Ram Alley, or Merry Tricks by Lording Barry

In 1611, a playwright named Lording Barry created a comedy so outrageous it bankrupted him, threw him into debtor's prison, and reportedly set him off on a life of piracy. Ram Alley unfolds in one of London's most disreputable lanes, where lawyers, lords, and respectable ladies stumble into the company of prostitutes and roguish vagabonds. The plot spins through mistaken identities, seduction schemes, and sheer bawdy chaos as social boundaries dissolve entirely. Barry's wit is ferocious: his dialogue cracks with intelligence even as the action wallows in ribaldry. A nineteenth-century editor dismissed the play as "full of gross passages," but modern scholars have recognized something far more interesting beneath the scandal. This is a play that uses transgressive comedy to expose the hypocrisy of Elizabethan society, to show how everyone in London, from noble to nonce, is chasing the same hungry appetites. After being performed only three times in four centuries, Ram Alley recently came within reach of topping an academic poll for the greatest "forgotten" play of the Elizabethan/Jacobean age. For readers willing to abandon propriety, it offers something precious: a glimpse of a dramatist who lost everything for his art, and might have been a genius.