[6] The play was entered into Stationers' Register on 17 April 1612 and was published later that year in quarto by the bookseller John Browne.
Tharsalio, the younger brother, is a romantic-comedy version of Chapman's tragic character Bussy D'Ambois – he is a "capricous," "wild, corrupted youth."
The countess has taken a vow never to remarry; nonetheless, she is courted (primarily for her money) by two contrasting suitors, Tharsalio and Rebus.
In the process, however, Arsace stresses Tharsalio's "manhood" and woman-pleasing capacities: "a goddess," she claims, "is not worthy of his sweetness."
The main plot of the last two acts (which draws upon the Ephesian Matron story in the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter) provides a twist to the situation of the preceding subplot.
(Eudora's servant Lycus, a confidant of Lysander and Tharsalio who is aware of the plot, is the only one to protest its emotional cruelty: "men hunt hares to death for their sports, but the poor beasts die in earnest.")
In a series of somewhat macabre graveyard scenes, the disguised Lysander finds Cynthia mourning at the family tomb, where she has gone without food or sleep for the past five days.
Tharsalio convinces his brother to accept the outcome of his plotting with equanimity; he asserts that when Cynthia loved Lysander in his soldier disguise, she was merely being "a constant wife."
Critics have often responded negatively to the play's cynical values and its harsh attitude toward women, and the way in which Chapman unrestrainedly exploits the biases of his era, which regarded widows as dominated by lust, sensuality, and hypocrisy.