The Family of Love by Lording Barry (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Family of Love by Lording Barry
• David McInnis

Barry, Lording, The Family of Love, edited by Sophie Tomlinson (The Revels Plays), Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2022; hardcover; pp. xxvi, 227; 3 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £90.00; ISBN 9780719088629.

Sophie Tomlinson's Revels Plays edition of The Family of Love (Children of the King's Revels, c. 1605–06) addresses an important editorial need, presenting the anonymously published city comedy as the work of Lording Barry: the first scholarly edition to do so. It is a superb contribution to the study of early modern drama and will hopefully stimulate interest in a play that is simultaneously peripheral yet intimately connected to social, political, and theatrical concerns regarded by scholars as absolutely central to Barry's London. Although the text has been printed a handful of times since the early nineteenth century, it has not (until now) received the kind of rigorous scholarly editing that Tomlinson provides, nor has it been properly understood as the work of Barry rather than as that of Thomas Middleton (to whom it has sometimes been ascribed). Despite its previous appearances in print (lightly edited; in anthologies; presented as Middleton's; and as an unpublished dissertation), The Family of Love has eluded most scholars and remained obscure. One of Tomlinson's numerous achievements here is to reframe the play as 'experimental' (p. 34) and deserving of fresh attention. As might be expected of an edition that consciously seeks to understand the play in relation to Barry as author, the boy company that performed it, and the historical milieu in which it was performed, a particular strength of Tomlinson's work is her attention to its distinctive language and style.

The play itself is a riot, still capable of drawing laughter and entertaining a crowd, as evidenced by the first contemporary performances of the play by drama students from the University of Auckland in September 2023 (directed by Benjamin Kilby-Henson). Bawdy doesn't begin to describe the plot of this 'scatological farce' (p. 34), which includes standard early modern comedic fare such as a ring trick, mistaken identities, and a lover concealed in a trunk to gain access to his beloved; but also, the depiction of a radical Anabaptist sect—the 'Family of Love'—whose meetings (restricted only to the password-knowing few) serve implicitly as a sex party for women. In a particularly memorable sequence, Mistress Purge's suspicious husband Peter follows her to 'Familist' meetings until he eventually overhears the password and gains admission; just as his wife seems poised to have sex with the unmarried masters Lipsalve and Gudgeon, she is led away in the dark to have sex with another man who—unbeknownst to her—is none other than her husband. Since she sleeps with him without knowing his true identity, it's a rather hollow victory for Master Purge: 'I have made myself a plain cuckold', he laments (4.4.43–44). Meanwhile, in another plotline, Doctor Glister forbids his niece and ward Maria to see Master Gerardine, but the lovers overcome the hindrance via the device of a forged tip-off note to Glister's wife, alleging that he incestuously impregnated Maria—an allegation which is held up in a mock-trial where Glister is found guilty and only redeems himself by allowing Maria to marry Gerardine after all (thus providing the child with a guardian: [End Page 305] its actual father!) and supplying a generous dowry to boot. The student whose knowledge of love and marriage in early modern comedy derives exclusively from Shakespeare's handling of these themes will be in for quite the surprise upon reading Barry's play.

Tomlinson adds helpful detail to our understanding of the quarto's printing process, noting previously unobserved textual variants and scribal annotations, adducing additional evidence of Richard Bradock's printing of the playbook (which connects it to two other plays Bradock printed in 1607–08), reconsidering the possibility of censorship, and reassessing the quality of the printing—including a defence of perceived imperfection in terms of Barry 'struggling, or experimenting, with literary form' (p. 3) rather than compositor error. As the first Barry play...