SOURCE: Foster, Verna Ann, and Stephen Foster. “Structure and History in The Broken Heart: Sparta, England, and the ‘Truth.’” English Literary Renaissance, 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1988): 305-28.

[In the following essay, Foster and Foster argue that Ford intended to draw an historical and political analogy between mythological Sparta in The Broken Heart and Elizabethan England, concluding that such an interpretation assists in revealing the play's structure and tragic outcome.]

In preparation for her death, Calantha at the end of Ford's The Broken Heart disposes of her realms and her people. To her cousin and designated heir, Nearchus, prince of Argos, she says,

I would presume you would retain the royalty
Of Sparta, in her own bounds: then in Argos
Armostes might be viceroy; in Messene
Might Crotolon bear sway

(5.3.42-45)¹

The political detail here is curiously circumstantial for the conclusion of a tragedy, and one wonders in any case why Nearchus should not simply join the two kingdoms. In fact, the future relations between Sparta and Argos can hardly have failed to remind a Caroline audience of those already existing between England and Scotland, ruled by one king but separately governed. Like James VI and I, Nearchus is to leave his first kingdom to take up residence in his second and more important one. The third realm Calantha bequeaths, the recently conquered Messene, suggests Ireland, which had been effectively subdued for the first time in the reign of Elizabeth.

While the fusion of Spartan “fiction” and English “truth” becomes most literal at the play's resolution, the parallel between Sparta and England implied in the prologue to The Broken Heart is developed throughout the action. Like the Tudor monarchs, Amyclas has, before the play begins, settled the violent quarrels between rival families (1.1.17-28). The precise blood relationship between the virgin princess, later queen, of Sparta and the prince of neighboring Argos closely parallels that between Elizabeth and James VI of Scotland. Nearchus is “In title next” to the Spartan throne because he is, as Amyclas carefully explains matters, “grandchild to our aunt” (3.3.8). James was great-grandchild to Elizabeth's aunt, Henry VII's daughter Margaret, whose marriage to James IV of Scotland Ford celebrates in Perkin Warbeck. And at the end of The Broken Heart Calantha's dying voice assures Nearchus' succession, just as James' claim to the English throne rested most immediately on Elizabeth's supposed deathbed declaration on his behalf.

If The Broken Heart had been written during Elizabeth's lifetime, it would have stood as a very bold example of the many plays concerned with advising the queen to settle the question of succession.² Throughout The Broken Heart the Spartan succession is a major issue, as the English succession had been during the lifetime of Elizabeth—and of the young John Ford. Ford highlights the problem of succession in the play through the rivalry of Ithocles and Nearchus for Calantha's hand (curiously James VI had been one of Elizabeth's many suitors³) and especially through Apollo's riddling oracle and Tecnicus' interpretation of it:

The plot is Sparta; the dried vine the king;
The quailing grape his daughter; but the thing
Of most importance, not to be revealed,
Is a near prince, the elm; the rest concealed.

(4.3.19-22)

Armostes supposes that the oracle refers to Calantha's marriage with “some neighbouring prince” (4.3.33).

Ford and his Caroline audience, however, had the advantage of historical hindsight. Calantha does not marry the “neighbouring prince,” but Crotolon's less specific intrepretation of the oracle does turn out to be true: “Truth is child of Time; and herein / I find no scruple, rather cause of comfort, / With unity of kingdoms” (4.3.39-41). This providential view of the union of Sparta and Argos has a distinct parallel in Durham's prophecy in Perkin Warbeck that from the marriage of Margaret of England and James IV of Scotland “a mystery / Of providence points out a greater blessing / For both these nations than our human reason / Can search into” (4.3.16-19).⁴ In Perkin Warbeck Ford writes about the end of the Wars of the Roses and the beginning of Tudor stability, looking forward in this speech of Durham's to the union between England and Scotland. In The Broken Heart he focuses on the end of Tudor rule, dramatizing and interpreting, not literally but imaginatively in the overall design of his play, the most important political event of his youth—the passing of the Tudors and the peaceful accession of the Stuarts.

The Broken Heart is not a topical play nor in any ordinary sense a straightforward political allegory. “Our scene is Sparta,” just as the first line of the prologue asserts, but Ford gives to Sparta an importance not assigned to any other state in Tudor-Stuart drama outside plays about English or, on occasion, Roman history. Sparta, in fact, is the real protagonist of The Broken Heart, for the play's unifying theme is the working out of the kingdom's fate. Just as Sparta rather than any Spartan is the play's “fictive” protagonist, so its “true” protagonist is England itself—not, as has sometimes been suggested, any individual English personage. The Broken Heart presents a kind of mythologized history of England's recent past and celebrates in the Spartan ideal a set of public virtues at once ancient and modern. If we are not aware of the play's historical implications for its first audience and readers, then we fail to understand either Ford's achievement or the play's total effect. Recovering the historical import of The Broken Heart goes beyond acknowledging a resonance of purely Caroline interest; rather, the play's political significance is central to resolving the vexed question of its structure and therefore to our understanding of its meaning. If Sparta is seen to shadow England, then much that has seemed confusing about the structure of the play and Calantha's role in it becomes clear.

It will be necessary, then, first to demonstrate that Ford did intend Sparta to suggest England and, equally important if we are talking about the play's effect, that his Caroline audience would have seen the analogy. Ford's reworking of English history as Spartan fiction, in turn, largely determines the play's structure and accounts for the subdued quality of the tragic outcome.

II

The political analogies between Sparta and England, which a Caroline audience could hardly have missed, have gone unnoticed by Ford's twentieth-century critics. At four centuries' remove their inquiries into the “truth” that The Broken Heart proclaims in its prologue have generally been little more than source-hunting without any further reference to the interpretation of the play.⁵ The most widely accepted version of the play's “truth” has been Stuart Sherman's argument that Ford based the relationship between Orgilus and Penthea on that between Sir Philip Sidney and Penelope Rich, the Stella of Sidney's sonnets.⁶ Recently Katherine Duncan-Jones has argued that Orgilus is modelled not on Sidney but on Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who was supposedly contracted to Penelope before her marriage to Lord Rich and was for many years her lover. Duncan-Jones goes on to suggest that Ithocles can be identified with Penelope's brother, the Earl of Essex, and Calantha with Elizabeth.⁷

We also will argue that the story of Calantha and Ithocles would indeed have evoked for a Caroline audience the history of Elizabeth and Essex. In fact, this analogy is far more likely to have been recognized by Ford's audience than any allusion to Penelope and her disappointed lover, whether Sidney or Mountjoy or some composite of the two. But individual identifications of any kind are insignificant in themselves. They matter because through allusions to historical personages and incidents immediately recognizable to his audience, Ford unfolds the parallel between Sparta and England with increasing explicitness. It is the audience, however, and its experience that have been neglected in earlier discussions of The Broken Heart. To recreate the play's effect on Caroline spectators, we need to examine it as it develops from the prologue that first points Ford's audience to the “truth” to the last scene in which the identification of Sparta and England becomes most literal.

