Abstract
Ford’s plays are both old-fashioned, for their time, and strikingly innovative. The clearest example of this oddly paradoxical effect in Ford’s writing is The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (c.1633), a play which continues the story of the Tudor dynasty at a point where Shakespeare had abandoned it in the 1590s, at the accession of Henry VII to be precise; even the title has the quaintness of the deliberately outmoded about it, and if that isn’t enough, Ford goes out of his way in the Prologue to admit that he’s writing in a genre now ‘So out of fashion’ (1. 2) that it’s likely to be misunderstood. But while all this is true, it would be absurd to claim that Ford is simply reviving the obsolete, because his history play reads like something quite different from any of its predecessors. This has a great deal to do with Ford’s angle of vision, which enables him to confer authority on characters not authorized by history.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
A.C. Swinburne, Essays and Studies, 3rd edn. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1888) 287–8. 2. See William Simon and John H. Gagnon, ‘Sexual Scripts’, Society 22.1 (November/December 1984): 53–60. 3. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber, 1951) 201. 4. Love’s Sacrifice often gets perfunctory treatment even from critics who are deeply interested in the very questions it raises; see for example Alan Brissenden, ‘Impediments to Love: a Theme in John Ford’, Renaissance Drama 7 (1964): 96; Reid Barbour, ‘John Ford and Resolve’, Studies in Philology 86 (1989): 358; and Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) 252–3. There are notable exceptions, among them Juliet McMaster, who declares that ‘Love’s Sacrifice is an explicit pronouncement on what is central to Ford’s drama, the theme of frustration’; see ‘John Ford, Dramatist of Frustration’, English Studies in Canada 1 (1975): 268. 5. The dating of Ford’s plays is necessarily provisional, since the evidence is incomplete. In general I am following the conjectural scheme proposed by Gerald Eades Bentley in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941–68) 3: 436–7, 441–2. Bentley argues that, aside from works written in collaboration, Ford’s plays fall into two groups: those written during Ford’s association with the King’s Men (The Lover’s Melancholy, The Broken Heart, and Beauty in a Trance [lost]), and those written for Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men (Love’s Sacrifice, ‘Tis Pity, Perkin Warbeck, The Fancies Chaste and Noble, and The Lady’s Trial). The meagre evidence available would suggest that Ford left the King’s company for Queen Henrietta Maria’s in about 1630.
Richard Crashaw, The Poems: English, Latin and Greek, ed. L.C. Martin, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957) 181.
See Ronald Huebert, John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977) 97–101. See also R.J. Kaufmann, ‘Ford’s “Waste Land”: The Broken Heart’, Renaissance Drama ns 3 (1970): 175; Anne Barton, ‘Oxymoron and the Structure of Ford’s The Broken Heart’, Essays and Studies ns 33 (1980): 85; and William D. Dyer, ‘Holding/Withholding Environments: a Psychoanalytical Approach to Ford’s The Broken Heart’, English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 401–24.
For the poems by Suckling and Cowley, see Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, ed. Hugh Maclean (New York: Norton, 1974) 261–2, 265, 340; for Behn’s poem see Kissing the Rod: an Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse, ed. Germaine Greer et al. (London: Virago, 1988) 258–9.
See, for example, Ernest Schanzer, ‘The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960): 81–9, and Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 299–301. For an early and intelligent application of this line of argument to The Broken Heart, see Glenn H. Blayney, ‘Convention, Plot, and Structure in The Broken Heart’, Modem Philology 56 (1958–59): 1–9.
Gerard Langbaine, the first critic of Ford’s drama, remarked that ‘Tis Pity ‘were to be commended, did not the Author paint the incestuous Love between Giovanni, and his Sister Annabella, in too beautiful Colours’; see An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691) 222.
Eliot’s description of the incestuous lovers, though rhetorically enticing, is closer to caricature than to interpretation: ‘Giovanni is merely selfish and self-willed, of a temperament to want a thing the more because it is forbidden; Annabella is pliant, vacillating and negative: the one almost a monster of egotism, the other virtually a moral defective’ (Selected Essays 198). It would be possible for actors to play the lovers in this way, but that would surely reduce the tragedy to burlesque.
For a similar point, see R.J. Kaufmann, ‘Ford’s Tragic Perspective’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1 (1959–60): 533–5.
Studies directed towards producing socio-political readings of the play seem to me unable to cope with the beauty (and hence the danger) of the relationship between Annabella and Giovanni. Terri Clerico, in ‘The Politics of Blood: John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 405–34, seeks to ‘draw ‘Tis Pity into the mainstream of cultural materialist thought’ (413). To accomplish this mission, Clerico demystifies Giovanni as follows: ‘The result of his training at an Italian university, Giovanni’s sophistical account of incest reflects a literalism that parodies mercantile pretensions to aristocratic manners and education’ (421). Valerie L. Jephson and Bruce Thomas Boehrer, in ‘Mythologizing the Middle Class: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and the Urban Bourgeoisie’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme ns 18 (Summer 1994): 5–28, see Ford as an arch-conservative who reacts to emergent bourgeois values (as represented by Annabella and Giovanni, among others) with derision. ‘It may seem ludicrous to claim that if you reject traditional absolutist social order you will end up sleeping with your brother or sister’, they write. ‘But that, put unceremoniously, is the moral of Ford’s play’ (15).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2003 Ronald Huebert
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Huebert, R. (2003). Endless Dreams: John Ford. In: The Performance of Pleasure in English Renaissance Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503168_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503168_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43254-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50316-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)