The noble Roderigo sees a beautiful young girl (Clara) walking one night with her family.
Declaring himself bewitched by her beauty, he kidnaps her with the help of his friends, Diego and Lewys, then takes her back to his residence and rapes her.
Clara studies the room and manages to steal a crucifix before she is returned to town; these are her only clues as to the identity of her attacker.
Meanwhile, Clara returns to her mother and father (Maria and don Pedro de Cortes) and relates her misfortune.
Roderigo, now wracked with guilt for his crime, meets Sancho and Soto and decides to turn gypsy as well.
The gypsy troupe arrives at don Fernando's house and he asks them to act out a play he has written.
Don Fernando confronts his son Roderigo and tells him that the play is real: he must marry the ugly heiress.
Roderigo refuses and expresses his desire to marry the beautiful woman who had been watching the play that evening.
But Fernando then stages an elaborate interrogation, first telling his son that he has been punished by marriage to a wanton, then pressing him to confess his crimes.
The mother of the gypsy troupe reveals to Fernando that Andrew is really Don John, son of Francisco de Carcamo.
The Spanish Gypsy was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 9 July 1623; the text includes two mentions of the camels and elephant that arrived in London for exhibit in that month.
H. Dugdale Sykes was the first modern scholar to dispute the attribution to Middleton and Rowley; he favoured John Ford as the author, judging on a range of stylistic and textual features.
Following up on Sykes' perception, M. Joan Sergeaunt noted the strong resemblances between the gypsy scenes in this play and similar materials in the works of Thomas Dekker.
The Spanish Gypsy dates from the early 1620s, a time when Dekker, Ford, and Rowley were certainly working together: they wrote The Witch of Edmonton in 1621, and joined with John Webster for Keep the Widow Waking in 1624.
As Gary Taylor has recently argued, however, "If the plot/scenario for the play was written primarily by one author, Middleton is the likeliest candidate.