The short prologue to The Broken Heart is generally remembered only for the unavoidable two lines, “What may be here thought a fiction, when time's youth / Wanted some riper years, was known A TRUTH.” This remarkable declaration, however, needs to be reread in the context of the full eighteen lines, as well as in light of the well-known proclivities of the audience to whom it was addressed. Playgoers in the early seventeenth century were notorious for their enthusiastic pursuit of topical commentary and hidden meaning, whether probable, plausible, or downright silly; the more literal-minded types even took along “table books” to jot down the details of any bits worth repeating later. A routine, almost ritualized task of the prologue, accordingly was to warn the audience away from their favorite practices.⁸The Broken Heart offers the usual injunction, opening not only with the pointed reminder that “Our scene is Sparta,” but adding almost immediately, “The title lends no expectation here / Of apish laughter, or of some lame jeer / At place or persons.” Then quite atypically the prologue continues by contrasting contemporary vulgarity with the pure art and “unblushing verse” of an earlier period, and, still without pause, the next lines go a long way toward pinning down just what past epoch it is whose standards are invoked and whose history will inform the play that follows.⁹ The lines, “This law we keep in our presentment now, / Not to take freedom more than we allow,” look very like a pun, for if “presentment” means theatrical presentation, its earlier signification, known certainly to Ford and the large contingent of lawyers in the Blackfriars audience and probably to most of the rest, is that of “a statement on oath by a jury of a fact within their own knowledge,” that is, their own personal knowledge.¹⁰ And if this reference to the recent past is not intended, or were overlooked, the crucial allusion is supplied in the two lines immediately following, which announce that the “TRUTH” of the play is to be found in a period “when time's youth / Wanted some riper years,” a phrase that does not imply the two thousand or so years it would have taken to get back to the Hellenic era. So far from being disingenuous in its repudiation of topicality (as other plays that made similar disavowals were), The Broken Heart is transparently honest in its prologue because its parallels are to matters no longer topical, although well within living memory.

If we now adopt the standpoint of an audience of the late 1620s or the 1630s that has just been primed by the prologue, then the familiar critical discussion of historical originals in The Broken Heart begins to seem a little out of focus. Whether the audience would have known the Inez de Castro story, for example, or seen in Orgilus Mountjoy rather than Sidney are dramatically less interesting questions than just what it was they were most likely to have been reminded of once their well-known curiosity was piqued by one of the most unusual of prologues. In the discussion that follows we will, to the extent that it is possible, concentrate solely on material readily available to any educated person in the 1620s and early 1630s and likely to be familiar to him—although, for reasons that will become apparent, a partial exception will be made for Calantha's marriage to the dead Ithocles.

What was “of famous memory” by 1630 or so was not primarily the careers of Mountjoy or Penelope Rich. Celebrated in their own day, they were progressively more distant figures after the passing of well over two decades since their deaths. Penelope probably would have been the more vividly remembered of the two, but for contingent reasons: she was, after all, the worthy second earl of Essex's sister, the popular and politically prominent second earl of Warwick's mother, and Sir Philip Sidney's Stella. Significantly, however, the vogue for sonnet cycles had passed, and there had been no new individual editions of Astrophil and Stella since the late 1590s—the work survived only as one of the “additions” tacked on to folio editions of the Arcadia, which remained popular.¹¹ As a sixteen-year-old college student in 1618 Sir Simonds D'Ewes dismissed poor Penelope as “old Lady Rich, mother of the Earl of Warwick, who was thought to be no better than need constrained.”¹² Mountjoy was even worse off, for he had neither legitimate issue nor a sonnet sequence to keep his memory fresh. He was remembered by 1630 for his conquest of Ireland (although after thirty years a large share of the glory had gradually been transferred to Essex) and especially for his connection with William Laud, who as his chaplain had officiated at his scandalous marriage to Penelope.¹³ Neither Penelope nor Mountjoy had been entirely forgotten by the time The Broken Heart was performed, but they were hardly figures to be evoked by the play unless the audience had first been pointed in their direction by some very strong suggestion—supplied in the play by two other, more immediately recognizable characters.

The dominant figure from the immediate past was of course Queen Elizabeth. Two monarchs on, in the reign of Charles I, the church bells of London still “rang merrily, in remembrance of famous Queen Elizabeth” every November 17th, the anniversary of her accession day. The deepening political crises of her last years, the unseemly, almost desperate yearning for getting on with a new reign, all that one would have thought anyone living in 1630 could possibly have remembered of Elizabeth, had somehow vanished from memory, and within a few years of her death, in Godfrey Goodman's bitter judgement, “the Queen did seem to revive … and in effect more solemnity and joy [were shown] in memory of her coronation than was for the coming in of King James.” Her epoch became the golden age and her reign the benchmark against which her successors were judged and (outside of the court masques) in one degree or another found wanting.¹⁴

Elizabeth, however, was more a presence than a personality—taken to be a given at all times and never departing for forty-four years from her motto, semper eadem. The intractable nature of her character as generally conceived presented special dramatic problems that Ford was to solve in a special way. Among the Elizabethans, however, the character most easily captured and most inherently dramatic was not the queen herself but the ill-fated second Earl of Essex. Unlike his sister Penelope or his friend Mountjoy, Essex left a name worth conjuring with decades later. At any time in the seventeenth century his gallant and tragic career was, as Samuel Daniel put it, a particularly vivid instance of “the universall notions of ambition and envie, the perpetuall arguments of bookes or tragedies.”¹⁵ The legendary Sidney had bequeathed to Essex his sword and his wife, and Essex accordingly also succeeded him as the model of courtesy and courage, in death as much as in life.¹⁶ His rising in 1601 was seen not so much as a pardonable act of impetuosity as quite simply a trap that the too-honest earl fell into because his nobility prevented him from comprehending the machinations of his enemies. His cousin Fulke Greville described Essex as in a “pitfall,” the ingenuous victim of “sect-animals whose property was to wound and fly away,” and of “such instruments as naturally like bats both fly and prey in the dark.” The twenty-year-old Sir Simonds D'Ewes was reminded at the departure of the hated Spanish ambassador Gondomar in 1622 of “Burleigh that plotted Essex death, which fell out after his [own] death,” and shortly thereafter dedicated an afternoon to “a treatise concerning the Earle of Essex troubles before his death.” Another twenty-year-old, John Ford, like D'Ewes a student at the Middle Temple at the time, had been more poetic in the same vein when in 1606 in Fames Memoriall he lamented “Renowned Devoreux, whose aukward fate, / Was misconceited by fowle envies hate.”¹⁷

