SOURCE: Greenfield, Thelma N. “The Language of Process in Ford's The Broken Heart.” PMLA, 87, No. 3 (May, 1972): 397-405.

[In the following essay, Greenfield examines how Ford uses language in The Broken Heart to convey the process of feelings and actions that create a tragic chain of events.]

“Ford does not,” writes Mark Stavig, “simply rewrite the same play over and over again as so many of his contemporaries did. In each of the plays he attempts something a little different.”¹ Although this observation is certainly accurate, Ford's plays bear such a distinctive atmosphere, his characters and style are so much his own, and his focus in certain ways is so narrow, that there has been an understandable tendency to emphasize the similarities more than the differences among his plays.² Concerning his language, readers of Ford's plays have rather uniformly remarked on his poetic power and on his characteristic qualities of simplicity and passionlessness, of colloquialism, of directness, of an odd thinness of imagery especialy at moments of supreme truth, and of the slow, dignified regularity of metrical line typical of all his plays.³ My present purpose is to attempt to identify in Ford's language “something a little different” that distinguishes one of his plays—The Broken Heart—from the others.

Robert Davril's conclusion that Ford molded his dramatic language into an exact and perfect vehicle for his particular mode of thought, taken in conjunction with Stavig's comment on the variety among Ford's plays, leads one to suspect that a search for peculiarities in Ford's language in a given play might well reveal a quality and significance particular to that play alone. Ford as “poet first” and “of the first order of poets,” a ranking testified to by many a modern scholar as well as by the weighty praises of Lamb, Swinburne, and (more reluctantly) T. S. Eliot, probably deserves more detailed study of his poetic craftmanship than he has received.⁴

One may begin with the question, what does the language of The Broken Heart do? Mainly, I think, it does three things: first, it explains at length the processes at work in the play, diagnosing the causes and effects in feeling and action (the important motivations, situations, and events stemming chiefly from Ithocles' initial error or ultimately shaped by that error); second and third, it articulates major emotional responses and, more briefly, it provides through the lips of secondary characters statements of events and feelings, but also of hopes and plans which set up a kind of phantom countermovement of what could or would have been had the normal course of events not been overwhelmed by the irresistible and tragic chain of reaction that controls the main characters. It is the first of these functions, revelation of a process, that seems to me fundamental to the play and what especially distinguishes it in language from the other plays. The analytical habit of mind which Oliver perceives as Ford's special gift finds here a sustained dramatic focus, a structure, and a language that go quite beyond his engagement of it elsewhere.

Although Ford's other plays dwell on statements of feeling and on self-assertion and self-defense, denunciation, defiance, reconciliation, etc., one does not get from them the same extended depiction of characters meeting a fate in a way illustrative of an inevitable causal pattern. One does find a kinship to the method of The Broken Heart in a few early lines in Perkin Warbeck on the operation of the Wars of the Roses. Of the other Ford plays, though they work with the same human relationships and situations—maligned ladies, jealous husbands, and complications between brothers and sisters—only The Lover's Melancholy as a whole brings to bear something of the illustrative quality of The Broken Heart. That play, too, undertakes to explain an operation, the operation of melancholy as distinct from ecstasy, dotage, rapture, and so forth.

The word “process” seems a useful one for this play. Swinburne used it of Ford's best writing, by which he certainly meant The Broken Heart, speaking of the “studious arrangement of emotion and expression, a steady inductive process of feeling … answering to the orderly measure of the verse.” Morris speaks perceptively of the avoidance of lucid statement in the play and a technique of blurred meanings which “mediates a process of thought rather than the thought itself.”⁵

