The following is a synopsis of The Devil is an Ass
by Peter Barnes in Barnestorm.

Late in the play, the minor devil Pug explains its title: the Devil is an ass to think he can corrupt human beings, who are far more corrupt than he is. Considering what Pug has seen on earth, he exclaims: "You talk of a university! Why, hell is A grammar school to this!" (IV).
At the start of The Devil is an Ass, Pug persuades Satan to send him to earth. Satan imposes constraints upon him: he may remain only until midnight, he must make do with a ready-made body (of a cutpurse just hanged at Tyburn) instead of a new one, he must use his ingenuity to obtain clothes, and he is to serve the first man he meets. Pug delights Fitzdotterel, the fool he encounters, partly because Fitzdotterel longs to meet a devil and partly because Pug agrees to work without pay. Fitzdotterel is duped by the swindler Meercraft, whose schemes include a patent to make leather from dogskin. He urges Meercraft to include him in a land reclamation fraud that will make him the Duke of Drowned Lands. When Pug tries to seduce Mrs. Fitzdotterel, she--thinking that her husband put him up to it as a test--informs on Pug, whom he beats. She tricks Pug into arranging a meeting with Wittipol, who loves her. In revenge, Pug tells Fitzdotterel, then recognizes too late that by preventing adultery he failed to profit his master's cause. When Fitzdotterel complains that his wife is not adapting to her forthcoming position as duchess, Meercraft and his broker Engine devise a new plan to fleece him. They urge him to send his wife to be instructed in deportment by a Spanish lady, to whom he should give a gift, a ring worth fifty pounds--soon rising to sixty, then a hundred--to be obtained from Gilthead, a goldsmith who, helping Meercraft fleece him, subtracts Meercraft's debt from the sum. Meercraft invents a court, of which his cousin Everill is Master, that for a hundred pounds and a legal deed of trusteeship will settle a quarrel by litigation rather than have a claimant fight a duel with the party who grieved him. Immediately, Fitzdotterel pays to bring suit against Wittipol. To protect Mrs. Fitzdotterel, whose financial ruin her husband's idiocies are hastening, Wittipol impersonates the Spanish lady at the home of Lady Tailbush, another of Meercraft's dupes, this time in a fraudulent scheme to acquire a monopoly on fucus, a cosmetic. In disguise, Wittipol persuades Fitzdotterel to name Wittipol's friend Manly, not Meercraft, as his trustee. Wittipol then reveals himself. Meanwhile, Lady Tailbush's missing steward Ambler arrives, delayed because his clothes were stolen while he was with a woman. Recognizing them on Pug, he delivers him to the law. In jail, Satan visits Pug, reprimands him for being a less effective devil than the person whose body he occupies, and returns Pug to Hell, where he will punish Pug for letting humans outdo a devil. Meercraft persuades Fitzdotterel that what occurred was part of a plot between his wife and her lover to steal his land and that to stay clear of the law, he should pretend to be possessed by a devil. During his feigned attack comes news of Pug's mysterious disappearance from jail. Astonished that Pug really was a devil, Fitzdotterel tells the truth.

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