[3] The poem tells the story of an early medieval Lombard Duke called Gondibert and his love for the beautiful and innocent Birtha.

His love for Birtha means he cannot return the affections of princess Rhodalind, the king's daughter, even though he would be made ruler of Verona if he were to marry her.

It was adopted by Waller in A panegyrick to my Lord Protector (1655) and by John Dryden in Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell and Annus Mirabilis.

According to the Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature "Dryden revives this measure to make his peace with the 1650s and advertise his bid to continue Davenant's Laureate project, but it would soon be wickedly parodied in Rochester's 'Disabled Debauchee'.

Alexander Chalmers wrote of the play that "although it is not without individual passages of poetical beauty, it has not dramatic form and consistency to entitle it to higher praise.

The character of Sir Gondibert also made a brief reappearance in English literature in "Calidore: A Fragment," an early unfinished poem by John Keats heavily influenced by Edmund Spenser.

[8] In the "Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors" chapter of Walden, American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau tells a story of once being interrupted of reading Davenant's "Gondibert" by a fire that broke out in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts.