 The playwrights seemed to have depended on the popular images of the sect as expressed in sermons and chapbooks, without actually knowing much, or caring to know much, about the real group.The play presents a cheerfully amoral world in which everyone is a manipulator – the typical world of Middleton's early city comedies.The protagonist, Gerardine, is in love with Maria, but her uncle and guardian, Glister the physician, opposes the match because the spendthrift Gerardine's estates are mortgaged.