Few names appear with greater frequency than Samuel Foote's in the accounts and annals of the later eighteenth-century English stage. Biographical sketches of various degrees of reliability, and collections of jokes, witticisms, and bon mots attributed to Foote began to appear in the year of his death; and there has been intermittent interest in the man and his works even to the present time. The only full-length attempts at biography in the twentieth century have been Percy Fitzgerald's Samuel Foote: A Biography (1910) and Simon Trefman's Sam. Foote, Comedian, 1720–1777 (1971), neither of which can be regarded as a definitive life.