An allegorical morality comedy about criminality and the rivalries between London, Lincoln and Spain.
This play is an exercise by a young dramatist who is grappling with understanding philosophical and legal concepts by simplifying these into personifications. Three Lords of London (called Pleasure, Pomp and Policy) declare their superiority with puffing emblems and insist that they have an innate right to marry the three Ladies of London (Love, Lucre and Conscience). The Ladies have been imprisoned in the first part of this series (Three Ladies of London) for their sins, and Nemo has decided that he would only release them if precisely three suitors bid for all of their hands in marriage simultaneously. The Ladies are told to remain silent and to obey whoever is willing to marry them, or they would have to return to prison to be tortured by Sorrow. Thus, instead of the standard comedic objections from female characters to potential matches, the only obstacles to this pre-determined resolution are that the three Lords of Spain and the three Lords of Lincoln appear to also bid for the Ladies. The defeat of the Spaniards is presented in an exchange of insults about emblems and epithets during a meeting that alludes to the Spanish Armada attack. And the Lords of Lincoln are briskly defeated when they are told they merely deserve the symbolic stones the Ladies have been sitting on. The introductory remarks explain how Lords should be part of the main canon because it might be one of only three pre-"Shakespearean" British comedies. And a section presents an alternative explanation for the mystery of how the seven copies of Lords' print-run ended up with strange combinations of varying typos. The annotations explain how the detail of Usury's parents being Jewish has been misinterpreted by previous critics as anti-Semitic, when this passage actually summarizes the ethnic backgrounds of the actual members of the Ghostwriting Workshop, as the merchant-lender among them Sylvester was Jewish, and Percy was from a region near-Scotland and had been educated in France. And evidence is presented why the series that includes Lords and Ladies should be re-attributed away from "Robert Wilson" and to Percy.
