller Richard Olive.
The title page states the drama had been acted by the Children of Paul's, the troupe of boy actors that had resumed public dramatic performances in 1599 or 1600 after a decade's absence.
thou art fled to brutish beasts, / And men have lost their reason" in Julius Caesar (c. 1599), Act III, scene ii, lines 104–5.
(Ben Jonson parodies the same line, as "Reason long since is fled to animals, you know," in his 1599 play Every Man Out of His Humour, III, iv, 33.)
Ernest Gerrard proposed a complex scheme, in which Dodypoll was an old play by Lyly, written c. 1592, and then revised by Thomas Dekker and collaborators (perhaps Henry Chettle, John Day, and/or William Haughton) in 1599.
Marshall Nyvall Matson, a modern editor of Dodypoll, argues that no convincing case for any given author, for revision, or for derivation from a previous source, has yet been made.
Alberdure is not alone in his infatuation with Hyanthe; the prince's father, Duke Alphonso, also wishes to marry her, even though he is contracted to the dowager Duchess of Brunswick.
The Duke makes feeble excuses for delaying his planned marriage with the Duchess, claiming sinister portents and foreboding dreams.
His attempt to court Hyanthe is disrupted by the mad Alberdure, who eventually escapes his would-be guardians and makes off into the countryside...so that he, and Lassingbergh and Lucilia, are discontentedly roaming about.
The resemblance to A Midsummer Night's Dream is accentuated by the appearance of a troupe of fairies; they set out a banquet, and mistakenly give a precious bejewelled cup to a passing peasant.
The play depicts a series of comings and goings, meetings and partings and misunderstandings among Alberdure, his pursuers, Lassingbergh and Lucilia, and the peasant.
Duke Alphonso expresses his remorse for his past actions and longs for his son's return – the type of repentance that often prefigures and motivates the denouement of an Elizabethan comedy.
The portrayal of Earl Lassingbergh as an admirable and aristocratic painter is noteworthy, in a historical era in which artists had not yet fully shaken off their Medieval status as mere artisans or craftsmen.