For those already disposed to remember him favorably, the hero of the 1590s seemed peculiarly compelling during the deeply depressing 1620s. Essex was still the last victorious general anyone could remember during a decade marked first by the humiliating failure to aid the very Continental allies in whose causes he had fought and then by successive defeats at the hands of the same powers whom he had earlier humbled. (Ford dedicated The Broken Heart to the only English soldier who could possibly have claimed Essex's mantle in that decade, William, Lord Craven.) Contempories found the analogies especially close after 1624, when a new war with Spain was dressed up as a reenactment of the great days of Elizabeth. Partly by accident, increasingly by design, the leading figures in the English campaigns immediately recalled the hero of the earlier efforts. The four English commanders in the expedition of 1624 in aid of the Dutch included the young third earl of Essex and Robert, Lord Willoughby, who had fought under the second earl, as well as the earl of Southampton, who, as D'Ewes had written in his college diary, had a “deep hand” in the rising of 1601 and was accordingly “the better beloved.” The next year, 1625, an expedition against Cadiz was intended from the start as a reprise of Essex's triumph of 1596, and the third earl was induced against his own inclination to take the post of second in command so that his family name might inspirit the troops. Gervase Markham wrote Honour in his Perfection on the occasion of the Dutch expedition to prophesy glory for the young Essex by rhapsodizing on the triumphs of his father, and at the same time the inveterate polemicist Thomas Scott in Robert Earle of Essex his Ghost carried matters to their logical conclusion by pretending to speak with the voice of the second earl of Essex himself in order to urge an anti-Spanish Protestant alliance.¹⁸ With an eye on the market for Essex memorabilia, the London stationer Cuthbert Wright promptly reissued A Lamentable Ditty of 1603 on the earl's execution and followed it up with A Lamentable New Ballad on the same subject, “to the tune of Essex last goodnight.”¹⁹

When both the Dutch expedition and the attack on Cadiz failed, along with Buckingham's attempt to relieve La Rochelle in 1627, the consequence was a further increase in the prestige of the earlier generation that was able to accomplish what the present one glaringly was unable to do. Creating a thoroughly incongruous Elizabethan popular front (as had Thomas Scott before him), John Russell in a bitter verse diatribe against Buckingham asked in 1628, “Where now is Essex, Norris, Rawleigh, Drake? / (At whose remembrance yet proud Spaine doth quake) / Where's Burleigh, Cecill, all those axletrees / Of state, that brought our foes upon their knees?”²⁰ Buckingham himself may have been aware of just whose standards he was to come up to, for he was reported in 1627 on the eve of his disastrous expedition to have boasted “that before Mid-summer he will and shall be more honoured and beloved of the Commons than ever the Earl of Essex was.”²¹ In the event, it was a bad prediction, but comparisons could hardly be avoided between the two royal favorites of military inclination who met sudden violent ends. Sir Henry Wotton, who had served both Essex and Buckingham, saw fit on Buckingham's death to revive an old project, an essay contrasting Essex and his archrival Cecil, and to convert it into a Parallell between earl and duke.²² It circulated privately in the 1630s, as did Sir Robert Naunton's memoir of the leading personalities of Elizabeth's reign, Fragmenta Regalia, but both works were printed in 1641 as testimony to the continuing fascination of the era. In the meanwhile, the public taste for evocations of the earlier period, of which both efforts were a sign, was met by successive editions of William Camden's Annales in the 1620s and 1630s.

Essex had complained in his own lifetime that he was all too suitable a candidate for representation on the stage. After his execution, the prosecution of Samuel Daniel for Philotas, like the fate of Fulke Greville's Anthony and Cleopatra (burned by its author because of the resemblance between the protagonists and Essex and Elizabeth), suggested how easily the earl might come to the minds of audiences early in the reign of James.²³ It may seem odd that a play of the 1630s should also include a character, Ithocles, who bears a strong resemblance to a man who died in 1601, but as has been repeatedly suggested, no moss had grown on Essex's memory in the intervening three decades, and it will be remembered as well that Ford was fond of the drama of the earlier era. (He went back to the 1590s for the structure of Perkin Warbeck and for the theme of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.) Admittedly, in finding Essex in The Broken Heart we join what Lily Campbell as far back as 1938 described as “a great chorus of political identifiers, shouting in volumes thick and thin their scholarly equivalent of ‘That's Him!’ ‘That's Essex!’ ‘That's Mary!’ ‘That's Elizabeth!’ ‘That's Sir Walter Raleigh!’—but most often, ‘That's Essex!’”²⁴ We can only reply that the habit of Essex-finding was not invented in the twentieth century, but by the audiences who first saw the plays in question, and if the resemblance between Ithocles and Essex in The Broken Heart is somehow a remarkable coincidence, then Ford must have been singularly blind to the inevitable consequences of his own inadvertent parallels. Once directed to the recent past by the prologue, a veteran theatre audience would have little difficulty in spotting the obvious similarities—and in The Broken Heart there are similarities aplenty just as soon as Ithocles is on stage in the second scene.

The play's first expository scene is given over to Orgilus and his predicament, the enforced marriage of his betrothed to another because of the ambition of her brother. This transgression explains Orgilus' desire for vengeance, the mechanism by which the action of the play is moved along almost to the end, but nothing in Orgilus' situation would immediately suggest a particular historical analogue, anymore than one could have been deduced from Vindice's opening tale of past injury in The Revenger's Tragedy. In the second scene, however, in come a virgin princess and a triumphant general just returned from finally subduing a neighboring territory that had been the scene of previous wars and that now has been added as a province to the Spartan monarchy. Then, and only then, after the Elizabeth and Essex parallel has first been raised—it will be continued and developed—would it have become possible for speculation to extend to the identity of the general's wronged sister and, at the third remove, to the original of her outraged lover. The simple fact of the matter is that apart from the marked similarities in their marital circumstances, Penthea and Orgilus bear little direct resemblance to their proposed historical doubles: the flamboyant Penelope, the warlike Mountjoy, the chivalrous Sidney.

By contrast, the identification between Ithocles and Essex would have been easy to make even in the first act. The entrance of Ithocles, fresh from conquering Messene, immediately suggests the last victory of English arms anyone in the play's audience could possibly have remembered, the subjugation of the revolt of Tyrone in the conquered province of Ireland at the very end of Elizabeth's reign. Essex's Irish command was actually the beginning of his final disgrace, a point noted twice by Ford himself back in 1606 in Fames Memoriall.²⁵ But more frequently, especially as time passed, it was regarded as another and, as it turned out, the last of his unrewarded triumphs. Mountjoy, the true victor, might or might not receive a share of the credit in popular memory because he might or might not come to mind, but Ireland was almost invariably remembered as at least in part an Essex victory. As Fulke Greville recalled it, Elizabeth “first by Essex, and after by Mountjoy, overthrew the Irish, and sent home the Spaniard well recompensed with loss and dishonour for assisting her rebels.” In 1624 Thomas Scott denigrated Mountjoy's role in Ireland by having Essex boast that after he had Tyrone “upon his knees,” his commission was transferred to “another Noble, my inferiour: who was sent over to wade [go] against those Rebels, after I had broken the Ice aforehand; and hee had the Honor, happily to performe what I had carefully and painefully, projected and intended.” With time Ireland was just another, rather vague addition to Essex's reputation and part of that long train of military successes by which the past could be called upon for the purpose of reproaching the present. “In Ireland, France, and Spaine, / they fear'd great Essex name— / And England lov'd the same / in every place.”²⁶

Most importantly, the resemblance is not only circumstantial. Ithocles really does behave as if he were Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex: impetuous, ambitious, ingenuous, much too brave and much too honorable for his own good. Camden summed up the popular verdict in his Annales of Elizabeth's reign when he wrote of Essex:

And indeed he seemed not to be made for the Court, who was slow to any wickednesse, of a soft nature to take offence, and hard to lay it downe, and one that could not cover his affections. … To speake in a word, No man was more ambitious of glory by vertue, no man more carelesse of all things else.²⁷

The ambition that Ithocles denounces as “of viper's breed” (2.2.1) originally prompted him to marry Penthea to Bassanes, as subsequently it hurries on his suit to Calantha. But his Essex-like innocence of wickedness, his “carelessness” about anything not related to glory by virtue, ultimately destroys him because he cannot conceive what is plain to the audience and might have suggested itself to anyone else—that the wrong he has done Orgilus festers to the point where the latter will desperately seek revenge.

