The Three Ladies of London is an Elizabethan comedy about usury that was probably first performed in 1581; it was published in a quarto edition both in 1584 and 1592. The play is unusual and noteworthy as a philo-Semitic response to the prevailing anti-Semitism of Elizabethan drama and the larger contemporaneous English society. Date, authorship, publication The play was first published in 1584 by the bookseller Roger Warde of Holborn; a second edition appeared in 1592, published by John Danter of Smithfield. The title page of both editions describe the play as "right excellent and famous", "a perfect pattern for all estates to look into, and a work right worthy to be marked." They also assign the play's authorship to "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, its 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). Form and plot In its form and structure, The Three Ladies of London looks back to the medieval allegory and the morality play, with characters who are personifications of abstract qualities rather than distinct individuals. The three ladies of the title are the Ladies Lucre, Love, and Conscience; the story shows Lady Lucre gaining control over Love and Conscience with the help of Dissimulation, Fraud, Simony, and Usury. Their regime of greed