The process of feeling and the process of thought that these critics observe as a crucial part of the language begin, I think, as early as the list of “Speakers' Names Fitted to their Qualities.” Everyone has commented on Ford's not only using but defining indicative names for this tragedy, but I have not seen mention of the fact that here is something quite different from the naming of humor characters or from fixing the figures so named in the realm of the abstract typical. For the important characters, the names signify not fundamental character traits but states of being evolving from action and situation. Penthea's name, meaning Complaint, tells her state of mind as a result of enforced marriage. The name otherwise has no particular appropriateness. Orgilus (Angry) has been a man of love and peace until made angry by the results of Ithocles' ambition. Aplotes, Simplicity, he assumes as a deliberate disguise. Euphranea is Joy only because she is allowed to wed Prophilus, who is Dear as a friend to Ithocles. Bassanes is Vexation because he has married a young wife who does not and should not love him. He later becomes a model of patience. Ithocles as Honor of Loveliness is grammatically harder to diagnose: he receives honor and in his heroic impulse to greatness he yet becomes increasingly of lovely character; he also comes to be honored by loveliness, by receiving the love of Calantha, Flower of Beauty. In any case, honor and loveliness are what come to him within the play.

The names, then, have the quality of intimate nicknames, bestowed with regard to given situations and the emotional responses of the characters rather than as clues to basic traits. Orgilus is more a man who has become angry than a man who does become angry. Calantha's name, on the other hand, is more a statement of an essential quality than are the other names, but her role in the chain of reactions is unlike the roles of the other characters, too; it is a secret and a surprise and she alone commands her fate as it happens.

The beginning of the play is especially laden with explanations of the vital sequences of cause and effect. Orgilus explains the result of Thrasus' death in Ithocles' consequent pride and what follows as the cruel aftermath brought about thereby.

From this time sprouted up that poisonous stalk
Of aconite, whose ripened fruit hath ravish'd
All health, all comfort of a happy life;
For Ithocles, her brother, proud of youth,
And prouder in his power, nourish'd closely
The memory of former discontents,
To glory in revenge. By cunning partly,
Partly by threats, 'a woos at once and forces
His virtuous sister to admit a marriage
With Bassanes, a nobleman, in honor
And riches, I confess, beyond my fortunes.

(I.i.36-46)⁶

Whether the poisonous aconite is Ithocles himself or his pride or the train of events he has initiated is not clear but the father's death has left room for the resumption of old animosities; the aconite grows, bears fruit; the fruit brings destruction. To clarify his metaphor, Orgilus immediately restates the process on the literal level. His next speech explains the effect of the marriage on Penthea—“thraldom, misery, / Affliction”—and then its effect on Bassanes:

                                                                                                              this thought
Begets a kind of monster-love, which love
Is nurse unto a fear so strong and servile
As brands all dotage with a jealousy.

(I.i.60-63)

Lastly, he explains the result of Bassanes' monstrous behavior upon himself, although he deliberately falsifies on this score until he has the opportunity to speak in soliloquy.

Others proceed to speak along the same lines. Tecnicus warns of the operation of fate and of the “danger” bespoken in Orgilus' aspect. Ithocles analyzes ambition's dangerous operations, its disastrous conclusions, and its proper remedies.

Ambition! 't is of vipers' breed: it gnaws
A passage through the womb that gave it motion.
Ambition, like a seeled dove, mounts upward,
Higher and higher still, to perch on clouds,
But tumbles headlong down with heavier ruin.
So squibs and crackers fly into the air,
Then, only breaking with a noise, they vanish
In stench and smoke. Morality, appli'd
To timely practice, keeps the soul in tune,
At whose sweet music all our actions dance;
But this is form of books and school tradition;
It physics not the sickness of a mind
Broken with griefs. Strong fevers are not eas'd
With counsel, but with best receipts and means;
Means, speedy means and certain; that's the cure.

(II.ii.1-15)

Ithocles' demand for means clearly indicates that his anatomy of ambition has been no academic exercise—he has described the journey of his own future. Ithocles' ambition is, throughout, a complex and developing force. It has led him to wrongdoing in nourishing revenge and forcing the fateful marriage. It leads to his death, for Orgilus will not allow him to triumph while Penthea dies. But Ithocles' ambition becomes refined into heroism on the battlefield and after that is glorified by love for a great princess. His greatness of spirit grows to afford him both a clear vision of his guilt and a simultaneous, undeniable impulse toward self-fulfilling grandeur.

