[6] Henry Shepard, who had a shop "at the sign of the Bible" in Chancery Lane between Sergeant's Inn and Fleet Street (according to the play's title-page), published this first edition, on whose behalf "M. P." printed it (the printer is assumed to be Marmaduke Parsons).

[8] When Boyster meets Luce 2 on the street outside in the confusion of its immediate aftermath, he asks her (mistakenly thinking that this is the person he has just married) "What art thou, girl or boy?

The central crisis in the play's dramatic structure is staged there (the secret wedding-ceremony, in which two pairs of disguised participants are married by the pedantical scholar and deacon, Sir Boniface, only to be abruptly dispersed when the Wise Woman interrupts with a false alarm).

[13] The liminality of the Wise Woman's house, located in the disreputable suburbs outside the jurisdiction of the city of London, is also expressed in the marginality of the character herself and in her dramatic function.

At the end of act four, scene three—having whispered her plan for the complex climax of the drama to Luce, Sencer, and Boyster, each in turn—the Wise Woman encourages them all to place responsibility for their fates in her ability to manage what she has called "a plot to make a play on.

[18] Luce 1's father explains that he rejoices to hear that his daughter "is preferred / And raised to such a match" with a gentleman who, as Chartley claims, is worth ten thousand pounds.

The trajectory of the aristocratic Luce 2's active pursuit of the praxis of dramatic agency counters and contains the flow of betrayals that emanates from the protagonist's desire and drives the action towards its comic resolution.

Young Chartley, the play's aristocratic protagonist, frequently relates to the objects of his desire (Luce 1, then Gratiana) by means of imagery involving wealth, commodities, or sexual possession and objectification.

[20] When his marriage to the citizen Luce [1] has become an inconvenience to be discarded in act three, scene three, he regrets having made a match with "so beggarly a kindred" and having "grafted in the stock of such a choke-pear", when the far superior attractions of "a goodly popering" as the knight's daughter, Gratiana, are on display (an image which bawdily regards Gratiana as a popering pear, whose shape is associated with that of a penis and scrotum and a coital pun on "pop-her-in", in relation to the folk-song "Pop Goes the Weasel!").

"[26] The performance was staged by Alan Cox, with Jeanne Hepple as the Wise Woman, Rebecca Palmer as Luce 2, Alexis Karne as Luce 1, and Katarina Olsson as Gratiana; James Wallace played Chartley, James Chalmers played Boyster, and Jean-Paul van Cauwelaert was Haringfield, with Bryan Robson as Sir Harry and Liam McKenna as Sir Boniface.

[27] Writing in 1888, John Addington Symonds argued that despite the play's superficial resemblance to Ben Jonson's comic masterpiece The Alchemist (1610), insofar as it also focuses on "the quackeries and impostures of a professed fortune-teller", nevertheless "to mention it in the same breath" as the latter work "would be ridiculous.

[29] The dramatic structure of the first and last scenes in particular drew his admiration: The culmination of accumulating evidence by which the rascal hero is ultimately overwhelmed and put to shame, driven from lie to lie and reduced from retractation to retractation as witness after witness starts up against him from every successive corner of the witch's dwelling, is as masterly in management of stage effect as any contrivance of the kind in any later and more famous comedy: nor can I remember a more spirited and vivid opening to any play than the quarrelling scene among the gamblers with which this one breaks out at once into life-like action, full of present interest and promise of more to come.

[31] He noted a similarity between the protagonist Chartley and that of How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602), which he offered in support of the claim of Heywood's authorship of the earlier comedy.

"[34] In Bradbrook's account, the play belongs to a more general shift within English popular comedy away from adventure stories and towards a greater interest in those focused on love.

[36] She links the dramatic strategy of The Wise Woman of Hoxton with Dekker's The Honest Whore (1604), insofar as both transpose the marriage-problem plot from domestic tragedy into a city comedy setting.