"Of all the minor English poets of his century, Randolph may perhaps be considered as standing at the head." This assessment appears in the first modern edition of Thomas Randolph's works, edited by W. Carew Hazlitt (1875), and it accords with the playwright-poet's reputation during most of the seventeenth century. Until the Restoration, Randolph's literary skills were often compared favorably with those of such luminaries as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. By the end of the century, however, his reputation went into decline, and it stayed there for the most part until the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when a modest number of scholars became interested in his life and writings.

Gerald Eades Bentley has discovered plentiful evidence of Randolph's great popularity during his lifetime and for a generation afterward: numerous poems and anecdotes about Randolph's career occur in seventeenth-century commonplace books; his verses appear in a host of manuscript copies...