Queenʼs
Men Editions

Para1For Queen’s Men Editions we decided to make a fairly conservative choice, selecting the nine plays listed in McMillin and MacLean (McMillin and MacLean 88–89) on the basis that these published works identified themselves on the title page as Queen’s Men productions. We added Thomas Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, even though it was written in 1581, before Wilson joined the Queen’s Men. The play was published in 1584; it was expanded and republished in 1592, suggesting that the play had been performed successfully by the Queen’s Men. Wilson also wrote the sequel, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, written after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588, and published in 1590. The two plays use many of the same characters and the second continues the story of the three ladies, left in a kind of limbo at the end of the first play.

Para2The fact of the sequel is not the only reason for including Wilson’s 1581 play. That play illustrates most of the traits we have come to associate with Queen’s Men house style. The verse form is irregular, anything from short lines to fourteeners to prose. The topics ranged from early English history, mythology, magical transformation, religious conversion, romance, swordplay and wordplay, lively storytelling including folk tales, and comic business of all kinds. All the plays might be loosely considered comedies, as they all have happy endings and restorations, but they also include deaths along with the marriages and feasting usually associated with comic finales. Most were printed by Thomas Creede. McMillin and MacLean list a further thirteen plays (91–93), of which four are lost; Roslyn Knutson gets up to seventeen, although she concedes that what she is recognizing is Wilson’s influence on playwrights of the 1580s, with The Three Ladies of London as seminal in the development of the Queen’s Men repertory (Knutson 101). That is, her list, like McMillin’s and MacLean’s conjectures, might be Queen’s Men or might be imitations by other companies, including such plays as James IV, The Cobbler’s Prophecy, The Pedlar’s Prophecy, and Locrine as well as the Shakespeare-assigned Edmund Ironside, and the still anonymous Edward I. We decided, however, to stick with the strongest candidates and aim for ten complete performance editions with as little muddying of the water as possible.