Table Of ContentJohn Ford and the Caroline Theatre
By the same author
Thomas Middleton and the Drama of Realism
John Ford and the
Caroline Theatre
Dorothy M. Farr
© Dorothy M. Farr 1979
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979 978-0-333-26460-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1979 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Baszngstoke
Assoc·iated companies in Delhi
Dublin Hong Kong johannesburg Lagos
Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo
Typeset by Preface Ltd., Salisbury, Wiltshire
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Farr, Dorothy Mary
John Ford and the Caroline theatre
I. Ford, John, b.ca 1.~86 - Criticism and
interpretation
!.Title
822'.4 PR2.527
ISBN 978-1-349-04650-8 ISBN 978-1-349-04648-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04648-5
This book is sold subjed
to the standard conditions
of the Net Book Agreement
For Catherine
Contents
Notes on the Text Vlll
Acknowledgements lX
6 Poet-dramatist in the Caroline Theatre 6
2 The Lover's Melancholy:
a play for Blackfriars 16
3 The Revenge Motive in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore:
a play for the Phoenix Theatre 36
4 Reassessment of the Othello theme at the Phoenix in
Love's Sacrifice 58
5 Return to Blackfriars and the Classical Tragic
Pattern in The Broken Heart 79
6 Revival of Chronicle History at the Phoenix in
Perkin Warbeck 105
7 Return to Domestic Tragi-comedy at the Phoenix in
The Lady's Trial and The Fancies Chaste and Noble 125
8 The Challenge of the Caroline Theatre 150
Appendix The Queen or The Excellency of her Sex 161
Notes 167
Select Bibliography 178
Index 181
Notes on the Text
Quotations from Ford's plays are as follows:
From john Ford, H. Havelock Ellis, Mermaid edition ( 1888)
The Lover's Melancholy
'Tis Pity She's a Whore
Love's Sacrifice
The Broken Heart
Perkin Warbeck
From The Dramatic Works of john Ford, ed. William Gifford,
( 1827)
The Fancies Chaste and Noble
The Lady's Trial
From W. Bang, Materia/en (Louvain, 1906)
The Queen
VIII
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to the Head of the Language
and Literature Department of the Birmingham Central
Library, and her staff, and also to the Librarian and staff of the
Stourbridge District Library, for unfailing help over a period
of reading and investigation which eventually led to the
writing of this book.
I should also like to thank Dr Stanley Dixon for kindly
aiding me in the reading of the proofs.
IX
1 Poet-dramatist in the Caroline Theatre
John Ford stands between two worlds in the theatre of his
time. His uniqueness, which has stimulated so much
commentary over the past fifty years, lies primarily in his
response as an artist to that situation. In date, in manner and
attitude, to some extent in the content of his surviving
independent plays, he is clearly of the Caroline theatre, but his
habit of presenting Caroline conceptions within a Jacobean
pattern, his obvious attachment to a drama which most of his
contemporaries would regard as outworn, have placed him to
the modern view as 'in every way a conclusion' ,1- in effectthe
last of the Jacobean poet-dramatists.
Ford's reputation is muddied with contradictory
assumptions; Lamb's admiration and the fair assessments of
Joan Sargeaunt2 and Una Ellis-Fermor3 have been countered
by the opinions, often curiously prejudiced, of those who
dismiss his work as part of the decadence,4 nor is the general
impression of Ford as a dramatist any clearer for those who
find in him an exponent either of Burtonian psychology5 or
of the traditional moral order.6 A recent tendency to approach
Ford's plays as a matter for the study rather than the stage is an
easy and totally misleading evasion of the problem. The
cumulative effect has been to lend an air of elderliness and
remoteness to one of the most enterprising and individual
dramatists of the early seventeenth century theatre.
A partial explanation is that except in name nothing is
known of Ford's independent plays before he reached the age
of forty. But another, and more important, is a general lack of
interest in the nature and use of the Caroline stage. Most
students of drama know a good deal about the Elizabethan and
Jacobean theatres; they know far less about those which
functioned during the reign of Charles I. With our hindsight
of what was to come we tend to regard both the stage and the
drama of that period as a dead end, an appendage to the
Jacobean era, providing temporary fare for an audience of
tired interest and declining numbers.
2
