Thomas Goffe had a distinguished reputation as a playwright during the seventeenth century. In the manuscript for The Fairy King (Bodleian MS. Rawlinson 28) Samuel Sheppard praises Goffe's tragedies and compares them to the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles; the author of II Crafty Cromwell, 1648, groups Goffe with Seneca, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Euripides, John Webster, and Sir John Suckling; and Samuel Holland in Don Zara del Fogo (1656) makes Goffe--with Philip Massinger, Thomas Dekker, Webster, Suckling, William Cartwright, and Thomas Carew--a lifeguard for Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Only three plays are definitely the work of Goffe although many more have been attributed to him.

Thomas Goffe, the son of a clergyman, was born in Essex, England, circa 1592. He attended Westminster School as a Queen's Scholar, and he probably participated in the annual Westminster play. Goffe's fellow students at Westminster included George Herbert; Charles Chauncey, the second president of Harvard...