The play opens with two London merchants and partners, Old Foster and the Alderman Bruin, anticipating major profits from their successful trading voyages.
Alderman Bruin tries vainly to patch up the Foster quarrel; he is the play's consistent voice of forbearance and Christian charity.
The Widow is the friend and "gossip" of Mistress Foster; her servant Roger is the play's Clown, who provides much of its comic material.
In conversation with a clergyman, the Widow expresses her strange predicament: she has lived the first 37 years of her life with no significant troubles – she a woman who has never been "vexed."
Alderman Bruin looks forward to devoting his mercantile profits to charitable purposes; he plans to build a hostel for poor travellers.
In her case, the foolish suitors are Innocent Lambskin, a silly young man, and Sir Godfrey Speedwell, a quarrelsome old knight.
Jane has a preference for Robert Foster; and his uncle Stephen is able to scare off Speedwell and Lambskin to his son's advantage, since both are among the Widow's debtors.
Stephen offers to two hapless suitors a chance to redeem their debts for only 10% of what they owe; and Robert uses the money to support his father in prison.
In the play's final scene, King Henry III and his courtiers come to celebrate the establishment of Alderman Bruin's charity.