A pair of stage comedies: the first follows an impecunious gentleman and his resourceful servant who arrive at a seaside town, where family rivalries, marriage schemes, financial pretenses, and mistaken expectations of inheritance create social satire and comic entanglement; the second is a metatheatrical farce that mocks theatrical mannerisms and critical self-importance by staging rehearsals, ridiculing bombastic playwrights and actors, and presenting a deliberately ludicrous play-within-the-play to expose vanity and affectation in contemporary theatre.