The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda is an enigmatic play. Appearing first in an undated, anonymous, and rather untidy quarto that gives no hint of playing company or initial performance contexts, the play closely follows a single primary source and yet is innovative and experimental. Before a recent flurry of interest in its dramatization of Christian-Islamic conflict it was largely neglected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century directors and scholars, with no recorded performances and only a small number of editions since that first quarto, which probably dates to late 1592 or early 1593.

Although its title page offers scant information in most other respects, the colophon of the first quarto does indicate that it had been printed by Edward Allde for Edward White and was to be sold from his shop ‘at the little North doore of Paules Church, at the signe of the Gun’. The play, then titled Salamon and Perceda, had been entered into the Stationers’ Register to Edward White on 20 November 1592, and was licenced for publication by John Aylmer, the Bishop of London. The same partnership of Allde and White subsequently produced a second quarto – now Solimon and Perseda – that was dated to 1599, the second issue of which was stamped on the title page as ‘Newly corrected and amended’. Here are the first potential connections to Thomas Kyd: his celebrated play The Spanish Tragedy had been entered into the Stationers’ Register not long before, on 6 October 1592, and a similarly undated quarto of that play printed by Edward Allde and published by Edward White appeared around the same time. Another play associated with Kyd, Arden of Faversham, was also entered earlier in the same year to White (on 3 April 1592) and was published that year by the same partnership of the two Edwards. This may suggest a selling off of manuscripts by Kyd to White (who would produce second editions of all three) at this point and, as Lukas Erne notes, although ‘it is impossible to recover what events or processes’ led to the near simultaneous appearance in print of these three plays, it is nonetheless ‘intriguing’.