SOURCE: Ornstein, Robert. “John Ford.” In The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, pp. 200-21. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1960.

Of the tragedies written between 1622 and the close of the theaters, only Ford's rank beside the masterpieces of the first decade. Blessed with the virtues of a constitutional monarch—sobriety, sincerity, and conventionality—Massinger had to be content in tragedy with unsubstantial regal gestures; he could not command the imagination as did the earlier Jacobeans. Shirley's dramatic authority was even more limited; at his best (in The Cardinal) he proves himself a skillful manager of plot. Because Ford had the courage and the will to break new dramatic ground, he was a less consistent and “correct” playwright than they. Yet even when his reach exceeds his grasp, he is indisputably the last of the Jacobeans—the last dramatist to make an original and significant contribution to early seventeenth-century tragedy.

Far more clearly than Middleton's, Ford's tragedies are an aristocratic rather than popular entertainment. His portraits of “noblesse” have a dignity and integrity that are lacking in Beaumont and Fletcher's posturing heroes. His ideals of love, as the date of The Peers' Challenge (1606) indicates, derive from Elizabethan Neoplatonism, not from the witty Petrarchanism of The Maid's Tragedy or The Changeling. Indeed, where Middleton ironically dissects the shams of honor, Ford attempts to recapture its meaning as a guide to the conduct of life. Informed by a courtly (though not always refined) sensibility, his plays are more remote from the actualities and exigencies of Jacobean life than any play we have studied so far. He is interested in the ethical problems that arise when the reality of marriage travesties the ideal, but he is not interested in the immediate social problem of enforced marriages. His plays do not teem with the references to contemporary manners and mores which “English” the Italian tragedies of Tourneur, Webster, and Middleton. He projects the aristocratic values of his age into a storied or aesthetically distanced past, where Friars deliver medieval sermons and brokenhearted lovers express the timeless pathos of willow pattern figures.

How distant Ford's art is from that of the earlier Jacobeans can be measured paradoxically by the extent to which he plagiarizes Shakespeare, a dramatist remote enough from Caroline audiences to provide a source of fresh and original situations.¹ Ford's drama is to Shakespeare's and Marlowe's as Euripides' is to Aeschylus' and Sophocles'. His tragic arena is bounded by the conventions of society; his tragic subject is the mystery of the heart. That his drama is more “psychological” than Middleton's, Webster's, Beaumont's, or Shakespeare's is not, however, beyond all dispute. If The Broken Heart seems to lack plot, it is because Ford is more interested in creating a tragic rhythm of lyric feeling than in psychological explorations. Like Aeschylus in the Agamemnon he develops a tragic situation, not a tragic sequence of events; he dramatizes the mounting, unendurable pressure of remembered wrongs that explodes at last in a spasm of violence. In Ford's “Oresteia” (which is set, interestingly enough, in ancient Sparta) familial crime—the sacrifice of a sister to a brother's ambition—is also treacherously revenged and the stain of murder expunged by ritual, through the ceremonious deaths of Orgilus and Calantha. All in all, Ford's psychological interests are as dramatic as Middleton's, and they lead to scenes of confrontation in Love's Sacrifice that are as theatrical as any in The Changeling. If we must blame psychology let it be for the tedious, vulgar subplots which Ford requires to flesh out the narrowly focused emotional dramas of 'Tis Pity and Love's Sacrifice. Or let us say that in Love's Sacrifice Ford, like Middleton, loses interest in his characters before their destinies are consummated because he is concerned only with the psychological drama of their relationships and not with their ability to confront death.

Though Ford departs from the dramatic techniques of the earlier Jacobeans, he also builds upon their achievements. When he attempts to imitate earlier melodrama, his passion is strained and meretricious. When he is content to suggest through stylized utterance the deeprooted passions which previous dramatists had unforgettably depicted, he achieves a unique artistic perfection. It is not accidental that many of the terms applied to Ford's drama are usually reserved for criticism of the plastic or pictorial arts, for in his finest plays the sound and fury of melodramatic conflict give way to the relative stasis of ceremonial gesture. Moments of intense feeling are recorded; sensationalism and violence intrude. But the total impression is of a tranquility and delicacy far removed from Webster and Tourneur. The aim in such plays as The Broken Heart and The Lady's Trial is not to hold a mirror up to nature but to capture an ultimate “ritual” expression of love and aristocratic “noblesse.” The protagonists of earlier tragedies were noble in their individuality—in their refusal to bow before circumstances. Ford's most admirable characters, however, seem to lose their individuality at climactic moments. Their nobility in the face of death springs not so much from depth of character as from an aristocratic awareness of the role which they must play—of the need to subordinate all personal feeling. They seem to realize that dying well (like living well) requires art and knowledge. They become, so to speak, artists within a work of art crystallizing through studied attitude the aristocratic values of their society; they make the aesthetic expression of virtue a virtue in itself.

