“The kindness that two Queens can beg”: Staging Consensus in John Banks’s The Island Queens (1684)

John Banks’s historical tragedies featuring Tudor queens produced for the Restoration theatres in the 1680s have often been credited with initiating the theatrical trend for female-centred sentimental spectacle across the long eighteenth century. This article explores the political determinants of Banks’s feminocentric pathetic drama. Focusing on Banks’s last Tudor history play, The Island Queens (1684) and its portrayal of monarchical authority as forms of female distress, the author locates she-tragedy’s origins within an emerging public demanding greater access to state power. By casting national history in scenes of female suffering, she-tragedy works to facilitate and domesticate political disputation, enabling opposition while embodying the volatile mix of religious and political convictions in vulnerable women. The feminization of history enacted by Banks’s influential tragic practice reimagines a theatrical commons within an audience divided by political factions while redefining participation within a newly inclusive public sphere.