John Ford (playwright)

This article is about the 17th-century English playwright and poet. For the 20th-century American science fiction writer and poet, see John M. Ford.

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John Ford (baptized 17 April 1586 - 1637?) was an English poet and playwright.

Life

Overview

Ford was probably born at Ilsington, Devonshire. He was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1602, and appears to have practiced as a lawyer. His chief plays are The Lover's Melancholy (1629), Tis Pity, The Broken Heart, and Love's Sacrifice (1633), Perkin Warbeck (1634), The Lady's Trial (1639), and Fancies Chaste and Noble (1638). He also collaborated with Dekker and Rowley in The Witch of Edmonton (1624). Ford has a high position as a dramatist, though rather for general intellectual power and austere beauty of thought than for strictly dramatic qualities. Charles Lamb says, "Ford was of the first order of poets." He had little humour; his plays, though the subjects are painful, and sometimes horrible, are full of pensive tenderness expressed in gently flowing verse. The date of his death is uncertain.

Youth and education

Ford, the 2nd son of Thomas Ford of Ilsington, Devonshire, was baptized at Ilsington 17 April 1586. His mother was a sister of Lord-chief-justice Popham.

He is probably the John Ford, "Devon, gen. f.," who matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, 26 March 1601, aged 16 (Oxford Univ. Reg. vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 246). On 16 November 1602 Ford was admitted a member of the Middle Temple.

Early career

In 1606 he published an elegy on the Earl of Devonshire, Fames Memoriall; or, The Earle of Devonshire deceased; with his honour- able life, peacefull end, and solemne Funerall, 4to, with a dedicatory sonnet to the Lady Penelope, countess of Devonshire, and commendatory verses by Barnabe Barnes and "T.P." Ford seems to have had no personal acquaintance with the earl or with Lady Penelope, and he is careful to state that his elegy was not written from any mercenary motive. In the course of the poem he makes mysterious allusions to a lady, "bright Lycia the cruel, the cruel-subtle," whose affections he had vainly sought to engage. To 1606 also belongs Honor Trivmphant; or, The peeres challenge, by Armes defensible, at Tilt, Turney, and Barriers. . . . Also the Monarches Meeting; or, the King of Denmarkes welcome into England, 4to.

His earliest dramatic work was an unpublished comedy entitled An Ill Beginning has [or may have] a Good End, acted at the Cockpit in 1613. On 25 November 1615 "A booke called Sir Thomas Overburyes Ghost, contayneing the history of his life and vntimely death, by John Fford, gent.," was entered in the Stationers' Register. This must have been a prose-tract or a poem, as a play on the subject would certainly have been forbidden. In 1620 Ford published a moral treatise, A Line of Life" Pointing out the immortalitie of a vertuous name, 12mo.

The Witch of Edmonton: A known true story; composed into a tragi-comedy by divers well-esteemed Poets, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, &c., 4to, published in 1658, was probably written in 1621, soon after the execution of the reputed witch, Elizabeth Sawyer.

The Sun's Darling: A moral masque; as it hath been often presented at Whitehall by their Majesties Servants, and after at the Cock-pit in Drury Lane with great applause. Written by John Foard and Tho. Decker, Gent., 4to, was posthumously published in 1656, some copies being dated 1657. This play, which may have been an alteration of Dekker's unpublished Phaeton, was licensed for the Cockpit 3 March 1623-4. From Sir Henry Herbert's Diary it appears that 2 other plays by Ford and Dekker, The Fairy Knight and The Bristowe Merchant, were produced in 1624, but they were not published.

In September 1624 was licensed for the stage A New Tragedy, called A late murther of the sonn upon the mother, written by Forde and Webster, which was not published. A copy of commendatory verses by Ford was prefixed to Webster's Duchess of Malfi, 1623.

Major playwright

1st on the list of Ford's plays in order of publication is The Lovers Melancholy; acted at the Private House in the Blacke Friers, and publikely at the Globe by the Kings Maiesties seruants, 1629, 4to, which had been brought out 24 November 1628. 4 copies of commendatory verses are prefixed, and the play is dedicated "To my worthily respected friends, Nathaniel Finch, John Ford, Esquires ; Master Henry Blunt, Master Robert Ellice, and all the rest of the Noble Society of Gray's Inn." In the dedicatory epistle Ford states that this was his 1st appearance in print as a dramatic writer, and hints that it may be his last.

In 1633 was published 'Tis Pity Shee's a Whore; Acted by the Queenes Maiesties Seruants at the Phœnix in Drury Lane, 4to, with a dedicatory epistle to John, 1st earl of Peterborough, to whom the dramatist acknowledges his indebtedness for certain favours.

