Return to Blackfriars and the Classical Tragic Pattern in The Broken Heart

Abstract

Whatever the reasons for Ford’s brief return to Blackfriars with The Broken Heart this play, often regarded as his masterpiece, marks a climax in his work’. Again, superficially, Ford gives the Caroline audience what it expects. Here again is the theme of true love wrenched apart by the tyranny of ambition, again we have the conflict between passion and honour, again the tensions of jealousy; again too we have the never-failing joke of the elderly jealous husband and the indifferent young wife. The stage is set for the usual romantic tragedy of frustrated love with a spice of light entertainment. In fact the play implies a criticism more searching than in either of the two previous tragedies of Platonic idealism and conventional ethics, while its restraint in manner and comparative simplicity in staging until the last episode are a rebuke to Caroline theatrical extravagance.