Throughout The Broken Heart, characters continue to expound what they have become and why. Penthea explains herself to her lover and then to her brother: “Such an one / As only you have made me: a faith-breaker, / A spotted whore”; she makes clear why her guilty body must die by her chosen method of suicide; Bassanes describes the operation of his new-found patience; Orgilus defines himself as an enforced revenger and explains often and fully why Ithocles is his victim; Calantha delineates the cause and procedure of her own death.

With all his emphasis on explanation, however, Ford gives his characters in The Broken Heart a curious imprecision of speech and leaves them unselfconscious as speakers. Rhetorical wit appears even less frequently in this play than elsewhere in Ford's drama. There are relatively few plays on words or crucial contrasts or repetitions of words or phrasal patterns within significant syntactic structures. The characters seem not to listen to themselves speak.⁷ Their formulations are often constructed of obscure and leisurely periphrases, compounded of varied, strung-out phrases:

Make me the pattern of digesting evils,
Who can outlive my mighty ones, not shrinking
At such a pressure as would sink a soul
Into what's most of death, the worst of horrors.
But I have seal'd a covenant with sadness,
And enter'd into bonds without condition,
To stand these tempests calmly; mark me, nobles,
I do not shed a tear, not for Penthea!

(V.ii.58-65)

Although the diction in itself is unexceptionable, ambiguities and loose syntactic connections abound among the extensions and repetitions here. Our understanding lags a little behind our sense of the rhythmic flow of the lines, and for good reason. On examination, the first two lines are skewed, to suggest rather than exactly articulate their meaning, and constant discrimination among possibilities is required. It takes time to see that Make me the pattern must be diagnosed to mean “proclaim me to be the model” or “consider me the model”; that digesting evils is a verbal and its object; that can outlive means “can endure.” More teasing, the equivalence between me, with a human referent, and digesting evils, which is a process, produces an uneasy desire for readjustment at one end or the other. The adjective clause that follows—who can outlive my mighty ones—aggravates the disjunction by reference to the person, me (who), and the object of the verbal of process, evils (ones), at its beginning and end, and aggravates it also by more or less restating the process but in terms of me as the doer instead of as a pattern of the process itself.

These two lines fuse the performer with what he does, a fusion which is the very heart of how the characters in the play function; they both do the action and illustrate it. Having given proof of his being an example of the process by virtue of his having performed it, Bassanes then (1) explains how he does it—not shrinking, etc., (2) explains how he is able—I have seal'd a covenant with sadness, and (3) demonstrates—mark me … I do not shed a tear.

Reiterative and explanatory as the passage is, however, it continues to be vague. The who clause leads into further extensions by the disparate, unparalleled continuations of not shrinking, at such, as would, into what's. The apparently appositional the worst of horrors presumably expands what's most of death or perhaps gives it a belated referent, or states its cause. The correlative But I have seal'd has no grammatical or semantic elements to correlate with—one must invent some application such as “my endurance is amazing but thus explainable” or “the soul cannot so endure but I have found a means.” The metaphor moves loosely from the fairly abstract processes of digesting and pressure to the completely abstract superlatives most of death and worst of horrors and thence to the language of the contract and a suggested personification of sadness and finally to tempests, after which metaphor is dismissed altogether for the abrupt literal “I do not shed a tear, not for Penthea!” The simplicity and colloquialism of this last line and its preceding insistent imperative and direct address, “mark me, nobles,” cannot mitigate the sense of the speaker's disengagement from himself, a sense that comes from the vagueness and complexity of the preceding lines. We feel that Bassanes stands apart from himself and looks at what he has become and at how he manifests his new state and urges others to look, too. But he provides no ironic honing of word as word or phrase as phrase as a vehicle for experience: he does not say, “listen to how I say this.” There is a gentle urgency in his continual shifts that bespeaks an anxiety to explain, but articulation does not become a vital part of his experience.

A quotation from Penthea gives a further illustration of my point.

'T is long agone since first I lost my heart;
Long I have liv'd without it, else for certain
I should have given that too; but instead
Of it, to great Calantha, Sparta's heir,
By service bound and by affection vow'd,
I do bequeath, in holiest rites of love,
Mine only brother, Ithocles.

(III.v.72-78)

One notices here in particular that every line after the first is filled with interrupting parentheses and parentheses within parentheses. But rather than adjusting and tightening the sense they mainly provide simple extension by obvious restatements, alternatives, and allusions to the person addressed. Most of the passage is tautological and the tautology is unexcused by wit. If Penthea lost her heart long ago, then obviously she has long lived without it. Three times in four lines she parenthetically avows her love to the Princess. That Calantha is great Calantha obviates need for the appositional Sparta's heir. Ithocles is of course Penthea's brother and that he is her only brother is of no significance really. These lines do not, as they might in the hands of another playwright, reveal the speaker as a smooth flatterer or even overly given to words. Insofar as they reveal character, they underscore her gentility. Above all they make us aware of the refinements of the situation and once again they represent a character sensitively albeit gropingly elucidating her condition and her action.

In both of the above passages there is dramatic purpose of another kind being served: contrast. Ford deals heavily in The Broken Heart with abrupt surprises and reversals and his language operates skillfully to enhance as well as to control such patterns. Bassanes' elevated and understanding words are completely unanticipated in view of his earlier vicious brutality of speech. Penthea's gracious intervention for her brother with Calantha follows hard upon her bitter denunciations of him uttered to his face. Ithocles' hostility toward Orgilus suddenly turns to protestations of love and Orgilus' acceptances of Ithocles' friendship turn as suddenly to reviling.

Morris has remarked on another kind of contrast, a linguistic tension between periphrasis and simplicity, as fundamental to this play: “the true distinction is not between image and plain statement, but between periphrastic and direct utterance.” Morris continues: “Ford's moments of profound simplicity are set in a context of an elaborate and courtly language, by means of which his speakers communicate both information and attitudes” (p. xxvii).

Especially toward the end of the play, these occasional abrupt contrasts become more frequent and often oxymoronic to underscore that here the paradoxical tragic developments make their strongest emotional bid. Bassanes ends the first speech quoted above with a sudden two-word contradiction, “Excellent misery.” Terse phrases follow Orgilus' somewhat talky suicide: “Life's fountain is dri'd up,” “'A has shook hands with time,” “Speech hath left him,” to state the death, and to offer paradoxical judgment, “Desperate courage,” “Honorable infamy.” Calantha's very frequently cited insistent directness at her own death caps the elaborate death speeches that preceded hers and suitably represents a sensibility by contrast so aristocratic that not old age, starvation, diabolical machine, or bloodletting but only repeated shock need be evoked to shatter it:

                                                                                          Oh, my Lords,
I but deceiv'd your eyes with antic gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward;
But it struck home, and here, and in an instant.

(V.iii.67-71)

Actually, these seemingly simple lines are very artfully done. Beginning with the dynamic “antic gesture” and “one news straight came huddling on another” and “still I danced forward,” the passage suddenly reverses itself with the countering suspension of movement, “but it struck home.” “And here, and in an instant” further simulates immobility. “Death and death and death … and here and in an instant” can be given a local habitation and names among the grammatical figures (polysyndeton, epizeuxis, and even something that sounds like hendyadis) but the effect is one of having moved beyond the leisure of art.⁸ Penthea, the King, Ithocles, and Orgilus have died seriatim, variously, but all with elaborate loquacity. Ford effectively climaxes the series with Calantha's skillful inarticulateness.

Morris remarks of the more expanded passages of the play, “the core of meaning is overlaid with a complicated yet a loosely articulated syntax which gives, without recourse to verbal ingenuity, an aureate grandeur of utterance. And this is not deployed to delineate character: it is a feature common to most of the speakers in certain situations” (p. xxvii). Penthea's speech indicates her awareness of her own conditions and her sensitivity to the situation at hand. True, her gift of her brother to Calantha will be foiled by Orgilus' revenge but, as always in The Broken Heart, the irony is much more in the event than in the language. Groping and disjointed in thought, soft through the frequent agency of vaguely applied connectives and leisurely repetitions, splendid in the purity of their diction, metrically measured and steady, with many run-on lines and with little pause even at full stops—thus equipped, long speeches of analysis and delineation are finally brought to rest by terse, pithy, or sometimes flat phrases, metrically roughened and summarizing in import. Both styles, however, unite in conveying a sense of much being unsaid. They work together rather than oppositely in providing rhythmical units and in implication of meaning.

