any family truly Christian is to throw out all its members’ plays, Defoe persistently seems to think of The Family Instructor as itself a play. Near the end of its preface, he writes, “The whole work being design’d both to divert and instruct, the Author has endeavoured to adapt it as much as possible to both those Uses, from whence some have called it a Religious Play.” And, lest it seem that only “some” readers—and not the writer himself— have deemed the text a play, Defoe makes clear in the Preface’s…
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