")[2] Brome is known to have written for William Beeston's company at the Cockpit Theatre during the final phase of his career; they staged his last play A Jovial Crew in 1641.
The resemblance between Brome's complaisant cuckold Saleware in A Mad Couple and the character Candido in Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part 1 has drawn notice.
Algernon Charles Swinburne called the work both "very clever" and "very coarse;"[6] Clarence Andrews complained that "the bad characters all end happily; no one suffers for his flagrant immorality; the hero is faithless, a rake, a scoundrel, and a liar.
The matter is complicated by the fact that the elderly Sir Anthony married a young wife two years previously, but has yet to father a child with her, leaving his nephew Careless as the heir to his estates.
Their conversations reveal a noticeable measure of sexual tension, the suggestion being that young Bellamy, though naive and inexperienced, is interested in Alicia Saleware for himself.
As a way of reforming the nephew and restoring his fortune, Thrivewell and Saveall promote an arranged marriage between Careless and a wealthy young widow, Mistress Crostill.
Careless is incorrigible himself: drunk, he makes sexual advances to Lady Thrivewell, offering to impregnate her with the heir that his uncle apparently cannot conceive.
She reveals that she has played a version of the bed trick (so common in English Renaissance drama), and that the woman Careless mistook for Lady Thrivewell in the dark was actually his mistress Phebe.
With all his other plots exposed, Careless admits that the robbery from which he once rescued Sir Anthony was a con-game, a trick arranged to earn the knight's gratitude.
[9] Behn retained much of Brome's work in her version, even keeping the original characters' names – though she expanded the crucial bedroom scene in Act IV.