 The citizen's "apprentice" then acts, pretending to extemporise, in the rest of the play.This is a satirical tilt at Beaumont's playwright contemporaries and their current fashion for offering plays about London life.The opera "Pagliacci" is about a troupe of actors who perform a play about marital infidelity that mirrors their own lives, and composer Richard Rodney Bennett and playwright-librettist Beverley Cross's "The Mines of Sulphur" features a ghostly troupe of actors who perform a play about murder that similarly mirrors the lives of their hosts, from whom they depart, leaving them with the plague as nemesis.