These parallels between Spartan and English generals are not restricted to a few significant points. They recur regularly throughout The Broken Heart, from Ithocles' triumphant entry to his murder and (we will suggest) beyond that to the final scene with his corpse. To begin with, Essex's violent jealousy of his rivals for Elizabeth's favor was notorious. As in the case of Ithocles' near brawl with Nearchus for the possession of Calantha's gold ring, twice Essex became enraged because of a token Elizabeth presented to another. In the better known and closer parallel, the gold chess piece the queen gave to the young Mountjoy prompted an insult from Essex that led to a duel and from there to a fast friendship.²⁸ Later, in 4.4, Ithocles held fast in Orgilus' trick chair might be Essex at his own end, caught in what Ford in 1620 had called “the toyles, snares, and trappes of the envious.”²⁹ Ithocles lacks his historical counterpart's Christian piety, hardly appropriate in pagan Sparta, but otherwise he is the same man in the same situation: by turns brave and defiant (as Essex was at his trial) and composed and reconciled (as Essex was on the scaffold).³⁰ Essex forgave his executioner and called him “the minister of justice,” just as Ithocles forgives Orgilus (“Nimble in vengeance, I forgive thee”) and confesses that the injury he has inflicted on Penthea justifies his fate (4.4.63,65-66), while Essex's last words, “strike, strike,” are echoed in Ithocles' “Strike home” (4.4.39).³¹ The parallel even extends as far as the most gruesome detail, fortitude under pain. In the Essex execution the headsman bungled the job the first two times and dispatched his victim only with the third stroke, but the earl, to the admiration of the spectators, never flinched, a last triumph celebrated by Robert Pricket in the ghastly verses,

Honor ne're moov'd, a third blow did devide
The body from the worlds admired pride:
Was that the way to lose a head
To have an Earle so butchered?(32)

Orgilus has much the same thing to say of his victim, whose courage and endurance he commemorates by announcing:

                                                                                          That Ithocles
Was murdered; rather butchered, had not bravery
Of an undaunted spirit, conquering terror,
Proclaimed his last act triumph over ruin.

(5.2.40-43)

Nor is the analogy quite over at Ithocles' death. His body is carried on stage in the very last scene of The Broken Heart to fulfill Tecnicus' prophecy that the lifeless trunk shall wed the broken heart. In the dramatic realization of that prophecy we come about as close as we ever may, given the scarcity of biographical details, to a direct link between an important episode in the play and a source known personally to Ford but otherwise not widely known. At the very last Calantha disposes of her realm by the terms of a feigned marriage proposal to Nearchus, immediately and correctly discerned by Bassanes to be in fact “a testament” (5.3.53), then turns to the body of Ithocles to put on his finger her mother's wedding ring, declaring, “Thus I new-marry him whose wife I am” (5.3.66). Then of course she dies of a broken heart. Here in the last moments of the last scene, the congruence between recent English history and the dramatic action is more complete than at any other point in the play.

As was well known, Queen Elizabeth in her last month of life ordered removed from her finger the ring originally given to her by the city of London to marry her symbolically to the kingdom. Contemporaries took the action to be a portent, and indeed soon afterward the queen fell into a deep and ultimately fatal melancholy, attributed by Essex's remaining partisans to her remorse at his execution.³³ Ford, however, has actually gone further than this common knowledge in his reworking of the episode. Although it was not generally known, when Elizabeth rid herself of the city of London's ring, she did not remove a second ring, presented to her by Essex, but retained it until her dying day. In having Calantha “marry” Ithocles' corpse with a ring after taking leave of her kingdom through a form of unmarrying ceremony, Ford was simply varying Elizabeth's actions slightly and compressing two rings into one.

The disjunction of the fate of the two rings was noted by members of the court, and it was just another step to applying an obvious romantic gloss to the episode. Narrow as the base provided by the retention of Essex's ring may have been, on it were erected all of the various and absurd accounts, some still current, in which rings not sent or missent frustrate Elizabeth's hope of granting Essex a last-minute pardon and plunge her into her fatal grief.³⁴ Webster had already alluded in unmistakable fashion to one of the variants on the ring story in The Devil's Law-Case, published as recently as 1623, so that there is every reason to suppose that Ford's audience caught the full force of the allusion in Calantha's gesture, in which through the ring she embraces death and Ithocles at once.³⁵ Webster's version of the story, however, is simply a form of the ring missent, “that loose report which hath crept into our discourse,” as Clarendon calls it.³⁶ Ford, by contrast, constructs his scene without much alteration of the historical original, and significantly he was one of the relatively few people in a position to have received a contemporary report of what happened in its simplest and most accurate form.

The only contemporary account of Elizabeth's disposal of the two rings is to be found in the entry of 4 April 1603 in the diary of John Manningham, then a student at the Middle Temple: “Dr. Parry told me the Countess Kildare assured him that the Queene caused the ring wherewith shee was wedded to the Crowne, to be cutt from hir finger some 6 weekes before hir death, but wore a ring which the Earl of Essex gave hir unto the day of hir death.”³⁷ Ford had been a contemporary of Manningham's at the Middle Temple for about six months when this entry was made, although the extant sections of the diary never mention his name. Manningham, however, was an incorrigible vehicle for gossip, and his diary mostly consists of the sort of wisecracks masquerading as aphorisms and revelations of dubious veracity about the famous that can be found in one form or another in many other sources of the period. While best known for its entry about a performance of Twelfth Night at the Temple, the diary, as its most recent editor notes, is really the very model of the tablebook, the collection of scandal and good lines a prosaic would-be wit kept in order to facilitate their more exact retailing.³⁸ Manningham even recorded the sources of his story for each entry (in most cases another member of his inn), and when he thought it necessary added a kind of annotation to make sure the point was clear. (“Shakespeare's name William” is the most famous.) He was hardly likely to keep his inside information about the death of Elizabeth to himself, and the Middle Temple was a small institution—no more than 200 to 250 members were likely to be in residence at any one time.³⁹ Directly or indirectly a very pedestrian and pedantic law student almost certainly provided the raw material Ford was to convert three decades later into a compelling dramatic moment in The Broken Heart.

