[In the following essay, first printed in 1935, Sargeaunt discusses the relationship between setting and the characters' emotions in Ford's plays.]

‘Shakespeare and his contemporaries,’ says Peacock, ‘… used time and locality merely because they could not do without them, because every action must have its when and where: but they made no scruple of deposing a Roman Emperor by an Italian Count, and sending him off in the disguise of a French pilgrim to be shot with a blunderbuss by an English archer. This makes the old English drama very picturesque, at any rate, in the variety of costume, and very diversified in action and character; though it is a picture of nothing that ever was seen on earth except a Venetian carnival.’¹

The lack of unity which might be expected to result from this indifference to historical accuracy in the plays of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and early seventeenth-century dramatists is often compensated for by a prevailing atmosphere, or mood, which gives to each play a different kind of unity of its own. The Italian setting of Romeo and Juliet may be no very realistic picture of renaissance Italy, but it is an entirely appropriate background for that tragedy of lyric love. The lovers may indeed live in a country as unknown to historians and geographers as the Sea Coast of Bohemia, but as a country of the mind it is equally remote from the ancient Rome of Coriolanus, the early Britain of King Lear or from Prospero's enchanted Island beyond the still vexed Bermoothes.

Elizabethan and early Stuart writers were, moreover, deeply interested in national characteristics; of this there is abundant evidence in the plays of Shakespeare. In Henry V he draws, with a touch of caricature, the Scottish, Irish and Welsh captains, and contrasts them with various types of English soldiers. In The Merchant of Venice, in Portia's sly word-pictures of her suitors, a contemporary audience would recognize the conventional notion of certain national types. Shakespeare here, too, very imperfectly conceals under a mask of mock modesty, that peculiar form of national vanity, shared by Elizabethan and modern Englishman, the love of a joke at the expense of his fellow countryman's childish delight in foreign fashions and his inability to speak foreign tongues. ‘He hath neither Latine, French nor Italian … hee is a proper mans picture, but also who can converse with a dumbe show? how odly he is suited, I thinke he bought his doublet in Italie, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germanie, and his behaviour everywhere.’ Later in the Roman history plays in Julius Caesar, Brutus, Portia, Coriolanus and Volumnia he draws men and women whose character, and, consequently, whose fates are a part of their national inheritance.

This interest in national characteristics is to be found in the plays of Ford, and the recognition of it is of importance in their right interpretation. In Love's Sacrifice, when Roseilli supposes himself banished by the Duke, he asks for and receives from the newly returned traveller Fernando information concerning the Spaniards, the French and the English, and such a summing up is of more significance than might at first sight appear. A careful study of the plays must lead to the belief that Ford's choice of an Italian background for 'Tis Pity, Love's Sacrifice, The Fancies and The Lady's Trial and of a pseudo-Grecian for The Broken Heart and The Lover's Melancholy was deliberate. Vernon Lee, in her Euphorion, gives a powerful description of the Italy of the Renaissance as it exists in the plays of the later Elizabethan dramatists.

The World of these great poets is not the open world with its light and its air, its purifying storms and lightnings: it is the darkened Italian palace, with its wrought-iron bars preventing escape; its embroidered carpets muffling the footsteps; its hidden, suddenly yawning trap-doors; its arras-hangings concealing masked ruffians; its garlands of poisoned flowers; its long suites of untenanted darkened rooms, through which the wretch is pursued by the halfcrazed murderer; while below, in the cloistered court, the clanking armour and stamping horses, and above, in the carved and gilded hall, the viols and lutes and cornets make a cheery triumphant concert, and drown the cries of the victim.²

Some of these features form the setting of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Love's Sacrifice, both tragedies in which overwhelming and uncontrolled passion and the most cruel and desperate revenge are the chief motifs. That Ford has consciously chosen such a setting is made apparent by various observations by the dramatis personae throughout the plays on the violence of the Italians in love, jealousy and revenge, such as Vasques' boast, in the last act of 'Tis Pity, that though a Spaniard he has beaten an Italian in revenge. The tone of The Broken Heart is entirely different from that of these two tragedies. The motive passions are as great but they lie concealed for the time in a depth whose surface is calm. The love is not less consuming, the revenge not less cruel, the tragedy not less heart-rending, but the action, though terrible, moves with less precipitate violence. It seems strange that critics should have ignored this difference in discussing the setting of The Broken Heart. Professor Sherman has indeed pointed out that the Sparta of this play is modelled on the Sparta of Sidney's Arcadia,³ but has added that the ‘Spartan’ setting is used by Ford as a disguise, to hide the real significance of the plot. His association with Dekker in the legal action brought against him by the persons introduced into Keep the Widow Waking may certainly have taught Ford the veracity of Raleigh's assertion ‘that who-so-ever … shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth.’ But there is, clearly, besides the Arcadian influence and the possible use of disguise, a more powerful motive for Ford in his choice of Sparta as the setting for The Broken Heart, in the atmosphere of this play so entirely different from that of the other two tragedies. The Ford of The Broken Heart is indeed the Ford of Swinburne's sonnet, hewing from hard marble the figures of Orgilus, and Ithocles and Calantha. They have all a certain statuesque quality of cold restraint, and are in the popular sense of the word truly ‘Spartan’.