In the same year (1633) was published The Broken Heart: A tragedy; acted by the Kings Majesties Seruants at the private House in the Black-Friers. Fide Honor, 4to, dedicated to William, lord Craven. "Fide Honor" is an anagram of "John Forde."

A 3rd play was printed in 1633, Loues Sacrifice: A tragedie, receiued generally well; acted by the Queenes Majesties Seruants at the Phcenix in Drury Lane, 4to, with a dedicatory epistle to the author's cousin, John Ford of Gray's Inn, and commendatory verses by James Shirley.

The Chronicle Historic of Perkin Warbeck: A strange truth; acted (some-times) by the Queenes Maiesties Servants at the Phœnix in Drurie Lane. Fide Honor, 1634, 4to, with a dedicatory epistle to William Cavendish, earl of Newcastle, and 5 copies of commendatory verses. It was reprinted in 1714, 12mo, when the movements of the Pretender's adherents in Scotland were attracting attention, and it was revived at Goodman's Fields in 1745.

The Fancies Chast and Noble, 1638, 4to, was a comedy acted at the Phœnix, dedicated to Randal Macdonnel, earl of Antrim. From a passage in the prologue it has been hastily supposed that Ford was abroad when the play was produced. The Ladies Triall; acted by both their Majesties Servants at the private house in Drvry Lane. Fide Honor, 4to, was brought out 3 May 1638, and was published in the following year with a dedicatory epistle to John Wyrley, esq., and his wife, Mistress Mary Wyrley. The prologue was written by Theophilus Bird, the actor. Pepys notices its revival at the Duke of York's theatre in March 1688.

A tragedy by Ford, Beauty in a Trance, was entered in the Stationers' Register 9 September 1653; and 3 comedies, The London Merchant, The Royal Combat, and An Ill Beginning has a Good End, were entered 29 June 1660. These 4 unpublished pieces were among the plays destroyed by Warburton's cook.

Last years

Ford drops from sight after the publication of the Ladies Trial in 1639; but in Gifford's time "faint traditions in the neighbourhood of his birth-place" led to the supposition that, having obtained a competency from his professional practice, he retired to Devonshire to end his days. In the Time-Poets (Choice Drollery, 1656) occurs the couplet-

Deep in a dump John Forde was alone got,

With folded arms and melancholy hat.

Writing

Ford was not dependent on the stage for his livelihood, and his plays bear few marks of haste. In the prologue to the Broken Heart he declared that his "best of art hath drawn this piece," and in all his work the diction is studiously elaborated.

He was a major playwright of his time. His plays deal with conflicts between individual passion and conscience and the laws and morals of society at large; Ford had a strong interest in abnormal psychology that is expressed through his dramas. His plays often show the influence of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

It is certain that he had very little comic talent. That he was a favorite with playgoers is shown by his familiar appellation, "Jack Ford," mentioned by Heywood in the Hierarchie of Blessed Angels, 1635:

And hee's now but Jacke Foord that once was John.

William Gifford rightly pronounces the comic portions of The Lovers Melancholy (1629) to be despicable; but it contains some choice poetry, notably the description (after Strada) of the contention between the nightingale and the musician.

Ford is best known for the tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, a family drama with a plot line of incest.. In this tragedy, of which the subject is singularly repulsive, Ford displays the subtlest qualities of his genius. The final colloquy between Annabella and Giovanni is one of the most memorable scenes in the English drama. Shocking as the play is, it is still widely regarded as a classic.

"I do not know," says Lamb of The Broken Heart (1633), "where to find in any play a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as this;" but Hazlitt and others have remarked on the fantastic unreality, the violent unnaturalness, of the closing scenes. In Loue's Sacrifice (also 1633), detached passages and scenes are excellently written, but the plot is unsatisfactory, and the characters badly drawn.

Perkin Warbeck (1634), is the most faultless, but not the greatest, of Ford's plays well planned and equably written, a meritorious and dignified composition. The Fancies Chast and Noble (1638) is ingeniously conceived but awkwardly executed. There is much to admire in the first 4 acts of The Ladies Triall (1639), but the conclusion is strangely muddled.

The Sun's Darling (not published until 1656) was a masque written by Ford and Thomas Dekker. The lyrical portions, which doubtless belong to Dekker, are the most attractive. In The Witch of Edmonton (1655), co-written with Rowley and Dekker, Ford seems to have contributed little or nothing to the powerful scenes in which Mother Sawyer figures, but he must be credited with no small share of the scenes that deal with Frank Thorney.

