The Puritan Widow

When Lady Plus collapses into extravagant widow's grief, her London household becomes a battleground of vanity, appetite, and uneasy duty. Her brother-in-law Sir Godfrey awkwardly urges remarriage, her daughters balance sentiment with wit, and her son Edmond barely hides his delight at the inheritance and freedom her husband's death has brought. The play turns that private mourning into sharp comedy, exposing how little public sorrow matches private self-interest. Around this family drama, a second comic world unfolds: George Pye-board, a scholar turned trickster, and Peter Skirmish, an aging soldier stranded by peace, decide that deception is the only profitable trade left. Their schemes draw in Captain Idle, jailed after a failed highway robbery, and the pious servants of Widow Puritan, whose religious scruples prove as exploitable as their hypocrisy. Pye-board manipulates them all with fortune-telling, false miracles, stolen property, and staged quarrels, even using a "cunning man" to bend the widow's household to his will. In a bustling satire of postwar England, everyone is performing, bargaining, or being fooled. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.