Colorful characters with names like Lady Teazle, Charles Surface, Sir Benjamin Backbite and Lady Sneerwell are outrageous gossips and victims of gossip, in a comic story filled with complications, ironies, surprises and schemes that go horribly wrong. This prototype of situation comedy also reveals many of the same guilty pleasures and petty obsessions we know today.

It begins as several characters discuss the contents of their tabloid equivalent of the National Enquirer. And it includes a familiar sort of hypocrisy, as characters deplore the salacious gossip they are spreading in the act of condemning it.