A few instances from a comparison of this play with 'Tis Pity at once make clear this difference. In 'Tis Pity the deaths are all brought about by means which fit into the background of the Renaissance Italy of the Elizabethan theatre: poisonings, murder under the cover of darkness with an envenomed dagger, banditti hired as the weapon of revenge. The last scene of this play is a riot of death. In The Broken Heart Penthea deliberately starves herself to death: Orgilus quietly plans the murder of Ithocles and carries it out in cold blood. He regards the act as the necessary retribution for Penthea's forced marriage and her death. Yet he appreciates the nobler side of his victim's nature, even while intent on his destruction. Nor does he seek to escape from the consequences of his deed. He confesses it freely and is allowed to kill himself by the slow means of blood-letting,⁴ means that he has chosen for himself. In the last scene Calantha after due preparation goes deliberately to a death that is the result of her previous suppression of emotions too strong to be overcome.

The very ‘engine’ that Orgilus uses to bring about the death of Ithocles is of classical origin. It was pointed out by Gifford that such a chair is described by Pausanias in his Attica (I, 20) and that Barnes uses it in The Devil's Charter (Act I, Sc. v). Ford may have borrowed it immediately from the latter, but he must, like Barnes, have known of its classical origin.

One other point is particularly noteworthy. A likeness between the Friar in 'Tis Pity and Tecnicus in The Broken Heart has sometimes been pointed out, but the Spartan sage with his appeals to philosophy is also in strong contrast to the Italian priest with his appeals to the catholic doctrines of the Church.

Unless this Spartan atmosphere is appreciated the play as a whole cannot be understood. The scene of the marriage dance and Calantha's death scene have, since Lamb wrote his fine criticism of them, often been treated as though they were a separate masterpiece, instead of the crown of the whole play. It is perhaps this detachment of these scenes from their context that has led many critics to condemn them as unnatural,⁵ as indeed they might be if they stood alone, but as it is they seem to sum up the spirit of the whole piece.

The Broken Heart stands alone among Ford's own plays as among those of his contemporaries. It cannot well be compared to any other dramatic poem; it must be judged on its own merits. The appeal depends on the compression of the emotions. The intense reserve of the diction, of the characterization and of the very setting could hardly be surpassed. Its beauties are not of a kind that appeal to popular imagination, but there will always be some who will afford it a high place among the great tragedies of our literature.

The scene of The Lover's Melancholy is laid in Cyprus, and in tone this play is in some ways far more nearly related to The Broken Heart than to the other comedies, though as a romantic drama with so slight a plot and a happy ending it is far removed from the tragic intensity of the later play. But the dramatis personae, especially the sisters Eroclea and Cleophila with their gentle wisdom, their patient courage and their rigorous self-control, might well claim kinship with Calantha and Penthea. This play has never, perhaps, received due attention from the critics. Even Professor Sherman passes it briefly by: ‘The Lover's Melancholy was but a prelude to the other three. It announced the longing for a romantic paradise, the exclusive love interest, the delicate phrasing of fine shades of feeling, the penetrating psychological treatment, which were to characterize the succeeding tragedies. But here Forde was still on purely romantic ground; Eroclea and Cleophila, moving sadly and immaculately among their bloodless sorrows, are but dimly frescoed Arcadians.’⁶ This critic has recognized the quality of the tone of the play, but it is difficult to think of Cleophila, self-destined to the care of a raving father, shut up in the old castle and assisted in her attendance by the faithful but unmannerly Trollio as ‘a dimly frescoed Arcadian’. Slight though the plot is the characters are drawn with Ford's greatest ability and the setting is entirely appropriate, and for these reasons the play deserves careful study as well as for the light that it throws on his other plays.

