 The 13-year-old John Honyman made his acting debut in this production; he played female roles for the King's Men for the next three years, to their production of Massinger's "The Picture" (1629); at the age of 17 he switched to young male roles.Massinger based his portrait of the Roman Emperor Domitian on the work of Suetonius (most likely in Philemon Holland's 1606 translation), supplemented by works of Tacitus and Dio Cassius, plus the second Satire of Horace and Book XIV of Ovid's "Metamorphoses", among other ancient sources.Ben Jonson's first Roman tragedy, "Sejanus", was Massinger's model "in style and in structure" and for "scene outlines"; "the trial of Paris (I,3)...is written in close imitation of the trial of Cordus in "Sejanus", Act III."