[1] The desired changes must have been made satisfactorily since the play was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre.
Most scholars now think that the dual attribution is simply a mistake, a point of confusion by the publishers: The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France, a Chapman play that had been revised by Shirley, was printed in the same year by the same house.
[2] Traditional critics sometimes complained about the frothy amorality of The Ball – judging it to display a "coarseness...unflattering" to the social set depicted.
[3] Yet Herbert's adverse reaction to the accuracy of the play suggests that even the revised version may have a certain journalistic quality, showing what the Court of Charles I was actually like.
The two plots are filled out with comic material, involving characters including Mr. Frisk the dancing master, and the clowns Freshwater and Gudgeon.