SOURCE: Loloi, Parvin. “Introduction.” In Two Seventeenth-Century Plays, Volume 1: The Sophy by Sir John Denham, pp. vii-lxxiv. Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Loloi examines Denham's only play, The Sophy, exploring issues such as its composition date, initial publication, first performance, historical context, sources, and critical reception.

The Sophy was Denham's only venture into drama (unless one counts the translation of the fifth act of Corneille's Horace, which he contributed to Katherine Philips's version of the play, published in 1669) and was one of his first publications. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register by Thomas Walkley on the 6th August 1642, and was published in that year. In what seems to be a contradiction of this fact, Anthony à Wood, in Athenæ Oxoniensis says that

In the latter end of the year 1641 he published the tragedy called The Sophy, which took extremely much and was admired by...