The courtier dramatists of the 1630s, men like William Cartwright, Lodowick Carlell and Sir John Suckling, worked largely in tragicomedy.
The Prisoners as entered into the Stationers' Register on 24 May 1640; it was published together with Claricilla in a single duodecimo volume in 1641, a book printed by Thomas Cotes for the bookseller Andrew Crooke.
Almost all of the plays were written in the various cities in Europe — Paris, Venice, Naples, Florence, Turin, Madrid, even Basel in Switzerland — where Killigrew lived during his Continental travels (1635–41) and his years in exile during the Commonwealth era (1647–60).
Like other tragicomedies of its era, the play belongs to a lush realm of fantasy and romance with limited relationship to reality.
The play provides an "overplus" of "adventure, heroic dialogue, and sentiment...The Prisoners introduces us to a melodramatic pirate, Gillipus, who holds nobles as his slaves and kidnaps princesses.