All Fools

All Fools is an early Jacobean era stage play, a comedy by George Chapman that was first published in 1605. The play has often been considered Chapman's highest achievement in comedy: "not only Chapman's most flawless, perfectly balanced play," but "also his most human and large-minded." "Chapman certainly wrote no comedy in which an ingenious and well-managed plot combined so harmoniously with personages so distinctly conceived and so cleverly and divertingly executed."

All Fools entered the historical record when the Children of the Queen's Revels performed the play at Court before King James I on 1 January 1605. Based on that fact, "the play was probably on the Blackfriars stage in 1604."

The play's date of origin is complicated by a notation in "Henslowe's Diary," the general term for the records that Philip Henslowe kept of his business at the Rose Theatre from 1591 to 1609. An undated note from the first half of 1599 records a payment to Chapman of £8 10s. for "The World Runs a Wheels & now All Fools But the Fool." Some critics interpret this as an alternative title for All Fools, which therefore indicates that at least an early version of the play was complete by 1599. Other dispute this conclusion, however; Chambers notes that "there is no 'fool' in All Fools," so that the early title doesn't fit the extant version; the switch of companies, from Henslowe's Admiral's Men to the Children of the Queen's Revels, is also problematic.

The play was first printed in 1605, in a quarto printed by George Eld for the publisher Thomas Thorpe. This 1605 first quarto was the only edition of the work issued during the seventeenth century.

In the quarto, Chapman dedicated the play to Sir Thomas Walsingham. Chapman's verse dedication specifies that earlier texts of Chapman plays had been issued "without my passport, patch'd with others' wit...." Chapman refers here to the defective texts of his earliest extant plays, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596; printed 1598) and An Humorous Day's Mirth (1597; printed 1599).

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