‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Author Biography)

Author Biography

John Ford, the second son of Thomas and Elizabeth Ford, was born in Ilsington, Devonshire, England, in 1586. The Fords were an old, well-to-do country family. While there is little information about Ford’s early life, it is known that he attended Exeter College, Oxford, from 1601-1602. At the age of sixteen, in 1602, he was admitted to London’s Middle Temple, where he studied law for several years, though there is no record of his having been called to the bar. The inns of court served as law schools as well as residences for young gentlemen, who also learned there the fine points of fashionable city and court life. During the years of Ford’s residence, such major literary talents as dramatists John Marston and William Davenant, and metaphysical poet Thomas Carew were affiliated with Middle Temple. Literary scholars believe Ford circulated among them, and through them knew poet John Donne’s family.

Between 1606 and 1620, Ford wrote several prose works, including Love Triumphant (1606), The Golden Mean (1613), and A Line of Life (1620). During his dramatic apprenticeship, he wrote and contributed to as many as eighteen plays, though seven have been lost.

Ford’s period of major collaboration, from 1621 to 1625, included writings with various playwrights. He worked with Thomas Dekker on The Fairy Knight (1624), The Bristow Merchant (1624), and The Sun’s Darling (1624). Ford, Dekker, and Rowley composed The Witch of Edmonton, which was produced at the Phoenix Theatre in 1621, while Ford, Dekker, Webster, and Rowley authored the nowlost A Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother; or, Keep the Widow Waking (1624).

Working independently, Ford wrote his major plays after 1625. He wrote for several theatrical companies, including the King’s Men at the Blackfriars and the Queens’ Men and Beeston’s boy-company at the Phoenix.

Robert Burton’s enormous The Anatomy of Melancholy, a Renaissance treatise detailing classical ideas about “humour” psychology, influenced Ford’s first independent play, The Lover’s Melancholy (1629). His other major dramatic works include Love’s Sacrifice (1633), The Broken Heart (1633), Perkin Warbeck (1634), and The Lady’s Trial (1638).

Ford’s interest in aberrant psychology figures prominently in many of his plays. In general, his most successful characters evidence dignity, courage, and endurance in the face of suffering. Though Ford’s plays deal with controversial themes such as incest and torture, he does so without being judgmental, neither condoning nor condemning, but rather, striving to offer an understanding of what a person experiencing such actions might think or feel.

Dating the performance history of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore proves difficult. Published in 1633, the play’s title page indicated that it had been “Acted by the Queenes’s Maiesties Seruants, at The Phoenix in Drury- Lane.” Quite logically, then, critics believe the play to be performed after the founding of the Queens’ company in 1626 and before its publication in 1633. Though published late in Ford’s career, however, some critics believe it may be the first play he wrote alone.

The details surrounding Ford’s death remain unknown, though most critics believe he died shortly after the 1639 publication of The Lady’s Trial.