In this hilarious seventeenth-century cloak-and-sword play, eight characters are enmeshed in a tangled web of mutual obligations. When they find themselves thrown together in the house of Don Pedro de Arellano in Toledo, they struggle to fulfill, or escape, those obligations. The action involves female rivalry, love triangles, kidnapping, and confusion of identities, while young Don Pedro and Don Carlos are moved about the house like pawns on a game board. In the end, however, the immobilized characters regain the initiative and make way for the comic solution of multiple marriages.