Sir John Suckling was, according to the seventeenth-century gossip and biographer John Aubrey, "The greatest gallant of his time and the greatest gamester both for Bowling and Cards, so that no Shopkeeper would trust him for 6d, as today, for instance, he might by winning, be worth 200 pounds, and the next day he might not be worth half so much, or perhaps sometimes be minus nihilo." A recent biographer, Herbert Berry, points out that Suckling's greatness as a gambler is best measured by the substantial amounts of money he lost. In the course of a few years he managed to gamble away the large estate left him by his father. Suckling's dramatic ventures are not unconnected with the constantly fluctuating and usually depressed state of his exchequer. He was not a professional playwright but a gentleman amateur, a courtier who saw the drama as a means of courtly...