It was performed by the King's Men in the Blackfriars Theatre in 1631, and is notable for the light in throws on the workings of the premier acting company of its time.
Though Humphrey Moseley entered the play into the Stationers' Register on 4 September 1646, no edition of the drama was printed in the seventeenth century.
Felix Schelling catalogued the play's stock elements as "the lecherous tyrant; the love-lorn girl page; the banished lord...; two old men of noble houses, enemies; their children, in love; poison evaded by the substitution of a sleeping potion; a fair captive generously treated by a chivalrous soldier, her captor; and...consanguinity a bar to virtuous love."
Greville, Penn and Smith were hired men, and Goughe, Thompson, and Trigg were boy players filling female roles.
The burly Lowin plays a character of "great Beard and Bulke" – Smith's Asprandus and Greville's Iseas are "two little Pigmies" in comparison (Act III, scene 2).
The 1629 quarto of John Ford's The Lover's Melancholy provides a roster of the 17 actors involved, but doesn't assign them to their roles.]
Antharis and Clephis are old rivals; but their children, respectively son Alcidonus and daughter Selina, are in love and secretly married – though parental opposition forces them to conceal the fact and live apart.
The two men confront each other over the issue – but the King is penitent, in his own limited way; he tries to repair matters by arranging a marriage between Arioldus and his sister, the princess Panopia.
Antharis, ignorant of their marriage, tries to squelch their affair by telling his son a giant lie – that Alcidonus is a bastard, and Selina's half-brother.
In having a supposedly dead body rise from its coffin, Wilson is exploiting a time-honored stage effect of English Renaissance drama.
A roster of earlier instances of the trick, with no pretense to completeness, could include Marston's Antonio and Mellida (c. 1600), Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre (c. 1609), and several plays in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators.
The moral resolution of the play, in which a rapist makes up for his crime by marrying his victim, is an abomination to modern sensibilities – but an acceptable thing to the minds of the 17th century.