The 1630 quarto was printed by Augustine Matthews for the bookseller John Waterson; it bears commendatory verses, including one by James Shirley.
Massinger dedicated his drama to George Harding, 8th Baron Berkeley, a prominent literary patron of the day who was the dedicatee of Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1623), among other works.
The true protagonist of the play, however, is Vitelli, a Venetian gentleman; he has come to Tunis disguised as a merchant, in order to search for his sister Paulina, who has been captured by Grimaldi's pirates and sold into the harem of the city's Viceroy, Asambeg.
Nineteenth-century critics tended to interpret the play's positive portrayal of a Jesuit confessor as a sign of Massinger's own supposed Roman Catholicism.
[citation needed] Jowitt, in the early 21st century, reads The Renegado as a political allegory on the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Buckingham's failed trip to woo the Infanta Maria in the Spanish.