The jeerers are simply people attending the rally, no different from the supporters who cheer the speaker.
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Pennyboy Senior has by now been driven mad by the mockery of the jeerers; he puts his dogs on trial for scheming to cheat him. Yet a final victory over the jeerers, and his discovery that his brother Pennyboy Cantor is still alive, help to restore Pennyboy Senior's wits. Pecunia accepts Pennyboy Junior as her future husband, and amity and concord are restored.
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Pennyboy Senior attempts to enter Pecunia's good graces by conniving with her servants, Broker the gentleman usher and Lick-finger the cook. As a miser, however, he becomes a prime target for the jeerers. The uncle and nephew also conduct an acerbic rivalry over their prospects with Pecunia. Act III begins, oddly enough, with a preface to the readers, asking them to approach the material that follows in a judicious frame of mind.
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She is served by her nurse, named Mortgage, her ladies in waiting, Statute and Band, and her chambermaid, Wax. Among her many wooers are the members of the society of jeerers. The members of this heterogeneous company – a sea captain, a poet, a doctor, and a courtier – have all gone bankrupt and now devote themselves to insulting and jeering at others, raising their practice to a pretended art form. Their leader is Cymbal, the manager of the News Staple.
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The main plot, about the Pennyboy family and Lady Pecunia, is a satire on the emerging ethic of capitalism; and the play features a complex threefold satire on abuses of language, in the News Staple, the society of jeerers, and the project for a Canting College. The play also provides an expression of the females-out-of-control theme that is so central and recurrent in Jonson's plays, from the Ladies Collegiate in Epicene (1609) to the three bad servants in The Magnetic Lady (1632).
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The Canting College will teach all the insider vocabularies that special interests use to maintain and advance their own self-interest and victimise the public. Pennyboy Cantor, disgusted by all that he has seen and heard, quarrels with the jeerers and finally doffs his disguise, revealing his true identity. He denounces his son and withdraws Pecunia to his own house. The Pennyboys have to confront another hurdle, in the attempted cheat of the villain Picklock; but Pennyboy Junior's frustration of Picklock's scheme demonstrates his repentance and returns him to his father's good graces.
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Pennyboy Junior, still accompanied by his disguised father, escorts Pecunia and her attendants to the News Staple, where he spends foolishly on spurious news of the day. ("The art of drawing farts out of dead bodies,/ Is by the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross / Brought to perfection...," etc.) Meanwhile, Cymbal takes an opportunity to press his own suit to Pecunia; and he jeers his rival suitor Pennyboy Senior mercilessly. Pennyboy Junior and Pecunia and her attendants adjourn to a nearby tavern – but they are tracked down by the jeerers. In an increasingly drunken state, they drive out Pennyboy Senior, and Junior proposes a plan for a Canting College.
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