Mother Bombie

Mother Bombie is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy by John Lyly. It is unique in Lyly's dramatic canon as a work of farce and social realism; in Mother Bombie alone, Lyly departs from his dream world of classical allusion and courtly comedy to create a "vulgar realistic play of rustic life" in a contemporaneous England.

Mother Bombie was entered into the Stationers' Register on 18 June 1594, and was published later that year, in a quarto printed by Thomas Scarlet for the bookseller Cuthbert Burby. Burby issued a second quarto in 1598, the printing done by Thomas Creede. The play was next printed in 1632, when it was included in Six Court Comedies, the initial collection of Lyly's works published by Edward Blount.

No specific early performances of the play are known; the title page of the first edition states that Mother Bombie was "sundry times" acted by the Children of Paul's, Lyly's regular company — performances that must have occurred prior to that company's cessation of activity in 1591. The play's date of authorship is uncertain and conjectural; given the complexity of the play's plot (atypical for Lyly), some critics have regarded Mother Bombie as the last and most technically mature of the dramatist's plays, and have dated it to c. 1590.

Thomas Nashe praised Mother Bombie is his 1596 pamphlet Have With You to Saffron-Walden as a popular and merry comedy. Modern critics have compared Mother Bombie with The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare's similar classically shaped comedy; both plays feature comic servants named "Dromio."

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