Miscellaneous

Ford prefixed commendatory verses to Barnabe Barnes's Foure Bookes of Offices, 1606, Sir Thomas Overbury's Wife, 1616, Shirley's 'Wedding,' 1629, Richard Brome's Northern Lass, 1632; and he was a contributor to Jonsonus Virbius, 1638. Dyce was of opinion that the verses to Barnabe Barnes were by the dramatist's cousin.

Ford's works were originally collected by Weber in 1811, 2 volumes, 8vo. A more accurate edition was published by Gifford in 1827, 2 volumes, 8vo. An edition of Ford and Massinger, by Hartley Coleridge, appeared in 1848; and in 1869 Alexander Dyce issued a revised edition of Gifford's Ford, 3 volumes, 8vo.

The title of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore has often been changed in new productions, sometimes being referred to as simply Giovanni and Annabella (the play's leading, incestuous brother-and-sister characters); in a 19th-century work it is coyly called The Brother and Sister.

As is typical for pre-Restoration playwrights, a significant portion of Ford's output has not survived. Lost plays by Ford include The Royal Combat and Beauty in a Trance, plus more collaborations with Dekker: The London Merchant, The Bristol Merchant, The Fairy Knight, and Keep the Widow Waking, the last with William Rowley and John Webster.

And there are possible or questionable attributions: The Laws of Candy, a play in the canon of Fletcher, may contain much of Ford's work. Scholars have also considered The Welsh Ambassador and The Fair Maid of the Inn as in part the work of Ford.

In 1940, critic Alfred Harbage argued that Sir Robert Howard's play The Great Favourite; or, The Duke of Lerma is an adaptation of a lost play by Ford. Harbage noted that many previous critics had judged to play suspiciously good, perhaps too good, for Howard; and Harbage pointed to a range of resemblances between the play and Ford's work. The case, however, relies solely upon internal evidence and to-some-degree subjective judgements.

Critical introduction

by William Minto

Ford was not one of the herd of playwrights, and he lost no opportunity of letting the world know that he "cared not to please many." His poetry was the "fruit of leisure moments"; he wrote for his own satisfaction, and the enjoyment of his equals in condition. Genial expansive sentiment, joyful presentation of the ordinary virtues, the exaltation of common ideals, was not to be expected in plays that bore upon their title-pages such an avowal of proud reserve. Ford would not walk in beaten dramatic paths; his pride lay in searching out strange freaks of tragic passion. The heart is not purified and ennobled by his tragedies; it is surprised, stunned, perplexed. Passion speaks in his verse with overpowering force; but though he shows profound art in tracing the most monstrous aberrations of love, jealousy, and revenge to a natural origin in strangeness of temper, the sense of strangeness is left predominant.

In the preface to The Broken Heart the names of the dramatis personae are explained as being ‘fitted to their qualities,’ and from this one might carelessly rush to the conclusion that the strangeness of Ford’s characters is due to their being extravagant personifications of single attributes, and not types of real men and women. But his art was much too profound, his mastery of thought and emotion much too living for any such mechanical superficiality. His creations are not inanimate figures; the pulse of life beats in them. The secret of their strangeness seems to lie in a certain intensity and concentration of nature, a hardness and strength of fibre which will not relax where once it has taken hold. The kinship of passion to insanity is strongly suggested by Ford’s plays. We seem to have before us men and women with a fixed delusion on some one point, impressed upon them not by the force of overmastering circumstances, but by some vicious warp in their own nature.

In Shakespeare’s plays men are driven into tragic error by the conspiracy of forces outside themselves; in Ford’s plays fatal false steps are made from mere waywardness of character. In the one case, we are struck with the nearness of the victims of misleading passion to our common humanity; in the other their remoteness from common motives is bewildering. The strangeness of the passions which Ford brings into conflict mars the effect of his two great tragedies as artistic wholes; we do not turn from them with awestruck hearts, full of subdued fear and wonder — they leave us dissatisfied, tortured, bewildered.

If these plays were all that were left to us by which to judge of the Elizabethan age they would justify all that M. Taine has said about its ferocity of spirit. In the play that bears the harsh and mocking title ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, we feel as if we were present at a hellish carnival of passion. There is no relief to its horrors, except the rapturous exultation of brother and sister in their guilty love. The revolting coarseness of the low-comedy scenes is not a relief but a sickening addition to the chaos.

Ford is not a poet who appears to advantage in quotations. Charles Lamb says truly of him that "he sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man." The sublimity to which his own gloomy austere temper directed him was the sublimity of demoniac resolution, the heroism of unyielding will. Even his heroines are not of the soft and tender type which his contemporaries delighted to paint; they are as firm and resolute in their purposes as the men whom they love. The sorrowful Penthea, though she bends to her brother’s will so far as to marry a husband of his choice, resists all the prayers of her discarded lover to prove unfaithful, and with silent and secret determination starves herself to death. Calantha, his "flower of beauty," bears stroke after stroke of appalling misfortune without betraying to the vulgar world one sign of the grief which is breaking her heart; she falls dead without a tear, when she has set the affairs of her kingdom in order.

