The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 8 June 1629; it was acted by the King's Men at both of their theatres, the Globe and the Blackfriars.
The play was popular and highly regarded in its own era; in 1650 Richard Washington wrote an elegy on Massinger in his own copy of the quarto of The Picture.
[1] Massinger's sources for his plot were the 28th novel in Volume 2 of The Palace of Pleasure (1567) by William Painter, and an anonymous English translation of The Theatre of Honour and Knighthood (1623) by André Favyn.
The clown Hilario, played by John Shank, is a thin-man character; the thin man was apparently a standard feature of the King's Men's dramaturgy – in the previous generation of Shakespeare and Burbage, hired man John Sinklo had filled thin-man clown roles like Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Shadow in Henry IV, Part 2.
And the female character of Queen Honoria is written for a supremely beautiful woman; she is more than once described as a "Juno" – which raises questions as to how the boy player Thompson managed the role.
In 2010 Philip Wilson directed a production for Salisbury Theatre, with Olivia Grant and Simon Harrison as the central romantic couple.
Mathias is a Bohemian knight who has decided to repair his financial situation by serving in the Hungarian defense against the invading Ottoman Turks.
Baptista has also prepared a miniature portrait of Sophia that will remain clear as long as she is a chaste wife, but will yellow if she is tempted to infidelity, and turn dark if she succumbs to temptation.
She, though warned of their coming, humiliates Mathias by giving them a very cold welcome; it becomes clear that she intends to embarrass her husband in retaliation for his doubts and her mistreatment.
The play's conclusion expresses the moral that "married men" should steer a middle course between the extremes of Ladislaus and Mathias, "Neither to dote too much, nor doubt a wife."