The Three Ladies of London - Form and Plot

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 and deception penetrates the Baker's house, the Chandler's, Tanner's, and Weaver's houses too. Lady Lucre forces Lady Love into a marriage with Dissimulation; Lady Conscience protests vainly when Usury murders Hospitality ("Farewell, Lady Conscience; you shall have Hospitality in London nor England no more"). When Lady Conscience is reduced to selling brooms to survive, Lucre makes Conscience her keeper of a house of sexual assignation. Diligence, Simplicity, Sincerity, Tom Beggar, Peter Pleaseman the parson, and similar figures populate the play. In the final scene, the upright judge Nicholas Nemo ("Nemo" being Latin for "No one") attempts to restore order to society, through harsh punishments of the three Ladies.

The Levantine Jewish moneylender Gerontius is a supporting character; but his portrayal as an honest businessman and a generous, good-natured, moral person is diametrically opposed to the standard image of the grasping and ruthless Jewish usurer. In contrast, it is the Christian Italian merchant Mercadorus, who borrows money from Gerontius but refuses to repay, who is the economic villain. Gerontius is shocked by Mercadorus's assertion that he would convert to Islam to avoid repayment.

Curiously, Wilson makes his personified Usury an Englishman of Jewish descent. The play's villains tend to be cosmopolitan foreigners: Dissimulation is a "Mongrel," half Italian and half Dutch, while Fraud is half French and half Scottish; Simony is a Roman.

The play is written in a very rough and uneven verse, a jumble of alexandrine and heptameter or fourteener meter:

But senior Mercadorus tell me, did ye serve me well or no?

That having gotten my money would seem the country to forego:

You know I sent you two thousand ducats for three months' space,

And ere the time came you got another thousand by flattery and your smooth face.

So when the time came that I should have received my money,

You were not to be found but was fled out of the country:

Surely if we that be Jews should deal so one with another,

We should not be trusted again of our own brother....