Calantha's resemblance to Elizabeth is so close in this final scene that it is tempting to rest the case by simply stating that she “is” or at least “evokes” the English monarch. But Ford, in fact, treats the queen in a far more complex manner, and in that complexity we have an indication of his dramatic purpose. Elizabeth in Ford's (and the audience's) memory may have been a strong-willed virgin and the last of her line, but she was not a young woman who held the throne for only a fitful moment “when youth is ripe.” The character of Elizabeth is actually distributed among Calantha, Amyclas, and even Penthea. Amyclas is the old monarch whose long reign has brought peace to a country previously torn by the conflicts of feuding families. Penthea's death, a self-willed act caused by deliberately going without sleep and food for ten days, closely parallels Elizabeth's own end as it was widely reported.⁴⁰ Calantha's role in the last act of the play more symbolically recapitulates Elizabeth's final years: a monarch oppressed by a multitude of griefs, yet by all outward signs imperturbably maintaining the masque and mask of royalty until she gives way all at once. The device of fragmentation was probably the only way an artist of Ford's generation could have dealt with the awesome unchanging figure whose reign seemed to be the most unalterable given of his youth. Elizabeth in multiple guise could appear variously as aging monarch or nubile princess without Ford's quite having to present the almost mythical queen as flesh and blood.⁴¹ But there is more to the tactic than an understandable delicacy or even artistic necessity.

All of the allegory of The Broken Heart, and not just the rendering of Elizabeth, is in one sense fragmented, allusive, intermittent, always, except for the last scene, unfinished or imperfect in its analogies. In the hands of a less skilled tragedian the effect might have been a recurring tease, but in The Broken Heart the imperfect allegory serves instead to make the point: it is not individuals Ford wishes to evoke so much as it is the England of Elizabeth, through its leading characters, in order that the history of his own nation might resonate against the developing, unifying theme of the tragedy, the drama of Sparta's fate and the civic ideal that city-state proverbially embodied. If the play is to invest the English past with a mythic, “classical” meaning, then this unifying Spartan theme and its historical echo must run parallel until the very last scene; too complete a convergence too early, and the result will be the kind of bathos the prologue deplores.

Only in 5.3 can theme and echo be allowed to come together. Calantha first insists that the Spartan polity requires that she marry, but like Elizabeth, who also promised to take a husband, she has, in fact, a different solution in mind, and it is the same one as her historical original's. She wills her kingdom to a cousin, monarch of a neighboring state, who ascends his new throne precisely as if he were the king of Scotland now made king of England and Ireland (newly conquered Messene). Calantha's reason for insisting on marriage—the inability of a woman to rule a warrior state—has startled critics, and the neat disposal of her kingdom and court, down to the fine point of the viceroyalties, seems a little incongruous in the last actions of a tragedy. But Calantha's disability is merely the closest appropriate Spartan counterpart to the Elizabethan problem of succession, and her disposition of the kingdoms in such detail is equally essential to complete the exact correspondence between the tragedy's end and the denouement of Tudor political history. At this point alone Ford can and must make explicit the sustained implications of the “TRUTH” heralded by the prologue: in the briefest of final moments Sparta and England fuse completely, and the Tudor line dies in order that the Spartan ideal shall endure under a new dynasty.

III

It has been necessary to demonstrate the likely Caroline reception of The Broken Heart at some length because Ford is never obvious or inartistic in his Spartan evocation of England and because modern critics, lacking the historical memory of Ford's contemporaries, have created difficulties over the structure of the play that would not have presented themselves to its first audiences and readers. Caroline spectators would have recognized the significance of the polity whose fate unifies the disparate stories of the characters, and they would not have been unprepared for the last scenes. The structure of The Broken Heart perfectly reflects and can best be explained by its Tudor theme. Out of conflict and potential chaos both Sparta and England achieve unity and peace.

Critics who have seen The Broken Heart simply as a tragedy stemming from Ithocles' enforcement of Penthea's marriage to Bassanes when she was already bethrothed to Orgilus have been confused about the play's central figure and wonder why the climax should be given over to Calantha, who rarely appears in the early acts and whose death is hardly required by the initial tragic premise.⁴² Certainly the dance scene does not function as an appropriate climax to any action centering on the four characters among whom Ford has thus far divided our interest. In the early acts of The Broken Heart Orgilus, Ithocles, Penthea, and Bassanes each sees himself as the central character in his own private drama. By constantly shifting point of view, Ford allows us to share the vision of each of these characters in turn, and so prevents the focus of the play from falling on any one of them. Setting himself up as wronged protagonist to Ithocles' villainous antagonist, Orgilus pursues a wavering course of vengeance against his enemy. But Ithocles, unaware of the role Orgilus has cast him in, romantically if ambitiously pursues his love for Calantha. Penthea sees herself as trapped in a moral limbo, married in faith to Orgilus but in law to Bassanes, so that her violated integrity can be restored only by death. And Bassanes, at first vacillating between adoration and suspicion of his wife, changes course entirely and resolves to become a true Spartan. For all of these characters the dance scene is irrelevant. Penthea and Ithocles are already dead; for Orgilus Calantha's dance is an anticlimax and for Bassanes it is a spectacle. Yet critics since Charles Lamb have felt and theater productions have demonstrated that the dance scene is indeed the play's climax.⁴³

In it Calantha sacrifices herself by fulfilling her duty to her country at the expense of her private feelings and ultimately her life. The Broken Heart presents as its chief theme and its unifying action the working out of Sparta's fate, in which the fates of the individual characters are subsumed. Sparta is more important than any Spartan.⁴⁴ In dying the heroes and heroines of The Broken Heart—but especially Calantha—achieve greatness for themselves and, more importantly, regeneration for Sparta—and by implication for England.

The Sparta of The Broken Heart is Ford's own creation, although it is based in important respects on the Renaissance image of Sparta. Ford emphasizes his characters' sense of duty to their country and the fortitude of his heroines, and he presents Sparta as a warrior state.⁴⁵ Specific details aside, Sparta provided an appropriate setting for Ford's purposes because it was identified with a distinctive and admirable civic ideal embodied in a particular state. That ideal as Ford presents it in The Broken Heart is essentially the sublimation of private self in public duty. As an ideal Sparta is most appropriately embodied in the persons of her rulers, Amyclas, Calantha, and finally Nearchus. The Spartan virtues of self-control and duty to country demonstrated by them throughout the play are attributes of their characters as individuals no less than of their public roles. Nearchus, for example, perceiving Calantha's love for Ithocles, gives up his own suit with the wisdom and restraint that fit him for the Spartan throne.⁴⁶ All three of the Spartan rulers possess an integrity of self that Penthea, Ithocles, and Orgilus, whose private feelings conflict with their public duty, can find only in death.