It is, perhaps, necessary to stress the difference of atmosphere in these two groups of plays—the pseudo-Grecian and Italianate, as they might be called—since it illustrates Ford's consciousness as a dramatic artist. The two pseudo-Grecian plays stand alone among Ford's plays as among those of his contemporaries. All his work bears strongly the impress of his peculiar genius. Besides certain qualities of style, phraseology, diction and metrical technique, he makes use again and again of similar motifs and ideas and develops them along lines of his own. His hand is easy to recognize, it is this indeed that makes it possible to be almost certain, on internal evidence alone, of his authorship of The Queen and of parts of The Spanish Gipsy. Yet among his plays The Broken Heart and The Lover's Melancholy are almost as far removed in the strange quality of their tone as Perkin Warbeck is from either group.

The Italianate plays are, in spite of evident differences, nearer in some ways to the plays of some of Ford's contemporaries. One can fairly easily imagine the author of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Love's Sacrifice collaborating with Webster to write the tragedy of A Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother, that lost ‘tragedy of blood’ for which Rupert Brooke sighed in vain.⁷ In her essay on The Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists—from which quotation has already been made—Vernon Lee writes of Ford, ‘although equal, perhaps, in genius to Webster, surpassing him even in intense tragic passion, he was far below Webster, and, indeed, far below all his generation, in moral fibre. The sight of evil fascinates him; his conscience staggers, his sympathies are bedraggled in foulness; in the chaos of good and evil he loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superiority only of strength of passion, of passion for good or evil: the incestuous Giovanni, daring his enemies like a wild beast at bay and cheating them of their revenge by himself murdering the object of his horrible passion, is as heroic in the eyes of Ford as the magnanimous Princess of Sparta, bearing with unflinching spirit the succession of misfortunes poured down upon her and leading off the dance while messenger succeeds messenger of evil; till, free from her duties as a queen, she sinks down dead.’⁸ One cannot perhaps altogether dispute this judgement, although one may feel that it tends to confuse moral and aesthetic issues, but it remains nevertheless evident that Ford saw clearly enough what he was about when he created two such different characters as Calantha and Annabella.

Ford's interest in national characteristics is emphasized, though quite differently, in his treatment of the theme of The Lady's Trial. A wife's faithlessness, or supposed faithlessness, and the steps that her husband takes to revenge his honour, form a subject that was popular among Elizabethan and seventeenth-century dramatists. The line of action that the wronged husband will pursue may be said, as a rule, to be assumed as a matter of course. Iago knows that if he can persuade Othello to a belief that his wife is unfaithful, he will feel that he can only save his honour by the deaths of Cassio and Desdemona. Shakespeare does not, of course, give such a crude study of Othello's complex psychology as this hasty summing up implies, but such, nevertheless, is the principle underlying Othello's actions, the principle that leads to the tragic dénouement just as it was in most other plays of the period in which the wife was faithless either in reality or in the husband's belief. In the winter of 1602/3 Heywood in his play of A Woman Killed with Kindness had written a tragedy in which such a principle is not assumed, or, more strictly speaking, is not assumed by the hero. When Frankford discovers that he has been betrayed by his friend and his wife, he does not seek revenge through the death of either.

My words are register'd in Heaven already,
With patience hear me! I'll not martyr thee,
Nor mark thee for a strumpet; but with usage
Of more humility torment thy soul,
And kill thee even with kindness.(9)
Even as I hope for pardon, at that day
When the Great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits,
So be thou pardon'd! Though thy rash offence
Divorc'd our bodies, thy repentant tears
Unite our souls.(10)
My wife, the mother to my pretty babes!
Both those lost names I do restore thee back,
And with this kiss I wed thee once again.
Though thou art wounded in thy honour'd name,
And with that grief upon thy death-bed liest,
Honest in heart, upon my soul, thou diest.(11)

Courthope describes The Honest Whore as sharing with this play ‘the distinction of furnishing the earliest example of those abstract and paradoxical moral situations which were afterwards more highly developed by Massinger and Ford.’¹² Mr. Clark has shown, I think convincingly, that Heywood was rather trying to write a domestic tragedy based on a real psychology, and however it may fail to convince in some of its parts, taken as a whole the motives and actions of Frankford in his behaviour towards the guilty couple are straightforward and comprehensible enough, and must have been so to a contemporary audience although they were outside the ordinary dramatic convention of the day. The scene of Heywood's tragedy is laid in England, and it would hardly be possible or convincing had he chosen instead the renaissance Italy of the Elizabethan theatre.

