Between 1677 and 1696 five tragedies by John Banks were staged and printed in London. Two further tragedies were prohibited performance but were printed, in 1684 and 1694 respectively. A revised version of one of the prohibited plays was staged in 1704 and printed some time later. Banks's ouvre comprises these eight tragedies and constitutes most of what is known about him.

Banks's earliest plays, The Rival Kings, The Destruction of Troy, and Cyrus the Great, are restless variations on the heroic mode, centered on the conflicts of love, friendship, and greatness experienced by heroes of antiquity. With his fourth play, however, The Unhappy Favourite (produced in May 1681), Banks originated and developed a type of pathetic tragedy on a subject from English history with a female protagonist-invariably a queen-that Allardyce Nicoll, adapting and backdating a term Nicholas Rowe coined in 1714, named the "she-tragedy" and that has some importance in the evolution of late-seventeenth-century...