Staging the Medici: The Medici Family in English Renaissance Drama, c. 1590 - c. 1640

In 1974, T. S. R. Boase published an article entitled 'The Medici in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama' in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. Boase's valuable study did not, however, take account of the fact that some of the plays of the Caroline dramatist John Ford both register a debt to some of the more overtly Medici plays which Boase identified and also show other, independent signs of Medici influence. This paper first surveys the evidence for the plays which Boase did consider and then moves on to examine those of Ford, whom he did not.