The alternation between “the periphrastic and direct utterance” works in still another way. Ford's reversals, paradoxes, and surprises operate to such an extent that with the least liberty of language they would verge into the crassly sensational. Looseness and abstractness in the aureate style, radical understatement in the simple style, bring to both a compensatory objectivity (while at the same time allowing for contrast and range) that controls severely any tendency to melodrama in the innumerable sudden turns.

The explanatory quality of the language of The Broken Heart pervades its metaphors in several interesting ways. One of the most distinctive to this play, although one can find some similarity in The Lover's Melancholy and briefly in Perkin Warbeck, is Ford's concretizing, not so much through nouns and adjectives—these remain fairly generally abstract—but by means of verbs and verbals. To go back to the Calantha passage, the substantive antic gesture, news, and death are not visually evocative; more concrete are the movements, came huddling, danced forward, struck home. In the passage cited above which describes the operation of Bassanes' reaction to his marriage, the emphasis on the process involved comes because of the dominance of causative verbs: thought begets a monster-love; this love is nurse (although nurse is a noun, the meaning here lies in the action of nursing rather in the figure of a nurse) to fear; fear brands dotage with jealousy. The nouns, thought, love, fear, jealousy, are abstractions. The concretizing verbs set them in a delicate balance between literal statement and personification. Verbs keep us constantly alert to how things happen: lust sweats, travails, plots, wakes, contrives; cruelty enforces a divorce and prevents triumphs; resolution chokes the breath of reason; reason speeds the traveler; dissension, fury, and rage broach quarrels in blood; time cannot eat into a love pledge; sorrow melts into more than pity; jealousies grow wild; humility bends before altars and perfumes temples of the gods. Even where more extended metaphors develop noun and adjective images, verbs and verbals continue to function as described (italics in this and the following quoted passage are my own):

Applause runs madding, like the drunken priests
In Bacchus' sacrifices, without reason,
Voicing the leader-on a demi-god …
                                                                                each common soldier's blood
Drops down as current coin in that hard purchase
As his whose much more delicate condition
Hath suck'd the milk of ease: judgment commands,
But resolution executes.

(I.ii.81-88)

Ford is able to use this type of metaphor very sensitively. Orgilus, posing as a rather mad scholar, and enraged by Prophilus' courtship of Euphranea, formulates in soliloquy grotesque, disjointed images with leap'd, creeps, reach, and write expressing his inner turmoil as well as the ironies of the developing situation:

Ingenious Fate has leap'd into mine arms,
Beyond the compass of my brain. Mortality
Creeps on the dung of earth, and cannot reach
The riddles which are purpos'd by the gods.
Great arts best write themselves in their own stories.

(I.iii.178-82)

(Once again the nouns in subject position are abstractions, fate, mortality, arts.) Ithocles' excited defiance of the Prince is similarly grotesque and even comic in its hyperbole of toss, lick, durst not stir, and rend, and, typically, like the two preceding passages quoted, subsides with its final sentence into a vague quietness:

                                                                                          for could his breath,
Like whirlwinds, toss such servile slaves as lick
The dust his footsteps print into a vapor,
It durst not stir a hair of mine: it should not;
I'd rend it up by th' roots first. To be anything
Calantha smiles on, is to be a blessing …

(IV.i.61-66)

With the explication of processes constantly before us, this tragedy works itself out not mysteriously but clearly. The many allusions to unknown fate, mysterious oracle, clouds, and hidden things refer much more to unknown and surprising events in the fulfillment of necessity than to the universal why and whence. The morality of the play, however, is a different matter. In moralizing passages, with Ford's typically unsustained images and loose syntax, we must often build our own bridges to move from point to point. In Ithocles' ambition speech quoted earlier, for example, ambition is a gnawing viper; ambition is a blinded dove; ambition is an exploding firecracker; then, rather obscurely, we are on morality, music, dance, and physic. Ford's technique here is not the smooth Shakespearean “fused image” (“the hearts / That spaniel'd me at heels / … do discandy, melt their sweets / On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is bark'd”) nor is it controlled by a Shakespearean rhetorical tightness (“thou mayst hold a serpent by the tongue, / A chafed lion by the mortal paw, / A fasting tiger safer by the tooth, / Than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold”).