It is on the supreme force and patient completeness with which he has displayed such stern and passionate natures, that Ford’s title to a high place among poets must rest. There is no great intrinsic charm in his verse: it is an admirable vehicle for the expression of intense restrained passion, word following word with severe clear-cutting emphasis; but without a knowledge of the character and situation one cannot feel the force by which it is animated. Even in his songs, with all the softness of their music, we are conscious of the same severely regulating taste. All his few songs are of a sad strain, but they are not filled with the ecstasy of grief; their music is chastened and subdued.

Recognition

Ford's poem "Dawn" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Publications

Poetry

• Fames Memoriall; or, The Earle of Deuonshire deceased. London: R. Bradock for Christopher Purset, 1606.
• Christes Bloodie Sweat; or, The sonne of God in his agonie.. London: Ralph Blower, 1613.

Plays

• The Witch of Edmonton (with Thomas Dekker & William Rowley) (1621). London: J. Cottrell for Edward Blackmore, 1658.
  • The Spanish Gypsy (with Thomas Dekker) (licensed 9 July 1623). London: I.G. for Richard Marriot, 1653.
• The Sun's Darling (with Thomas Dekker) (licensed 3 March 1624). London: J. Bell for Andrew Penneycuicke, 1656.
• The Lover's Melancholy (licensed 24 November 1628). London: H. Seile, 1629.
• Loue's Sacrifice: A tragedie. London: Iohn Beele for Hvgh Beeston, 1633.
• 'Tis Pitty Shee's a Whore. London: Nicholas Okes for Richard Collins, 1633.
• The Broken Heart. London: Iohn Beele for Hvgh Beeston, 1633.
• The Chronicle Historie of Perkin Warbeck: A strange truth. London: Thomas Purfoot for Hugh Beeston, 1634.
• The Fancies, Chast and Noble. London: E.P. for Henry Seile, 1638.
• The Ladies Triall (licensed 3 May 1638). London: Edward Griffin for Henry Shephard, 1639.
• The Queen; or, The excellency of her sex. London: T.N. for Thomas Heath, 1653.
• Dramatic Works (edited by Henry Weber). Edinburgh: G. Ramsay for A. Constable, 1811. Volume I, Volume II
• The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford (edited by Hartley Coleridge). London: E. Moxon, 1840.
• John Ford (5 plays; edited by Havelock Ellis). London: Vizetelly, 1888; New York: Hill & Wang, 1957; London: Ernest Benn, 1960.
• Selected Plays (edited by Colin Gibson). Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Non-fiction

• Honor Trivmphant; or, The peeres challenge, by armes defensible, at ailt, turney, and barriers, in honor of all faire ladies, and in defence of these foure positions following. London: Francis Burton, 1606.
• The Golden Meane: Lately written, as occasion serued, to a great lord; discoursing the noblenesse of perfect virtue in extreames. London: H. Lownes for Jeffery Chorlton, 1613.

Collected editions

• The Works of John Ford (edited by William Glifford & Alexander Dyce). London: James Toovey, 1869. Volume II, Volume III
• The Nondramatic Works (edited by Leo Edward Stock). Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991.
• The Collected Works (edited by Gilles D Monsarrat, Brian Vickers, & R.J.C. Watt). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2011-

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets
• List of English-language playwrights

References

• F.E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
• Harbage, Alfred. "Elizabethan:Restoration Palimpsest." Modern Language Review Vol. 35 No. 3 (July 1940), pp. 278–319.
• Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
• Stavig, Mark. John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order. Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.

External links

Poems

• "Dawn".
• John Ford at PoemHunter (3 poems)
• Ford in The English Poets: An anthology: Penthea’s Dying Song (from The Broken Heart), Calantha’s Dirge (from The Broken Heart), Awakening Song (from The Lover’s Melancholy)

Books

• "Online works by John Ford". Online Books Page. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?author=jOHN+fORD&amode=words&title=&tmode=words. 
• 1831 Edition of the Works of John Ford (Volume One of Two) at the Internet Archive
• 1831 Edition of the Works of John Ford (Volume Two of Two) at the Internet Archive
• An Old-Spelling Edition of the Complete Works of John Ford, Gen. ed. Sir Brian Vickers (in preparation, to be published with Oxford University Press)

About

• John Ford (British dramatist) in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• John Ford (1586-1656?) at Luminarium
• "Ford, John" in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Ford, John