The Family of Love (play)

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The Family of Love is an early Jacobean stage play, first published in 1608. The play is a satire on the Familia Caritatis or "Family of Love," the religious sect founded by Henry Nicholas in the sixteenth century. Though the play was printed anonymously, many modern scholars attribute it to Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker.

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on Oct. 12, 1607, as a play acted by the King's Revels Children, a company of boy actors founded around that time. It was published in quarto in 1608 by the bookseller John Helmes, with printing by Richard Braddock.

The date of authorship in uncertain, but the play is most commonly assigned to 1602-7. Nicholas's sect was well-known and controversial in England at the time: they unsuccessfully petitioned King James I for tolerance in 1604, and were the subject of many sermons and pamphlets, most of them hostile, as a result. References to the sect recur in the stage plays of the era—in George Chapman's Sir Giles Goosecap, John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, and in Every Woman in Her Humour (perhaps by Lewis Machin).[1]

The play's authorship is complex; one scholar, Gerald J. Eberle, argued that the comedy displays "several strata of composition," and is "a revision by Dekker and Middleton of an early play written by Middleton and Dekker."[2] David Lake cites evidence for Middleton and also Dekker, though he suggests a third hand, that of Lording Barry.[3]

The play satirizes the sect's reputation for sexual lasciviousness, and treats the Familists as hypocrites, as Puritan sects are usually treated by Jacobean satirists (as in Middleton's play The Puritan from the same era). The playwrights seemed to have depended on the popular images of the sect as expressed in sermons and chapbooks, without actually knowing much, or caring to know much, about the real group.[4]

[edit] Synopsis

The play presents a cheerfully amoral world in which everyone is a manipulator—the typical world of Middleton's early city comedies. The protagonist, Gerardine, is in love with Maria, but her uncle and guardian, Glister the physician,[5] opposes the match because the spendthrift Gerardine's estates are mortgaged. Gerardine pretends to depart for a long ocean voyage; Glister has no problem when Gerardine makes Maria the heir to his property. When a trunk containing that property is delivered to the sequestered Maria, it contains Gerardine himself. Gerardine fools Glister's wife into thinking that Maria is pregnant with Glister's child; Glister is tried in a prank trial and is blackmailed into allowing Gerardine's and Maria's marriage and paying a hefty dowry.

The anti-Familist satire is strongest in the play's subplots. Glister is in fact cheating on his wife—not with Maria but with the Familist wife of Purge the apothecary. Purge is a "wittol" or complaisant cuckold, though he is distressed to learn that Mrs. Purge is having even more affairs with other sect members. On a third level, the dim-witted gallants Gudgeon and Lipsalve plot to seduce Maria, Mrs. Purge, and Mrs. Glister too, but completely without success. Both Lipsalve and Gudgeon have balcony wooing scenes with Maria, parodying the famous scene in Romeo and Juliet. Gudgeon and Lipsalve separately approach Glister for a potion for seducing Mrs. Purge; Glister fools them into whipping each other. At the play's end, Gerardine and Maria are together, and everyone else has been taught his or her lesson.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Chambers, Vol. 3, p. 441.
  2. ^ Logan and Smith, p. 35.
  3. ^ Lake, pp. 91-108.
  4. ^ Chakravorty, p. 28.
  5. ^ A glister was an enema tube.

[edit] References

  • Chakravorty, Swapan. Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
  • Lake, David J. The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
  • Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
  • Marsh, Christopher W. The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994.