The play is a dramatisation of the story of Boudica, the British Celtic queen who led a revolt against the Romans in 60–61 AD.
The principal hero is not Bonduca herself, but rather Caratach (Caratacus), who is anachronistically depicted as her general, despite having been exiled from Britain almost a decade prior.
Bonduca's confidence is challenged by her general Caratach, who tells her that the Romans are not easily crushed and that the war will be very different from the tribal conflicts they are familiar with.
An officer is sent to contact Poenius Postumus, another Roman commander, to join his army with Suetonius' force.
Back in Suetonius' camp Petillius and fellow officers make fun of the love-stuck Junius.
Bonduca's vengeful daughters are keen to hang the captured men, but Caratach intervenes and orders them to be well fed and sent back to the Roman camp.
In the Roman camp Junius reads the fake love-letter, in which Bonduca's daughter tells him that he has won her love.
The daughters intend to kill the Romans, but again Caratach intervenes and insists that honourable adversaries should not resort to such tricks.
Poenius watches as the small Roman army is apparently overwhelmed by the British forces, but the fog of the battle conceals things.
Watching from the hill Caratach berates Bonduca for launching a mass-attack, as the British superiority in numbers is turned against them, creating a crush between the Romans and the baggage train.
Suetonius tells Petillius to contact Poenius, who he intends to forgive for failing to join the battle.
Meanwhile, Petillius can't stop thinking about Bonduca's older daughter, and Junius takes the opportunity to play tricks on him in revenge for the ridicule he had received.
Arthur Sherbo discovered a range of parallels and commonalities between the play and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I (c. 1587).
In the opposite chronological direction, S. W. Brossman identified borrowings from Bonduca in John Dryden's Cleomenes (1692).
In a note appended to his transcript, Knight explains that the original prompt-book that supported the stage performances had been lost, and that he had re-copied the author's "foul papers" into the existing manuscript.
[3] Knight, however, was unable to transcribe the entire play (he had to summarise the first two and a half scenes in Act V), because the set of foul papers from which he worked was itself incomplete – a useful demonstration of the difficulties in textual transmission that plagued English Renaissance theatre.
[4] (The missing scenes are present in the 1647 printed text, though their order, as Knight describes it, is reversed: his V,i comes second and his V,ii comes first.)
Henry Purcell's last major work, composed in 1695, was music for an adaptation entitled Bonduca, or the British Heroine (Z.
In the alternate history novel Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove, William Shakespeare writes a play entitled Boudicca to incite the people of Britain to revolt against Spanish conquerors.
The Britons in part stand for the Native Americans of the Virginia colony, and are depicted as savage pagans.
Ronald J. Boling and Julie Crawford argue that the nominal hero Caratach is portrayed in a satirical fashion, and that this probably represents contemporary ambivalence about the court of King James I.