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John Ford

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Ford
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(baptized April 17, 1586, Ilsington, Devon, Eng. — died 1639?) British dramatist. Early in his career he studied law and wrote collaboratively with several other playwrights, but little more is known of his life, and the dating of many of his works is uncertain. His revenge tragedies are characterized by scenes of austere beauty, insight into human passions, and poetic diction of a high order. His reputation rests on the first four plays he wrote alone, only one of which can be dated with certainty: The Broken Heart; The Lover's Melancholy (1628); Perkin Warbeck; and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, an eloquently sympathetic story of incestuous lovers that is his best-known work.

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Biography: John Ford
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The English author John Ford (1586-1639?) was the last great tragic dramatist of the English Renaissance. His work is noted for its stylistically simple and pure expression of powerful, shocking themes.

John Ford, the second son of Thomas Ford, was baptized at Ilsington, Devonshire, on April 17, 1586. The Devonshire Fords were a well-established family, and John's father appears to have been a fairly well-to-do member of the landed gentry.

In 1602 Ford entered the Middle Temple, one of the London Inns of Court. Although designed primarily to provide training in the law, the Inns of Court at this time also attracted young men who had no intention of entering the legal profession. Ford probably acquired his knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, and the Latin classics while in residence at the Middle Temple, where he remained for about 15 years.

During his early years in London, Ford wrote a few undistinguished nondramatic works. Not until 1621 did he turn to writing for the stage. From 1621 to 1625 he collaborated on at least five plays with Thomas Dekker, John Webster, and Samuel Rowley - all experienced and successful dramatists. From 1625 until the end of his literary career Ford worked alone, writing about a dozen plays (some of which are lost). Ford's reputation as a major dramatist rests on two of these unaided efforts: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and The Broken Heart.

Ford has been called a decadent playwright because of his frank treatment of lurid and sensational themes. In 'TisPity She's a Whore (1629?-1633) the central character, Giovanni, having become involved in an incestuous and adulterous affair with his sister, is finally led to kill her. With his sister's heart on the point of his dagger, Giovanni triumphantly proclaims his misdeeds, whereupon he is himself killed.

The Broken Heart (ca. 1627-1631?), while less obviously sensational, also treats of abnormal characters caught in highly unusual situations. The action of the play is set in Sparta, and its principal characters illustrate the typically Spartan virtues of rigorous self-discipline and overriding concern for personal honor. In the final act, when Princess Calantha is told of the deaths of her father, her friend, and her betrothed, she suppresses all signs of emotion. Only when she has set the affairs of the kingdom in order does she reveal the unbearable psychological strain put upon her; with ceremonious dignity she weds her dead lover and successfully commands her heart to break.

Nothing is known of Ford's activities after 1639, when his last known play was printed. No record of his death or burial has been found.

Further Reading

The standard life of Ford is M. Joan Sargeaunt, John Ford (1935).For the dating of Ford's plays (an extremely difficult task) see Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 3 (1956). Ford's intellectual makeup and his moral views are treated at length in G.F. Sensabaugh, The Tragic Muse of John Ford (1944), and Mark Stavig, John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order (1968).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: John Ford
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Ford, John, 1586-c.1640, English dramatist, b. Devonshire. He went to London to study law but was never called to the bar. The early part of his playwriting career was taken up with collaborations, primarily with Dekker. His three major tragedies, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Broken Heart, and Love's Sacrifice, and a historical play, Perkin Warbeck appeared between 1627 and 1634. Ford was the most important playwright during the reign of Charles I. His plays are characterized by a sympathetic treatment of thwarted love, and they stress the conflict between the power of human passion and the laws of conscience and society. They are intense, melancholy, and violent, often revealing his interest in abnormal psychology and taboo subjects-'Tis Pity She's a Whore deals with incest.

Bibliography

See biography by D. K. Anderson (1972); studies by M. Stavig (1968), F. Ali (1974), and D. Anderson (1986).

Wikipedia: John Ford (dramatist)
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John Ford (baptised April 17, 1586 – c. 1640?) was an English Jacobean and Caroline playwright and poet born in Ilsington in Devon in 1586.

Life and work

Ford left home to study in London, although more specific details are unclear — a sixteen-year-old John Ford of Devon was admitted to Exeter College, Oxford on March 26, 1601, but this was when the dramatist had not yet reached his sixteenth birthday. He joined an institution that was a prestigious law school but also a centre of literary and dramatic activity — the Middle Temple. A prominent junior member in 1601 was the playwright John Marston. (It is unknown whether Ford ever actually studied law while a resident of the Middle Temple, or whether he was strictly a gentleman boarder, which was a common arrangement at the time.)

It was not until 1606 that Ford wrote his first works for publication. In the spring of that year he was expelled from Middle Temple, due to his financial problems, and Fame's Memorial and Honour Triumphant soon followed. Both works are clear bids for patronage: Fame's Memorial is an elegy of 1169 lines on the recently-deceased Charles Blount, 1st Earl of Devonshire, while Honour Triumphant is a prose pamphlet, a verbal fantasia written in connection with the jousts planned for the summer 1606 visit of King Christian IV of Denmark.[1] It is unknown whether either of these brought any financial remuneration to Ford; yet by June 1608 he had enough money to be readmitted to the Middle Temple.

Prior to the start of his career as a playwright, Ford wrote other non-dramatic literary works—the long religious poem Christ's Bloody Sweat (1613), and two prose essays published as pamphlets, The Golden Mean (1613) and A Line of Life (1620).[2] After 1620 he began active dramatic writing, first as a collaborator with more experienced playwrights — primarily Thomas Dekker, but also John Webster and William Rowley — and by the later 1620s as a solo artist.

Ford is best known for the tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633), a family drama with a plot line of incest. The play's title 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 nineteenth-century work it is coyly called The Brother and Sister.[3] Shocking as the play is, it is still widely regarded as a classic piece of English drama.

He was a major playwright during the reign of Charles I. 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 The Anatomy of Melancholy. While virtually nothing is known of Ford's personal life, one reference suggests that Ford's interest in melancholia may have been more than merely intellectual. The volume Choice Drollery (1656) asserts that

Deep in a dump alone John Ford was gat,
With folded arms and melancholy hat.[4]

The canon of Ford's plays

— and probably —

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,[5] 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.[6]

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.[7] The case, however, relies solely upon internal evidence and to-some-degree subjective judgements.

Notes

  1. ^ Stavig, pp. 3-19.
  2. ^ Stavig, pp. 20-35.
  3. ^ William Francis Collier, A History of English Literature in a Series of Biographical Sketches, London, T. Nelson, 1871; p. 170.
  4. ^ Halliday, p. 172.
  5. ^ Critics regard the Ford/Dekker Fairy Knight as distinct from the extant manuscript play of the same name.
  6. ^ Stavig, p. 207.
  7. ^ Harbage, pp. 299-304.

References

  • Halliday, F. E. 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.

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