In Ford's tragi-comedy, The Lady's Trial, the attitude of Aurelio, the would-be protector of his friend's honour, is that of the conventional Italian of the Elizabethan stage. He seems almost to suspect before Auria's departure that his wife will be unfaithful to him, or, at least, that by his absence the husband himself leaves her unfairly exposed to temptation.

Aurelio. … it is not manly done
To leave her to the triall of her wits,
Her modestie, her innocence, her vowes.
This is the way that poynts her out an art
Of wanton life.

Later when he discovers Adurni and Spinella locked up together he immediately assumes not only that the wife has been tempted but that she is unfaithful. It is his suspicion that causes the flight of Spinella to her cousin's house and her concealment there even after Auria's return. Here are circumstances that might easily on the seventeenth-century stage have led to a tragic dénouement. But the husband for once is prepared to act in a rational way. He is prepared to believe that his wife may have been faithful to him during his absence, however much appearances are against her, and he is prepared to hear not only her own defence but the defence of her lover. Even more unusual, perhaps, in the drama of this period is the line of defence that Spinella takes in her bold declaration that it is Auria who is in the wrong to have brought a charge of disloyalty against her on insufficient grounds, and that by so doing it is he who breaks faith with her.

Spinella. … herein evidence of frailtie
Deserv'd not more a separation,Then doth charge of disloyaltie objected
Without or ground or witnesse, womans faults
Subject to punishments, and mens applauded
Prescribe no laws in force.

Later, when Auria demands, as of right, to be still further satisfied of her innocence, she cries out

                    you can suspect,
So reconciliation then is needlesse,
Conclude the difference by revenge, or part,
And never more see one another.
Grisilde is deed, and eek her pacience,
And both atones buryed in ytaille;
For which I crie in open audience,
No wedded man so hardy be tassaille
His wyves pacience in hope to fynde
Grisildis, for in certein he shall faille!

Such was the warning of Chaucer to fourteenth-century English husbands, and here on the seventeenth-century stage, and in a scene laid in renaissance Italy, is a wife as devoted to her husband as Griselda, or the nut-brown maid or Prior's Emma, but who is not prepared to exercise her patience in abetting her husband in wrong conduct towards herself. Fortunately her husband has the sense to appreciate this kind of rational loyalty. That Ford was fully aware that such an attitude was opposed to stage convention especially in a play of renaissance Italy seems evident. When Adurni first makes his explanation to Auria, the latter exclaims

                                        Sure Italians hardly
Admit dispute in questions of this nature,
The tricke is new.

And again, later, when he is persuading his sister-in-law to marry Adurni, in order to rectify ‘all crookes’ and ‘vaine surmises,’ he says:

                    Make no scruple
(Castanna) of the choyce, 'tis firme and reall,
Why else have I so long with tamenesse nourisht
Report of wrongs, but that I fixt on issue
Of my desires, Italians use not dalliance
But execution.

Is it fanciful to suggest that Ford in this play may have made use of the Italian setting for the purpose of emphasizing the attitude and actions of hero and heroine, in a domestic tragi-comedy that is perhaps as original in its treatment of subject as is Heywood's English domestic tragedy of A Woman Killed with Kindness?

Many readers of Ford's plays are oppressed by the feeling that their atmosphere is unhealthy, and, as it were, lacking in fresh air. This is especially so of the Italianate plays, but the atmosphere of all seems, at times, almost unbearably overheated. This is due to a variety of causes. Ford's birthplace was a Devonshire village on the edge of Dartmoor, surrounded by some of the most beautiful country of the south-west of England, and it may be assumed, from his constant use of certain west-country provincialisms in the dialogue of the plays,¹³ that he passed his childhood and early youth there. Whether he ever returned there in later life we do not know for certain, but he owned some property in Ipplepen and Torbryan, two other charming villages, with their characteristic granite-towered churches and lanes whose banks are in springtime a mass of primrose and sweet-smelling white violets. But he has made scarcely any attempt to introduce into his plays, as Shakespeare into his, the beauties of nature or of outdoor life, and for all the evidence of this kind that his writings afford he might have been born and bred in a town. Most of his scenes are laid within doors in the state-rooms and bed-chambers of palaces and castles. The tale of the musical contest between the boy and the nightingale in The Lover's Melancholy, delightful though it is, is a purely fanciful picture, and academic in origin. Some of the scenes of The Broken Heart are laid in a garden, but it seems almost as airless as the house in which the jealous Bassanes tries to keep his beautiful young wife guarded from the contagion of prying eyes, and the mad Penthea's exclamation to her lover,

When last we gather'd Roses in the garden
I found my wits, but truly you lost yours.

seems to be of purely symbolical significance,and hardly calls up to the senses, the lost fragrance of the flowers themselves. In Perkin Warbeck, in strong contrast to Shakespeare's historical plays, neither king nor pretender shows any of that love of English country, that passion for the very soil, that plays a large part in the patriotism, different as it may be in other ways, of Richard II and John of Gaunt.

