The Queen, or the Excellency of Her Sex

In 1906 the German scholar Willy Bang published an edition of The Queen, or the excellency of her sex in which he claimed it as a previously unrecognised play by the Caroline dramatist John Ford. The attribution stuck, but the play has rarely been edited, performed, or analysed. This first Revels edition resituates The Queen in the Ford canon and explores how it spoke to audiences both when it was first composed in the late 1620s and when it was finally published in 1653, revealing it as a play about love, jealousy, melancholy, sovereignty, strangeness, and female rule. In the 1620s the heroine, who is queen of Aragon in her own right, might have seemed to echo both Katherine of Aragon and Elizabeth I; by 1653 its three separate scenes showing threatened (though aborted) executions and its discussion of monarchic power spoke of the recently executed Charles I and of his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots before him. Its pathologically misogynist hero is a more timeless figure whose reliance on flatterers and astrologers reveals deep-seated insecurities, while the subplot explores the uneasy relationship between love and sex. Presented here in modern spelling and with a detailed commentary and introduction, The Queen is revealed as a delicate blend of light and shade, comedy and tragedy, and verse and prose, which treats its main characters as both private and public figures.