Several recent critics have approached the language of The Broken Heart by identifying key words, Anderson finding them in image clusters relating to the heart and the banquet, McDonald in “antilogies” of moral significance; Morris sees them as shifting from passage to passage, “each energizing a phrase and creating not a lucid statement but an arcane meditation” (p. xxvii). I think the use of key words is probably more sustained than Morris allows and I find a number of them embodied in repeated verbals, again indicating patterns of process. Verbals of diving into or piercing define attempts to penetrate clouded, hidden fates. Growing, budding, and shriveling (linking with height- and growth-signifying noun images of vegetation—mushrooms, underbrush, vines, elms) predicate individual fortunes and hopes as well as Sparta's general welfare. The word building reinforces the emphasis on rising and the contrast between the high and the low, while standing recurs to express firmness, certainty, endurance, and heroic stature. Certain kinds of images attach to certain people. Confinement and sinking are associated with Penthea especially (though later they begin to apply to others), while an opposite pattern of building, rising, and height images bespeak the contrasting fortunes of her brother. The inextricably intertwined fates of the two, however, are indicated through shared metaphors. Not only does Ithocles finally accept the metaphors of sinking for himself but earlier both have had dream speeches; Penthea more knowingly, “I've slept with mine eyes open a great while” (in this dream of life) while Ithocles rejects dreams of greatness—“these are still but dreams”—yet insists on “a real, visible, material happiness … I saw it, sir, I saw it.”

Words of a very different type—and nouns, mainly—characterize Bassanes' speeches in his early condition. Between them, he and Phulas name vulgar disfigurements and sicknesses, and degrade humanity into long catalogs of beasts and birds and even fish and insects in their comings and goings (gaudy earwig, springals, son of a cat, ill-looking hound's head, lions, bears, bit-fox, a herd of lords, a flock of ladies, shoals of horses, caroches in drifts, and so forth). Husbands are asses or beneath animal existence altogether—earth, “clods of dirt.” These nouns are not part of the explanatory element of the play but are indicative of Bassanes' hideously debased view of man.

I should like to mention two more kinds of key words, those associated with the culmination of the tragic movement of the play in death, and those associated with the ultimate means to that death. In the inexorable sequence, death becomes more an acceptable respite than a fearful cutting off. Peace, rest, freedom, and curatives become death's synonyms. Reiteration of the word bed operates importantly here as pivotal between marriage and the grave and as a reminder of the chain of causation that stretches in this play from one to the other. The chain comes to its end when those doomed to or prevented from the marriage bed can “lie down in a bed of dust.” Sorrows are the preparation for this “rest for care.” The following passage between Ithocles, urging friendship as he looks forward to his own marriage, and Orgilus, covertly promising assassination as he remembers the wreck of his, illustrates these connected meanings of bed and carries the typical sense of peaceful subsidence into death through its gentle, downward-moving verb phrase.

Ith.                                                                                                              partners
In all respects else but the bed.
Org.                                                                                                              The bed!
Forfend it Jove's own jealousy!—till lastly
We slip down in the common earth together,
And there our beds are equal.

(IV.iii.134-38)

Lastly, slip down in the common earth together, there our beds are equal suggests soft naturalness that sits a little oddly with the treacherous violence of Orgilus' diabolic machine, but the ritualistic shaping of Ithocles' murder, a view accepted by Ithocles himself, puts the emphasis on order and peace: “my last breath,” says Ithocles, “which on the sacred altar / Of a long-look'd-for peace—now—moves—to Heaven.” The slip down of Orgilus' lines is a part of a pattern of such verbs appearing especially toward the end of The Broken Heart—such as sink, fall, totter, bend, lie down—the ironic real process that substitutes for the fantasies of growing, building, reaching, and standing.

