Campaspe is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy by John Lyly. Widely considered Lyly's earliest drama, Campaspe was an influence and a precedent for much that followed in English Renaissance drama.
Campaspe is known to have been performed at Court before Queen Elizabeth I, most likely on 1 January 1584 (new style); it was also acted at the first Blackfriars Theatre. The company that performed the play is open to question: extant records assign the Court performance to "Oxford's boys," and the Blackfriars production to the Children of Paul's, Lyly's regular company, and the Children of the Chapel. One resolution for the conflicting assignments is the theory that the play was acted by a combination of personnel from the Paul's and Chapel companies as well as from the troupe of boy actors maintained in the 1580s by the Earl of Oxford.
Campaspe was first published in a 1584 quarto printed by Thomas Dawson for the bookseller Thomas Cadman. Q1 exists in three different "states" or impressions, with slight differences among them. The first, Q1a, titles the play A moste excellent Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes.In the subsequent impressions, Q1b and Q1c, the play's title is shortened to Campaspe. The running title of all three impressions (printed along the tops of the text's pages) is A tragical Comedie [sic] of Alexander and Campaspe. (Editors and scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally referred to the play as Alexander and Campaspe; their twentieth-century counterparts tend to prefer the shorter title.)
A second quarto edition appeared in 1591, printed by Thomas Orwin for the bookseller William Broome. The play would also be included in Six Court Comedies (1632), the earliest collected edition of Lyly's plays, printed by William Stansby for Edward Blount. Blount's edition printed the texts of the plays' songs, which were omitted from the earlier quartos – including the often reprinted "Cupid and my Campaspe play'd..."; though scholars have questioned whether these songs are authentically Lylian in authorship.