While contemporary scholarship on Erasmus’ Praise of Folly has been unusually productive, it has dealt primarily with structure and theme. It appears, however, that not nearly enough attention has been paid by scholars to the Listrius commentary which, after the 1515 Basel edition, became a standard appendage to the work. A close analysis of the commentary demonstrates that while at times it is ostentatious and irrelevant, its critical and interpretative remarks are often quite valuable. It can be seen not only as an objective statement of Erasmus' satiric method, but also as a kind of humanist courtesy book.

Almost from its inception, printers and translators made use of the commentary.

Readers have always found it easier to agree that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is a good book than to agree on precisely what makes it so good or what message it is, in its laborious and complicated manner, delivering. As they stress now this aspect and now that of its fathomless richness, they seem at times hardly to be talking about the same work. For example, we are told that Burton is utterly credulous: 'For the nature of evidence (as it is called by the moderns) he cares nothing. Everything is admissible that has been written in a book.' And yet, ‘in Burton the English Renaissance grows… skeptical.' The book is ‘a medical treatise … orderly in arrangement.' Yet it is a ‘trackless jungle.’ It is a ‘formidable statement of … skepticism.' On the contrary, 'no greater adept of Platonism’ than Burton ‘ever lived'; or rather, ‘Burton was, first of all, a neo-Platonist.'6 But then, ‘he is no metaphysician.

When Hamlet calls on the player to render a speech from 'Aeneas’ tale to Dido,’ his choice of subject offers some obvious parallels to his own situation. Hecuba, the archetypal grieving queen, is an effective contrast to Gertrude. Pyrrhus’ vengeance for his father's death is a reminder of the duty laid on Hamlet, as well as on Laertes and Fortinbras. Bloody Pyrrhus embodies the savage violence which both attracts and repels Hamlet. The player's speech has a more important function, however: it leads directly to Hamlet's ‘mousetrap’ strategy, the presentation of a play for Claudius. Hecuba's woes and the familiar idea of the guilty spectator at a play were already associated in a passage from Plutarch which probably was in Shakespeare's mind.

It has long been recognized that Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600), a play now acknowledged to be the work of Marston, is indebted to the first part of Sir Philip Sidney's tale of Argalus and Parthenia (Arcadia, Bk. 11, chs. 2, 7); and that this as well as other material from the Arcadia appeared in the roughly contemporaneous The Trial of Chivalry. There has been, however, no effort to explore either the precise nature of Marston's use of the Arcadia, or the relationship between the plays. A study of these questions reinforces the argument that Marston's intention in Jack Drum's Entertainment is unmistakably satiric. The evidence strongly suggests that Marston's play, written for performance at Paul's, should be read in the context of the War of the Theaters: it burlesques the naively romantic crudities of the public theatres in general (what Marston, in his Introduction, calls ‘mouldy fopperies of stale Poetry, / Unpossible drie mustie Fictions'), but is directed specifically at The Trial of Chivalry, which had recently been staged by the Earl of Derby's Men.