Two final points, which I shall pass over hastily not because they are unimportant but because they are so large and obvious that much comment has been given them. The first is the function of the words blood and heart in the play's movement toward death. In addition to being a part of the process of the play, blood and bleeding unite mankind in a common humanity and individual characters with one another in their particular involvements. Blood is the metaphor for quarrels, battles, family ties and authority, love, and revenge. To Bassanes it is lust and youth. To Penthea, it is her own sexual life, polluted by the marriage bed, requiring literal starvation. To Orgilus it is death as well as “this bubbling life.” Some applications of the word are general, “Poor Honor, thou art stabb'd and bleed'st to death,” “Your reputation … / Lies bleeding at my feet,” “usher to the rankness of the blood”; some more particularized, “I sweat in blood for it,” “By our bloods / Will you quite both undo us, Brother”; some fantastic, “three drops of blood at the nose,” “every drop / Of blood is turn'd to an amethyst, / Which married bachelors hang in their ears”; some literal, “It [Orgilus' actual blood] sparkles like a lusty wine new broach'd.”

Penthea, Ithocles, and Orgilus all die by processes of literal deprivation of blood. Even Penthea's starvation aims at this part of her being, “blood … be henceforth never height'ned / With taste of sustenance! Starve.” Ithocles dies of stab wounds, “Penthea, by thy side thy brother bleeds.” Orgilus kills himself with an exaggeratedly clinical opening of a vein in each arm. With the appropriate order, “Remove the bloodless body,” the stage is cleared of the last of the trio so bound together by blood in its various meanings of consanguinity, love, life, murder, suicide, and so forth. Calantha moves the focus to the heart. She does not bleed but dies of “the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings.” As her mode of speech ostensibly moves beyond art and her dying beyond ordinary agency, she is fixed linguistically in death in an oxymoron of smiling sorrow: “Her heart is broke … I must weep to see her smile in death.”

In spite of the heavy emphasis on blood, it is typical of Ford's control that white, the ritual symbol of purity, is the play's only color. And this leads me to my last point, that much of the process and the language of process in The Broken Heart is crystallized into ceremonial form. The pattern is repeated violation and reconstitution of ceremony. One thinks of The Spanish Tragedy in which the tragic play-within-the-play turns to real killings, of the heaped-up horrors perpetrated under the cover of the masked revels at the end of The Revenger's Tragedy, or of numerous interrupted banquet scenes of which Macbeth and The Tempest offer most striking examples. The Broken Heart, however, is more ceremonial throughout and its violations of ceremonial rites substitute new ceremonies through which the playwright achieves both shock value and control. These transformed ceremonies are the inevitable results of the violation of Penthea's purity through marriage rites. Much of the language concerning ceremony has to do with sacrifice, suggesting that the tragedy is a propitiation for guilt and a cleansing of sacrilegious pollution. A countermovement of the play resides in images anticipating happy celebrations but these are ominously undercut. The King's proclamation of a victory celebration, “our humility shall bend before altars, and perfume their [the gods'] temples with abundant sacrifice,” is supplanted by a contrary image of celebration described by Ithocles and quoted above beginning, “Applause runs madding, like the drunken priests.” Prophilus' happy expectation of Hymen's torches fed “with eternal fires” is immediately followed by Orgilus' “Put out thy torches Hymen.”

Love is the holiest sacrifice, sacred to the altar of Vesta:

                                                                                                                                  Time can never
On the white table of unguilty faith
Write counterfeit dishonor; turn those eyes,
The arrows of pure love, upon that fire
Which once rose to a flame, perfum'd with vows
As sweetly scented as the incense smoking
On Vesta's [altars]; virgin tears, like
The holiest odors, sprinkled dews to feed 'em
And to increase their fervor.

(II.iii.25-33)

Wrongdoing and expiation are expressed in terms of desecration and redeeming rites. Thus Bassanes endeavored

                                                                                                                                  to pull down
That temple built for adoration only,
And level 't in the dust of causeless scandal.
But, to redeem a sacrilege so impious,
Humility shall pour before the deities
I have incens'd a [largess] of more patience
Than their displeased altars can require.

