In differing ways and to differing degrees the main characters are all transformed during the play. It is traditionally the business of comedy to encourage moral change. Its laughter is meant to shame, to instruct, to purify. It achieves this by the display of folly onstage in the hope that members of the audience will go away determined to mend their ways if they have seen their failings and sins represented or leave the theatre determined to avoid such pitfalls if they are innocent of them. So much for the intended effect of drama mediating between writer and audience. It is common too that within comic drama foolish characters shown their failings will also be reformed, will see the errors of their ways, will be ashamed or humiliated and become better souls. Another aspect of this didacticism was the portrayal of public figures and power holders, shown up, mocked, humiliated and punished for their greed, cruelty, vanity and dishonesty. With the accelerating growth of the numbers of government employees, the expansion of society in general, of wealth and of poverty, such figures proliferated and the opportunities to objectify and vilify them expanded hugely in the late- Elizabethan theatre and even more so in Jacobean times. As the corruption of government, the governing ranks and the aspiring bourgeoisie worsened in the seventeenth century, so satirical writing increased.

The persistence of these problems, the failure of government to clean its own house and the increase of luxury and waste, would split society and turn written mockery to political action. In the 1590s, however, writers essayed the power of the pen to expose vice. Ben Jonson, in the induction to his early comedy Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), declared his aim to ‘strip the ragged follies of the time’