To recognize Ford's method of stylization is perhaps to understand why his attempts at comedy are unsuccessful as well as indecent. His Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors used clownish simplicity as a ground burden to the sophisticated “divisions” of courtly love. They contrasted the artificial posturings of romantic heroes and heroines against the more realistic (if somewhat burlesqued) affections of maids and servants. Ford's comic characters are also coarser-grained than his heroes, but they are not realistic or satiric social types. They do not bring the sounds and smells of workaday London into the perfumed corridors of Veronese palaces. Instead they are caricatures—at times grotesque ones—of his romantic protagonists. It is as if Ford, knowing the true proportions of his delicate lovers, deliberately distorts them for comic and moral contrasts, to create lewd antimasques to romantic tragedy. The vulgarity of the gutter candidly reported (as in Marston) has at least a natural and earthy vitality. The vulgarity of the boudoir, burlesqued by a writer who had no comic talent, is more often than not simply disgusting.

Earlier dramatists were more uneven in their artistic achievement than Ford, but he alone wrote plays like Love's Sacrifice that are both delicate and gross, finely wrought and carelessly patched together. Only in The Broken Heart does one feel that he perfectly executed his artistic intention. In 'Tis Pity his reach exceeded his grasp; his techniques were not refined enough for the moral and aesthetic complexity of his subject. Although the chronology of Ford's plays remains problemmatical, 'Tis Pity seems to me the earliest of the tragedies.² Far more successful artistically than Love's Sacrifice, it is notwithstanding less mature in its characterizations and less sophisticated in its themes than the other tragedies. It lacks the concern with aristocratic codes of behavior that marks Ford's later plays and it is the only one which pretends to an ideological significance in the manner of earlier Jacobean plays.

Ford's treatment of incest is the most daring in Jacobean drama, but it is not as unique as critics have made it appear. The debate over nature and moral law in the opening scene of 'Tis Pity recalls similar dialectical moments in the plays of Marston, Tourneur, and Fletcher. In the first speech of the play, the Friar warns his student, Giovanni, against the intellectual subtlety and curiosity that lead men away from God:

Dispute no more in this, for know (young man)
These are no Schoole-points; nice Philosophy
May tolerate unlikely arguments,
But Heaven admits no jest; wits that presum'd
On wit too much, by striving how to prove
There was no God; with foolish grounds of Art,
Discover'd first the neerest way to Hell;
And fild the world with develish Atheisme:
Such questions youth are fond; for better 'tis,
To blesse the Sunne, then reason why it shines;
Yet hee thou talk'st of, is above the Sun.(3)

(I. i)

Echoing the quietism of Renaissance apologists, the Friar seems to recall Tourneur's assertion that God is above nature (or the sun). Like D'Amville's, Giovanni's naturalistic atheism has its libertine corollary, and like D'Amville he defends the naturalness of incest against the “customary forme” of moral law:

                                                                                Shall a peevish sound,
A customary forme, from man to man,
Of brother and of sister, be a barre
Twixt my perpetuall happinesse and mee?
Say that we had one father, say one wombe,
(Curse to my ioyes) gave both us life, and birth;
Are wee not therefore each to other bound
So much the more by Nature; by the links
Of blood, of reason; Nay if you will hav't,
Even of Religion, to be ever one,
One soule, one flesh, one love, one heart, one All?

(I. i)

The Friar counsels mortification of the flesh and self-abasement, but like earlier Jacobean heroes Giovanni finds that prayers and counsel are futile, that supposed remedies against passion are “but dreames and old mens tales / To fright unsteedy youth.” Convinced that he is fated to love and perish, he dares to reveal his passion to Annabella. When she objects, “You are my brother, Giovanni,” he answers:

                                                                                I know this:
And could afford you instance why to love
So much the more for this; to which intent
Wise Nature first in your Creation ment
To make you mine: else't had beene sinne and foule,
To share one beauty to a double soule.
Neerenesse in birth or blood, doth but perswade
A neerer neerenesse in affection.
I have askt Counsell of the holy Church,
Who tells mee I may love you, and 'tis iust,
That since I may, I should; and will, yes will.

(I. iii)

Up to this point the moral pattern of 'Tis Pity seems almost predictable. The only question would seem to be whether Giovanni will (like Malheureux) renounce his naturalism in time, or (like D'Amville) acknowledge God too late. The deliberate equivocation about the “Counsell of the holy Church” signals a new emphasis in characterization, however—a turning away from ideology to psychology. Intimating the shallowness of Giovanni's atheistic convictions, it prepares us for the casuistry with which he later rationalizes his seduction of Annabella. When the horrified Friar warns of catastrophe, Giovanni replies:

Father, in this you are uncharitable;
What I have done, I'le prove both fit and good.
It is a principall (which you have taught
When I was yet your Scholler) that the Frame
And Composition of the Minde doth follow
The Frame and Composition of Body:
So where the Bodies furniture is Beauty,
The Mindes must needs be Vertue: which allowed,
Vertue it selfe is Reason but refin'd,
And Love the Quintesence of that, this proves
My Sisters Beauty being rarely Faire,
Is rarely Vertuous; chiefely in her love,
And chiefely in that Love, her love to me.
If hers to me, then so is mine to her;
Since in like Causes are effects alike.