(IV.ii.31-37)

Ithocles will make Penthea a deity at whose “hallowed shrine” prayers and sacrifices will be offered by maids and wives, but he himself becomes the blood offering upon her altar as Orgilus entraps him “to sacrifice a tyrant to a turtle.” Dying, Ithocles proclaims himself and his great hopes to be sacrifices on the altar of peace.

When Calantha pronounces her own coronationturned-abdication and marriage-funeral rites, the union of ritualized action and ritual language and the ceremonial paradoxes reach full strength. Fulfilling her personal destiny and her public duty at the same time, concluding the final event in the tragic series and opening up a hopeful future for Sparta, Calantha harmonizes disparate elements that have hitherto in the play been at war.

In the ceremonial words, explanation is still at work and it is this explanatory presentation of what happens, of what must be, that is so distinctive in The Broken Heart. Significant names, pinpointing of cause and effect, heavy use of verbs that produce metaphors showing cause and operation, a style detached and observational although alternately complex-vague and simple-direct, a measured and unbroken, yet slightly incoherent, progression of lines, key words that crucially define the last steps of the tragedy, ceremonial shaping (both verbal and visual) of actions and reactions—these are qualities of language that Ford puts to work in this play where so clearly one initial choice brings inescapable repercussions on everybody and on everything that happens. With these components, Ford can have inevitability with surprise; he can be explicit yet maintain the heavy implication of things not said; he can bring an aura of incredible refinement to a drama of blood revenge; he can operate mainly in a single dimension and yet suggest variety and depth.

Notes

1. John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 193.

2. One thinks of an early example in Richard Crashaw's reproachful epigram to the effect that Love's Sacrifice is nothing but The Broken Heart. The Poems English, Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 181.

3. Robert Davril, Le Drame de John Ford (Paris: Didier, 1954), M. Joan Sargeaunt, John Ford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1935), Stavig, H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne Univ. Press, 1955), and among earlier critics, Lamb, Hazlitt, Swinburne, Lowell. Hazlitt and Lowell disliked Ford's style intensely for some of these very reasons but Saintsbury, who also disliked Ford, still praised his poetical faculty and his verse as a “noble medium.”

4. Eliot found Ford's blank verse unique in its movement and tone. Essays in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt, 1960 [c. 1932]), p. 140. Of late, in fact, the considerable 20th-century attention to Ford's ideas, apart from his techniques as a poet, has begun to be balanced by a few examinations of his language. I have already mentioned Davril's long section on the subject. Frederick M. Burelbach, Jr., has published an article on “John Ford's Style: The Apprentice Years,” The McNeese Review, 17 (1966), 58-73. Donald K. Anderson, Jr., in “The Heart and the Banquet: Imagery in Ford's 'Tis Pity and The Broken Heart,” SEL, 2 (1962), 209-17, defies the much remarkedon paucity of images in Ford and uses imagery as a key to meanings in Ford's greatest plays. Charles O. McDonald, “The Design of John Ford's The Broken Heart: A Study in the Development of Caroline Sensibility,” SP, 59 (1962), 141-61, finds in The Broken Heart oppositional key words or “antilogies” which develop contrasting moral sequences that lie at the heart of the play's meaning. A most sensitive treatment of John Ford's verse appears in Brian Morris' introduction to the New Mermaids The Broken Heart (New York: Hill, 1966) where, although no particular effort is made to distinguish the poetic technique of The Broken Heart from that of any other of the Ford plays, most of the observations aim at that one work.

5. Algernon Swinburne, Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), p. 280; Morris, p. xxviii. Further references to the Morris introduction will be given parenthetically in the text.

6. Quotations from The Broken Heart are taken from Robert Ornstein and Hazelton Spencer, Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy (Boston: Heath, 1964).

7. Even the most verbose of Shakespeare's characters speak self-consciously, with tightly structured circularity: “Madam, I swear I use no art at all. / That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity; / And pity 'tis 'tis true. A foolish figure! / But farewell it, for I will use no art. / Mad let us grant him then.”

8. Ford's fondness for such a phrase is attested to by his use of the same pattern in The Lover's Melancholy V.i: “Here's prince, and prince, and prince; / Prince upon prince!” where again the effect is something like irritably relegating momentous news to a fly's insistent buzzing.