This classical history tells of the meeting and romance of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and the betrayal and death of Pompey the Great at the hands of one of his own officers, the "false one" of the title.

Scholars date the play to the 1619–20 period, partly because of parallels with the political situation in Jacobean era England at the time.

Given Fletcher's highly distinctive pattern of stylistic and textual preferences, scholars have found it fairly easy to distinguish the shares of the two authors in the play.

The play is set in Egypt; at its start, the Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII has sequestered his sister/wife/queen Cleopatra and has assumed sole rule of the kingdom, and the Battle of Pharsalia has not yet occurred.

Similarly, Katherine Philips's translation of Pierre Corneille's La Mort de Pompée (1643)[6] was a stage hit in London in 1663.