At first Ford presents the history of Sparta primarily as a backdrop to the personal struggles of the leading characters. The choice of so distinctive and unusual a location, however, in itself focuses interest on the state and its unique public culture. In the person of Amyclas, moreover, there is from the start a character who repeatedly draws attention to the importance of the kingdom itself. Amyclas rejoices that “The Spartan gods are gracious” (1.2.1) in granting the conquest of Messene that makes Sparta “a monarchy at length” (1.2. 13). He hopes that a marriage between Nearchus and Calantha will insure the future security of the state (3.3), and he is anxious about Apollo's oracle, not for himself, but for his daughter and his kingdom (4.3). Tecnicus also voices concern for Sparta; he prophesies the deaths of Ithocles and Orgilus yet laments not over them but “O Sparta, / O Lacedaemon!” (4.1.124-25 and 142-43). By the last act the fate of the city-state has come to dominate the action as Calantha, “in all [Amyclas'] daughter” (1.2.69), gives up her life in affirmation of her country's ideals.

Apollo's oracle is crucial to our understanding of Calantha's role in the last act of The Broken Heart. The oracle prophesies both the succession of Nearchus and the death of Calantha: “want of sap / Doth cause to quail the budding grape” (4.3.13-14). While Ithocles and Orgilus die for what they have done and Penthea for what has been done to her, each fulfilling some objective or subjective sense of justice, Calantha's death is a divinely required sacrifice. Ford makes explicit Calantha's role as willing sacrificial victim by his ritualistic staging of the play's last two scenes. In 5.2 Calantha refuses to interrupt the carefully wrought harmony of Prophilus and Euphrania's marriage dance, which symbolizes order and renewal, despite the jarring counterrhythm created by the messengers who announce the deaths of her father, her friend, and her betrothed lover. She defends her continuation of the dance in terms that point to its symbolic significance and suggest that she herself understands the nature of the ritual she is enacting:

                                        'tis, methinks, a rare presumption
In any, who prefers our lawful pleasures
Before their own sour censure, to interrupt
The custom of this ceremony bluntly.

(5.2. 24-27)

By Ford's day the disrupted celebration had become a well-established dramatic symbol of disorder. Calantha's refusal to interrupt her dance powerfully asserts the preservation of the Spartan order over which she herself now presides. The heroic deliberateness of Calantha's choice becomes apparent in the play's final scene when the queen stage-manages her own funeral-marriage. By denying herself the natural outlet of “shrieks and outcries” (5.3. 72) in order to fulfill her duties as queen of Sparta, Calantha has imposed on herself an emotional burden impossible to bear. Symbolically her heart breaks. Calantha's death, then, results directly from her repression of personal grief in the name of Spartan duty. Ford's elaborate stage directions at the beginning of 5.3 emphasize the religious nature of the play's final rite. Clad in the white robe of a pure victim, Calantha dies willingly, “smiling” (5.3. 76), before the altar of the Spartan gods.

Previous criticism has missed the full public dimension of this final scene. Calantha's death has generally been regarded as a personal tragedy or as a self-immolation in tribute to an aristrocratic ideal of reticence by which Calantha reconciles her public and private duties.⁴⁷ But the setting is not merely any Renaissance or ancient patriciate; it is Sparta and also England. Calantha's death is not only appropriate, it is also required as public expiation for public wrong. Although the other characters have already paid for their private sins—Bassanes for his jealousy, Ithocles for his ambition, Orgilus for his vengefulness—these Spartans are not just private citizens: there are no private citizens in Sparta. Their transgressions treaten the fabric of a commonwealth built upon public duty. Bassanes' violent suspicions, especially his accusation of incest, and Ithocles' rudeness to the Prince of Argos over Calantha's ring undermine social and political relationships. More seriously, in preventing the marriage of Penthea and Orgilus, Ithocles not only ruins their happiness and causes Penthea's madness and suicide, but he has also disrupted Amyclas' plan to put an end to the contention between the houses of Thrasus and Crotolon. Ithocles' continuation of the vendetta leads inevitably to his own death at the hands of Orgilus. In killing Ithocles, Orgilus in turn destroys not only a personal enemy but Sparta's greatest general and potential future king. The cumulative effect of the wrongs done to Sparta is greater than the suffering of any individual, for through the conflicts of her citizens Sparta faces disintegration as an ideal and possibly even as a state. By their deaths Ithocles and Orgilus can atone for their personal sins but only partially for their crimes against the state. Orgilus' murder of Ithocles, while in one sense a just punishment, is also a sinful act of vengeance. The queen's order for Orgilus' death, however, is an unexceptionable act of justice, finally putting an end to the chain of vengeance that stretches back into the Spartan past. Although Orgilus links Calantha herself to this bloody chain, her death requires no further act of vengeance because it results from her own heroic determination to vindicate the Spartan ideal, violated by most of the other major characters, of subordinating one's own needs to those of one's country. Calantha's death finally expiates the wrongs done to Sparta.

The play's unifying pattern of sin, punishment, and expiation is reinforced through the repetition of visual and verbal images. Ford presents as rituals all three of the play's onstage deaths, all of which have been prophesied, suggesting that they are pieces of the same providential design. Orgilus stabs Ithocles with the solemnity of a priest offering a sacrifice: “To sacrifice a tyrant to a turtle” (4.4.29). And Ithocles acknowledges the justice of his death for Penthea's “forced faith” (4.4.66). Orgilus in turn willingly becomes his own “executioner” (5.2.147) in reparation for the murder of Ithocles, stabbing himself since he is “well skilled in letting blood” (5.2.101). In this ceremony, this “pastime” that “Appears majestical” (5.2.131-32), Bassanes assists Orgilus (“How is't man? Droop not yet” [5.2.135]) as courteously as Orgilus encouraged Ithocles (“Keep up thy spirit” [4.4.60]). The ritualistic death scenes of Ithocles and Orgilus foreshadow the much more elaborate ceremony of Calantha's death. And the bloodlessness of the dead Ithocles and Orgilus links them imagistically with Penthea, who starves her “blood” (4.2. 151) to pay for the pollution of her body, as well as with Calantha, to whose cheeks the dance, or the news of death, brings the blood rushing (5.2. 21-22) and who dies a pale figure dressed in white.⁴⁸ In their courageous acceptance of death and acknowledgement of its justice, Penthea, Ithocles, and Orgilus share with Calantha in the salvation of Sparta. As each of these characters gives up his personal struggle, the disparate strands of the play's action coalesce and flow into the one action that contains them all, the working out of Sparta's fate, finally accomplished by Calantha, who hands over her kingdom, purged and intact, to her cousin Nearchus, prince of neighboring Argos.