Nor is there, in the tragedies at any rate, much other attempt at any sort of relief from the scenes of intense passion or from the intervening melodrama of lust and violence. Ford's futile attempts at comedy merely disgust one by the unseemly irrelevance of their buffoonery. Occasionally in some of his more homely characters such as Florio and Donado in 'Tis Pity, and Huntley in Perkin Warbeck one is brought into touch for a moment with a more everyday world. Very rarely, too, Ford has allowed a breath of fresh air to blow in from the city streets. In The Fancies Chaste and Noble he has returned to an Italian setting; yet the play contains one or two descriptions of London city life, as vivid as those of Dekker or Middleton. Such is Flavia's recollection (wherein real regret is concealed under a light cloak of satire) of the days when she was the contented young wife of a citizen, enjoying the excitement of the Lord Mayor's Day.

When we were common, mortall, and a subiect
As other creatures of heavens making are,
(the more the pitty) bless us! how we waited
For the huge play day when the Pageants flutter'd
About the City, for we then were certaine,
The Madam courtiers, would vouchsafe to visit us,
And call us by our names, and eate our viands:
Nay give us leave to sit at the upper end
Of our owne Tables, telling us how welcome
They'd make us, when we came to Court: full little
Dream't I at that time of the wind that blew me
Up to the Weathercocke of th' honours, now
Are thrust upon me, but we beare the burthen,
Were't twice as much as 'tis, the next great feast,
Wee'l grace the City wives (poore soules) and see
How they'le behave themselves, before our presence.(14)

There is nothing quite in this vein in any of Ford's earlier plays, and if the whole piece had been written in this spirit it would have been a remarkable production. But unfortunately it is not so.

What is it then that seems to Ford's admirers to give his plays their real and permanent value? For what reward may one look among that welter of melodrama and tomfoolery, of murder and rape and incest? The answer was given more than a century ago by Charles Lamb, and it is simple enough. It lies in Ford's extraordinary power to make us acutely aware even in the midst of depravity and horror of the greatness of the spirit of man. It is this theme and this alone that has absorbed all his creative energy; if this solitary jewel is lost amongst the shoddy assortment of rubbish that surrounds it, there is nothing further to seek. ‘Ford was of the first order of Poets. He sought for sublimity not by parcels in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and Annabella … we discern traces of that fiery particle, which in the irregular starting from out of the road of beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity, and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and degradation of our nature.’¹⁵

Notes

1. Peacock. The Four Ages of Poetry. (Percy Reprints, No. 3, 1923), pp. 12-13.

2. Vernon Lee. Euphorion, Vol. I, pp. 78-9.

3. See S. P. Sherman, Stella and the Broken Heart, p. 275 ff. Cf. Ward, Vol. III, p. 79. ‘Either Ford, or the novelist from whom he borrowed made little account of historical probability in choosing Sparta as the scene of a love-tragedy which savours of mediaeval Italy.’

4. Koeppel (p. 177) has pointed out that the Stoic Seneca was in the same way given choice of death, and made the same choice as Orgilus. See Tacitus, An. XV, 60-64.

5. See, e.g., George Saintsbury, Elizabethan Literature, Ch. xi, p. 404. ‘I own that I am with Hazlitt, not Lamb, on the question of the admired death scene of Calantha. In the first place, it is certainly borrowed from Marston's Malcontent; in the second, it is wholly unnatural; in the third, the great and crowning point is not, as Lamb seemed to think Calantha's sentimental inconsistency, but the consistent and noble death of Orgilus.’

6. See S. P. Sherman's introductory essay to W. Bang's edition of John Fordes Dramatische Werke, p. x.

7. See Rupert Brooke, John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama, pp. 115-6.

8. Vernon Lee, Euphorion, Vol. I, pp. 75-6.

9. A Woman Killed with Kindness, Act IV, Sc. vi.

10. Ibid., Act V, Sc. v.

11. Ibid., Act V, Sc. v.

12. W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry, Vol. IV, p. 224.

13. See Chapter III, p. 45.

14. The Fancies, Act II, Sc. i.

15. Lamb, Specimens … pp. 264-5.