The Family of Love, a city comedy, was published in 1608 by John Helmes. The title page of Q1 tells us that it was acted by The Children of his Majesty’s Revels (also known as The Children of the King’s Revels), who played in the Whitefriars theatre in 1607-8. No author is given.
Edward Archer’s notoriously unreliable playlist of 1656 attributed the play to Thomas Middleton, and the next two editors of the play (Alexander Dyce in 1840, and A. H. Bullen in 1855) uncritically followed Archer. In 1975 David Lake, on the basis of a study of variations in specific verbal forms, suggested that Middleton probably wrote the play, but that it was later revised by other authors: first in 1605 by Thomas Dekker, and again in …
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Citation: Fraser, Duncan. "The Family of Love". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 April 2015 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35548, accessed 21 November 2024.]
