Ford, John - Charles Lamb (essay date 1811)

Charles Lamb (essay date 1811)

SOURCE: Lamb, Charles. “The Broken Heart.” In Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, Vol. II, edited by Israel Gollancz, pp. 188-99. 1893. Reprint. London: J. M. Dent, 1970.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1811, Lamb rhapsodizes about Ford's profound ability to dramatize tragic passion in The Broken Heart.]

I do not know where to find in any Play a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as this [in The Broken Heart]. This is indeed, according to Milton, to “describe high passions and high actions.” The fortitude of the Spartan Boy who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha with a holy violence against her nature keeps closely covered, till the last...

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