The Queen or the Excellency of Her Sex

A scholarly modern-spelling edition of a play by the Caroline dramatist John Ford which has not seen much previous critical attention due to being accidentally omitted from the 1652 edition of his complete works. The introduction resituates the play in the Ford canon and explores how it spoke to audiences when it was first composed in the late 1620s when it tapped into the contemporary fascination with the pathology of melancholy and also when it was finally published in 1653. By this time the play's main plot about a sovereign who is threatened with execution would have recalled the beheading of Charles I four years earlier. The play can thus be seen as examining both psychology and politics.