The Three Ladies of London

The Three Ladies of London is an Elizabethan era stage play, first published in 1584. It is unusual and noteworthy as a philo-Semitic response to the prevailing anti-Semitism of Elizabethan drama and the larger contemporaneous English society.

The 1584 quarto was published by the bookseller Roger Warde; a second edition appeared in 1592, published by John Danter. The title page of the first edition assigns the play to an "R. W." The consensus of modern scholarly and critical opinion identifies R. W. as the comic actor and playwright Robert Wilson; strong commonalities among three plays, The Three Ladies of London, it sequel The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (printed 1590), and The Cobbler's Prophecy (printed 1594), indicate that all three dramas were written by the same person. Three Ladies appears to date from the year 1581; an allusion to the (temporary) restoration of Peter's pence by the Roman Catholic Queen Mary in the winter of 1554–55, as having occurred 26 years earlier, favours that dating. The proclamation controlling usury issued on 19 May 1581 would have made the play's subject topical at that time; Queen Elizabeth's 1571 statute against usury was scheduled to expire in 1581, making the topic a matter of public interest.

In his Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), Stephen Gosson provided a description of the story of The Three Ladies of London that does not match the extant version of the play – perhaps indicating that Wilson revised the work between its premier and its first publication. The revision might have been provoked by negative reactions to the original – Gosson's, and the play London Against the Three Ladies (see below).

The limited survival of historical materials prevents certainty on matters of dramatic influence and interconnection; yet many critics have seen relationships among a set of Elizabethan plays on the subjects of Jews and usury in this historical era. In this view, The Three Ladies of London may have been a response to the prior anonymous lost play The Jew (1579 or earlier), which portrayed the conventional social attitude toward "the bloody minds of usurers."Three Ladies is thought to have prompted a hostile response in another anonymous lost play, London Against the Three Ladies (c. 1582). In turn, these plays influenced the important later plays on the subject, like Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. It has been argued that The Jew may have influenced Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Wilson's play itself has been perceived as, if not a source, then an "analogue" of Shakespeare's play.

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