The Broken Heart is a cycle completed.⁴⁹ It is also, we will suggest, a cycle broken. The audience that has seen Sparta and England shadow each other throughout the play and finally merge in the last scene was not likely to be taken unaware by Calantha's death. They knew of course that Elizabeth had died and the Tudor line with her—an event that had a moral as well as a political significance. From at least as far back as Polydore Vergil down to Samuel Daniel and Sir Walter Ralegh, English history was seen in terms of a recurring cycle of dynastic foundation and extinction, generally in three generations, dating from the Conquest. In Ralegh's popular History of the World, which went through five editions between 1614 and 1634, the pattern proposed is one of transgression and expiation. The innocent pay for the deeds of the guilty, so that for the sins of the Tudors the line of Henry VII “ended in his grand-children, as that of Edward the Third and Henry the Fourth had done.”⁵⁰

This concept of English history was clearly familiar to Ford: Daubeney invokes it in Perkin Warbeck. In the expository first scene Durham and Daubeney recount the civil war between York and Lancaster that has culminated in the rule of Henry VII. We quote from the quarto of 1634:

Edward the fourth after a doubtfull fortune
Yeelded to nature; leaving to his sonnes
Edward and Richard, the inheritance
Of a most bloudy purchase; these young Princes
Richard the Tirant their unnaturall Uncle
Forc'd to a violent grave, so just is Heaven.
Him hath your Majestie by your own arme
Divinely strengthen'd, pulld from his Boares stie
And strucke the black Usurper to a Carkasse

(sig. Bv)

Philip Edwards points out that in his edition of Perkin Warbeck Peter Ure repunctuated this speech to make “so just is Heaven” go with the following rather than the preceding lines, presumably because Ure could not conceive of the murder of the little princes as a divine punishment for the sins of their father. Edwards, by contrast, urges the “barbarous” nature of Daubeney's interpretation of history as a virtual denial of “any theory of divine intervention” in the play.⁵¹ In fact, the line does not need to be repunctuated, nor should Daubeney's view be seen as particularly bloodthirsty. Rather, he is expressing a common view of the moral purpose behind English dynastic history. (Ralegh, indeed, read exactly the same lesson into the deaths of the little princes.)⁵²

Unlike the overthrow of the house of York, the extinction of the Tudor line could be seen as the end of the pattern. The death without issue of a virgin princess brought the cycle to a close by allowing the guiltless accession of an untained foreign prince.⁵³ In The Broken Heart the sins for which Calantha's line is extinguished are those of the polity rather than the dynasty, but otherwise the parallel holds very closely. The disruptions of the social order that were first quieted by Amyclas before the opening of the play and that break out again at the very end of his reign are finally expiated by Calantha. Through her death she can bequeath a Sparta purified to a new prince in no way implicated in past transgressions. In The Broken Heart Ford has raised recent English history to the level of tragic necessity.

The ending of the play is appropriately subdued. There is none of the tragic agony of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. The final mood in The Broken Heart is rather one of reconciliation and acceptance as Calantha calmly disposes of her realms and her subjects and new-marries Ithocles, and Nearchus takes over the kingdom of Sparta. In keeping with the play's classical propriety, the quiet tone of the ending mutes its tragic force. The peculiar emotional effect of the conclusion of The Broken Heart can, like the play's structure, be attributed to its Tudor theme. The “tragic” death of the old monarch (Amyclas-Calantha) is subsumed in the rebirth of the kingdom. Nearchus can ascend the throne of Sparta just in the way that James assumed the crown of England—“in a profound peace.”⁵⁴

Notes

1. Quotations are taken from T. J. B. Spencer, ed., The Broken Heart (Manchester, Eng., 1980).

2. See Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and The Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977).

3. Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Politics of Queen Elizabeth (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), II, 195, 240. See also Edith Rickert, “Political Propaganda and Satire in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Modern Philology, 21 (1923-1924), 74-75. We should emphasize that there was little chance that either Ford or his audience knew anything of these proposals.

4. Quoted from Peter Ure, ed., Perkin Warbeck (London, 1968).

5. Spencer, pp. 15-20, summarizes the scholarship on Ford's possible sources for The Broken Heart.

6. S. P. Sherman, “Stella and The Broken Heart,” PMLA, 24 (1909), 274-85.

7. Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Ford and the Earl of Devonshire,” Review of English Studies, 29 (1978), 447-52. Duncan-Jones suggests that the identification of Calantha as Elizabeth might “help to explain both the oddity and the ultimate strength of her part in the play” (p. 451), but she does not elaborate on this important point.

8. William A. Armstrong, “The Audience of the Elizabethan Private Theatres,” Review of English Studies, 10 (1959), 247-48; Clifford Leech, “The Caroline Audience,” Modern Language Review, 36 (1941), 304-19. See also David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 12-13; Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642 (Princeton, N.J., 1981), p. 162; Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 106-108, 111-113. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, Wisc., 1984), p. 47, stresses that the inexactness or incompleteness of analogies between fiction and historical fact did not bother contemporaries and could serve as a useful line of defence for the author.

9. Leech, pp. 310-15; Cook, pp. 164-67.

10. OED, s.v. “Presentment.” For lawyers at the Blackfriars see Armstrong, p. 237.

11. Christopher R. Wilson, “Astrophil and Stella: a Tangled Editorial Web,” The Library, 6th Ser., 1 (1979), 336-46.

12. [John Howard Marsden], College Life in the Time of James the First as Illustrated by an Unpublished Diary of Sir Symonds D'Ewes, Baronet, and M.P. (1851), p. 47.

13. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645 (London, 1940), pp. 36-37.

14. Thomas Birch, comp., The Court and Times of Charles I, ed. R.F. Williams (1848), I, 171, II, 80, 145; Godfrey Goodman, The Court of King James I, ed. John S. Brewer (1839), I, 98. See also Christopher Hill, “Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present, No. 92 (Aug. 1981), pp. 110-11; Anne Barton, “Harking Back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia,” ELH, 48 (1981), 706-31.

15. A. B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, I(London, 1885), xxiii.

16. See Ray Heffner, “Essex, the Ideal Courtier,” ELH, 1 (1934), 7-36.

17. John Gouws, ed., The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (Oxford, 1986), pp. 93-97; Elizabeth Bourcier, ed., The Diary of Sir Simonds D'Ewes (1622-1624), Publications de la Sorbonne, Litteratures, No. 5 (Paris, 1974), pp. 78, 87; Fames Memoriall, or the Earle of Devonshire Deceased … (1606), sigs. C3-C3v.

18. Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel, The Life of Robert Devereux, the Third Earl of Essex, 1591-1646 (Lincoln, Neb., 1970), pp. 118-19, 129; [Marsden], College Life in the Time of James I, p. 47.

19. The text of the two ballads may be found conveniently in William Chappell, ed., The Roxburghe Ballads, I (1888, rpt. New York, 1966), 564-74.

20. I. R. [John Russell], The Spy, Discovering the Danger of Arminian Heresie and Spanish Trecherie (Strasburgh [i.e., Amsterdam], 1628), sig. Av.

21. Birch, I, 217.

22. The piece circulated privately in the 1630s and was published posthumously as A Parallell betweene Robert late Earle of Essex, and George late Duke of Buckingham (1641). For the original project see Logan Pearsall Smith, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (Oxford, 1907), I, 130, 130n.

23. Bevington, p. 290; The Tragedy of Philotas by Samuel Daniel, ed. Laurence Michel, Yale Studies in English, No. 110 (New Haven, Conn., 1949), pp. 36-66; Greville, p. 93.

24. “The Use of Historical Patterns in the Reign of Elizabeth,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 1 (1937-1938), 136.

25. Sig. C3v.

26. Greville, p. 126; Robert Earl of Essex his Ghost, Sent from Elizian … (1624), p. 8; A Lamentable Ditty, Roxburghe Ballads, I, 565.

27. Annales, or the Historie of the Most Renowned and Virtuous Princess Elizabeth, Late Queene of England, trans. R. Norton, 3rd ed. (1635), pp. 552-53.

28. Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia or Observations on Queen Elizabeth, Her Times & Favorites, ed. John S. Cerovski (Washington, D.C., 1985), pp. 75-76. Cf. Francis Osborne, Historical Memoirs of the Reigns of Elizabeth and King James in Secret History of the Court of James I, ed. Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1811), I, 47-49; William Sanderson, Aulicus Coquinariae in Scott, II, 138. Although the earliest of these three accounts, Naunton's, first appeared in print in 1641, each version differs so much from the others in detail (and in the source to which the story is attributed) as to indicate an independent origin in each case: some version or other was presumably abroad and in widespread circulation well before Fragmenta Regalia was published. See in general Frederick M. Jones, Mountjoy, 1563-1606, The Last Elizabethan Deputy (Dublin, 1958), pp. 23, 187-88. For another quarrel over a gold token, this time between Essex and Ralegh, see Charles E. Mounts, “The Ralegh-Essex Rivalry and Mother Hubberds Tale,” Modern Language Notes, 65 (1950), 509-13.

29. A Line of Life, ed. John Payne Collier, Shakespeare Society of London Publications, 10 (1843; rpt. 1966), 62.

30. The source for Essex's trial and execution most immediately available to Ford's audience would have been Camden, Annales, pp. 543-51. Two secondary sources that provide a summary of the very numerous contemporary accounts of Essex's last moments are Snow, 15-16; G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (London, 1937), pp. 322-25. See also below, n. 32.

31. Snow, p. 16.

32. Honors Fame in Triumph Riding, ed. A. B. Grosart (1604, facsimile rpt. Manchester, 1881) p. 29.

33. One can find this much of the ring story, along with a detailed account of Elizabeth's death, in Camden, pp. 584-86.

34. The evolution of the ring story may be traced in DNB, s.v. “Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex.” See also Robert Lacey, Robert Earl of Essex, An Elizabethan Icarus (London, 1971), pp. 314-315.

35. [Leonora]                                        Let me die
    In the distraction of that worthy princess
    Who loathed food, and sleep, and ceremony
    For thought of losing that brave gentleman
    She would fain have saved, had not a false conveyance
    Express'd him stubborn-hearted.

    Frances A. Shirley, ed., The Devil's Law-Case (Lincoln, Neb., 1972), 3.3.295-300. The play was probably first acted somewhere between 1617 and 1621 (pp. xi-xiv).

36. “The Difference and Disparity between the Estates and Conditions of George Duke of Buckingham, and Robert Earl of Essex,” in Sir Henry Wotton, Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651), p. 52.

37. Robert Parker Sorlein, ed., The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602-1603 (Hanover, N.H., 1976), p. 222. Dr. Henry Parry, then a royal chaplain and subsequently bishop of Worcester, was a personal friend of Manningham. The “Countess Kildare” is Frances Howard daughter of Catherine, countess of Nottingham, a great favorite of the queen. Catherine Howard had died the previous month, and in the wilder versions of the ring story she reputedly intercepts Essex's ring, but then confesses her crime to Elizabeth on her deathbed, breaking the queen's heart.

38. Diary of Manningham, pp. 1-2.

39. Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590-1640 (Totowa, N.J., 1972), pp. 10-17.

40. In addition to Camden, cited above, n. 33, see F. H. Mares, ed., The Memoirs of Robert Carey (Oxford, 1972), pp. 57-59.

41. The device of fragmenting the monarch had ample dramatic precedent in the Tudor masques. See Marie Axton, “The Tudor Mask and Elizabethan Court Drama,” in English Drama: Forms and Development, Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, ed. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 24-47. For state presentations of Elizabeth after her death see Barton, “Harking Back to Elizabeth,” pp. 712-19.

42. See H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford (London and New York, 1955), pp. 68-70; “Artifice or High Design?” Times Literary Supplement, 19 July 1957, pp. 433-35; Arthur C. Kirsch, Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (Charlottesville, Va., 1972), p. 116; Kenneth Muir, “The Case of John Ford,” Sewanee Review, 84 (1976), 624. For a defense of the play's structure in terms of the theme of enforced marriage see Glenn Blayney, “Convention, Plot, and Structure in The Broken Heart,” Modern Philology, 56 (1958), 1-9.

43. For a discussion of productions of The Broken Heart see Verna Ann Foster, “The Dramatic Art of John Ford: Varieties of Mode and Effect,” diss. Univ. of London (1977), pp. 447-54.

44. Two recent defenses of the structure of The Broken Heart in terms of a unifying theme are Eugene M. Waith, “Struggle for Calm: The Dramatic Structure of The Broken Heart,” in English Renaissance Drama: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Doran and Mark Eccles, ed. Standish Henning et al. (Carbondale, Ill., 1976), pp. 155-66, and Anne Barton, “Oxymoron and the Structure of Ford's ‘The Broken Heart’,” Essays and Studies, 33 (1980), 70-94. Barton's interpretation of The Broken Heart is in some respects similar to our own in that she sees Calantha as the play's central figure who vindicates “an aristocratic social order” (p. 73) that is more important than any individual. However, Barton's concern is with an aristocratic code rather than with Sparta as a polity, and we cannot agree with her argument that Ford deliberately misleads his audience as a means of dramatizing “the unknowability of fate” (p. 94).

45. See Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969) and Spencer, ed., The Broken Heart, pp. 21-25.

46. Nearchus corresponds to Ford's rather conventional definition of the good man in A Line of Life: one who out of his own private virtue voluntarily assists others for the public good. Ford gives James I as an example of such a man (pp. 64-69).

47. See especially Barton, “Oxymoron and the Structure of Ford's ‘The Broken Heart’.”

48. Thelma N. Greenfield, “The Language of Process in The Broken Heart,” PMLA, 87 (1972), 403, discusses the way in which blood imagery links Penthea, Ithocles, and Orgilus.

49. Dorothy M. Farr, John Ford and the Caroline Theatre (New York, 1979), p. 98, makes a similar point.

50. The History of the World (1614 [i.e. 1628]), pref., sig.[A4v]. Cf. F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif., 1967), pp. 278-79; Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr., Crime and God's Judgement in Shakespeare (Lexington, Ky., 1984).

51. Philip Edwards, “The Royal Pretenders in Massinger and Ford,” Essays and Studies, 27 (1974), 25.

52. The History of the World, pref., sig. [A4r].

53. The History of the World, sig. [A5r].

54. James Spedding et al., eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, VII (London, 1861), 167. Cf. the verdict of John Hawarde, an Inner Temple lawyer, immediately upon Elizabeth's death that “shee wente to her Forefathers in peace, lyved, reygned and dyed in peace, and bequeathed peace to her people.” William Paley Baildon, ed., Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609 (London, 1894), p. 178. Glynne Wickham has argued for the influence of the accession of James I on Shakespeare's last plays. See Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage (New York, 1969), pp. 249-65, and “From Tragedy to Tragi-Comedy: ‘King Lear’ as Prologue,” Shakespeare Survey, 26 (1973), 33–48.