Gosse wasn't alone in his attitude; Algernon Charles Swinburne called the play "a mixture of coarsely realistic farce and gracefully romantic comedy."
[5] Gray's hypothesis has not found widespread support, though F. L. Lucas allowed a possibility that Heywood may have revised an original Webster/Rowley collaboration.
[6] Webster appears to have handled the play's main plot, and Rowley (unsurprisingly for a professional clown) the comic subplot.
Since A Cure for a Cuckold is later than most, perhaps all, of these plays, it likely represents the cumulative influence of a skein of dramatic development winding through them, centring on the plot of a woman who wants her lover to duel with and kill his best friend.
Lessingham's professed friends quickly drop away with a variety of excuses, till only one is left: it is Bonvile, the groom.
In the nearby woods, Rochfield, a younger son left destitute by the strictures of primogeniture, has decided to turn thief; he encounters Annabel, his first intended victim, and tries to rob her of her wedding necklace and bracelets.
True to her word, Annabel gives Rochfield twenty gold pieces, and introduces him as a friend of the groom.
Justice Woodroff is gathering investors for a trading voyage that he's planning, and Annabel manoeuvres Rochfield into investing his twenty gold pieces in the venture.
The captain and master are killed – but Rochfield takes command and leads the crew in an effective resistance they even capture one of the Spanish ships, and return to England with a lucrative prize.
Once the five passionate young people, Annabel, Bonvile, Clare, Lessingham, and Rochfield, are all under the same roof, they involve themselves in a tangle of misunderstandings and jealousies – until wise old Woodroff manages to get them altogether and straighten them out at the end of the play.
Modern readers may tend to take the opposite approach, and judge the main plot's ethic of chastity, honour, and duelling far less humane and palatable than Compass's live-and-let-live ethos.