Other examples range throughout the Western canon (several occur in Arthurian romance, as well as in Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale") and can be paralleled by instances in non-Western cultures (such as that of Indra and Ahalya in the ancient Indian epic Ramayana).
In the final scene of Much Ado About Nothing, the bride at Claudio's wedding turns out to be Hero instead of her cousin, as expected; and in The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Wooer pretends to be Palamon to sleep with and marry the Jailer's Daughter.)
(Male versions of the bed trick are rarer but not unprecedented; a classical instance occurs when Zeus disguises himself as Amphitryon to impregnate Alcmene with the future Hercules.
Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent features an extreme version of the bed trick, in which a woman is kidnapped and raped in darkness, by a man she doesn't realise is her own husband.
After theatres re-opened with the start of the Restoration era, the bed trick made sporadic appearances in plays by Elkanah Settle and Aphra Behn,[9] and perhaps reached its culmination in Sir Francis Fane's Love in the Dark (1675); but in time it passed out of fashion in drama.
Modern critics, readers, and audience members tend to find the bed trick highly artificial and lacking in credibility (though scholar Marliss Desens cites one alleged real-life instance of its employment in Shakespeare's era).