(Marston left dramatic authorship after 1608, and apparently tried to minimise public acknowledgement of his earlier playwriting phase; his name was removed even from the 1633 collected edition of his plays.
[2] The title page of the 1613 quarto states that the drama was performed at the Whitefriars Theatre — which indicates the Children of the Queen's Revels as the company that staged it.
A Restoration novelization of The Insatiate Countess, which featured the plot of that play alongside several other stories, was published with the title God's Revenge Against the Abominable Sin of Adultery, in 1679.
Some have argued that Marston started the play, but left it unfinished when he encountered his second bout of legal troubles in 1607 and 1608, and that Barkstead and Machin later completed the script.
The final scene, V, ii, is a makeshift ending tacked on by an "unscrupulous hack", to turn a defective play text into publishable form.
[5] Conversely, David Lake has argued against Marston's presence, and Martin Wiggins assigns the play to Barkstead and Machin in his 1988 edition.
Darren Freebury-Jones, Marina Tarlinskaja, and Marcus Dahl argue that Barkstead and Machin revised and completed a play originally written by Marston.
François de Belleforest translated Bandello's account into French in 1565, which in turn appeared in English as the 24th story in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1567).
As the play opens, Countess Isabella is at her house in Venice, where she observes the customary period of mourning for her recently deceased husband Viscount Hermus.
Two foolish citizens, Rogero and Clardiana, are determined to continue a family feud begun by their grandfathers; even on their mutual wedding day, the two quarrel in the street.
The two silly men are ready to be wrongfully condemned, rather than admit publicly that they've been cuckolded (as they now believe); Mendoza, wanting to spare Lady Lentulus dishonor, claims that he was climbing to her apartment to steal her jewels.
On the day appointed for the executions, Abigail and Thais come forward to explain the double bed trick; their husbands, now realising that they are not cuckolds, retract their confessions and are released.