His best-known plays are the passionate tragedies The Changeling and Women Beware Women, and the cynically satiric city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
The poem is indeed a graver labor; it celebrates a heroine of chastity rather than the amorous advances of the Queen of Love to a bashful country sportsman.
That is The Rape of Lucrece, a tragic tale about the chaste Roman dame Lucrece who, after being raped by the terrible Tarquin, committed suicide and then was avenged.
Nothing, one feels, would have been easier for Mercy than to read her lover a fine discourse upon the vanity of grandeur, the loveliness of chastity, the vicissitudes of fortune.