Summer's Last Will and Testament is an Elizabethan stage play, a comedy written by Thomas Nashe. The play is notable for breaking new ground in the development of English Renaissance drama. The literary scholar George Richard Hibbard says "No earlier English comedy has anything like the intellectual content or the social relevance that it has."[1]
Although Nashe is known as an Elizabethan playwright, Summer's Last Will and Testament is his only extant solo-authored play; his other surviving dramatic work, Dido, Queen of Carthage, is a collaboration with Christopher Marlowe, in which Nashe's role was probably very minimal.
- ^ G. R. Hibbard, quoted in: Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith, eds., The Predecessors of Shakespeare: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1973; p. 113.