(II. v)

There is no more intellectual seriousness in this “unlikely argument” than in Giovanni's plea to Annabella, only now his improvisation is mocking and exultant. This is high-spirited casuistry for casuistry's sake, an egotistic display of shallow wit. The brilliant young scholar does not really attempt to persuade his teacher; he demonstrates again the jesting arrogance which the Friar earlier condemned by sophisticating Neoplatonic ideas. The horrified Friar does not respond in kind:

O ignorance in knowledge; long agoe,
How often have I warn'd thee this before?
Indeede if we were sure there were no Deity,
Nor Heaven nor Hell, then to be lead alone,
By Natures light (as were Philosophers
Of elder times) might instance some defence.
But 'tis not so; then Madman, thou wilt finde,
That Nature is in Heavens positions blind.

(II. v)

Strangely enough, the Friar does not attack Giovanni's specious syllogisms. Instead he implies that philosophy and “natural law” support rather than refute Giovanni's arguments. Though an uncompromising defender of religion, the Friar admits what had never before been admitted on the Jacobean stage: namely, that incestuous desire is natural, though forbidden by divine law.

The Friar's reply is of course characteristic of his fideistic viewpoint. It also has a larger significance in relation to Jacobean debate over nature and moral law. The recurrent link between libertine naturalism and incest in Jacobean drama was not fortuitous, because a justification of incest was implicit in the libertine argument for unconfined love and is in fact wittily explicit in Donne's “Elegie XVII.” One footnote to the Friar's speech is provided by François Garasse, who attacks the libertine Vanini for associating with a man who excused some forms of incest:

Le mal-heureux Lucilio Vanino, Atheiste tres-envenimé, tesmoigne en ses Dialogues qu'il a recogneu dans Geneve un Ministre Flamand qui se moquoit de tout ce qu'on appelle scrupule, nommément en matiere de vilainies, & dogmatisoit publiquement dans cette Bethauen, que les incestes en premier & second degré, ne sont pas plus grand peché que les actions iournalieres de boire & manger: Et rendoit une raison du tout horrible, pour laquelle il s'imaginoit que les Loix humaines seulement, & non pas les Ordonnances divines eussent defendu les incestes.⁴

To Garasse's orthodox mind any defense of incest was a manifest sign of depravity. To more liberal minds, however, the naturalness or unnaturalness of incestuous desire was a more complex matter. Charron, for example, is not convinced that incest is unnatural. Indeed, he cites the prohibition against incest as evidence of the power of custom over natural desire:

But who would beleeve how great and imperious the authoritie of custome is? He that said it was another nature, did not sufficientlie expresse it, for it doth more than nature, it conquereth nature: for hence it is that the most beautiful daughters of men draw not unto love their naturall parents, nor brethren, though excellent in beautie, winne not the love of their sisters. This kind of chastitie is not properly of nature, but of the use of lawes and customes, which forbid them, and make of incest a great sinne. … And it is the law of Moses which forbad it in these first degrees; but it hath also sometimes dispensed therewith. …⁵

In 1625 Hugo Grotius, the famed authority on ethics, came to a somewhat similar conclusion about incest. Although he refutes moral relativism and presupposes the universality of moral law, he insists upon carefully defining the sanctions for moral precepts. He warns against rashly accounting “among things forbidden by nature, those things which are not manifestly so, and which are forbidden rather by Divine Law: in which rank haply you may put copulations without marriage, and some reputed incests, and usury.”⁶

The late Renaissance acknowledgment of the naturalness of sexual desire makes comprehensible the Friar's “retreat” to a fideistic position. In his speeches, as in The Atheist's Tragedy, there is a partial acceptance of a naturalistic view of man and the universe. If there were no power superior to nature and no goal in life higher than that of satisfying natural impulses, the Friar concedes, the naturalist's position would be in some respects defensible. But like Tourneur (and like the moral philosophers of the late Renaissance) the Friar insists that a wholly naturalistic view of the universe is incomplete, that nature in “Heavens positions” (i.e., as law-giver) is blind.

The significance of the Friar's answer to Giovanni, then, is not its apparent surrender to libertine sophistry but its calm, assured dismissal of “ignorance in knowledge.” The debate over nature is ended, the naturalistic casuistry which had provoked so many learned and lengthy confutations is now summarily rejected. In fact compared to D'Amville, Giovanni is hardly a dangerous opponent of morality. If nature really is his goddess, she receives scant acknowledgment in his speeches; and although he has a facile wit, he has no ideology that would substitute for traditional ethics. Because his atheism is lacking in conviction he is easily terrified by the Friar's threats of damnation. When he despairs of gaining Annabella he is a frightened child; when his love is fulfilled, he jokes about heaven or hell. All in all, his rebellion is more emotional than intellectual. The once mighty naturalist is now impersonated by an unsteady youth, who scarcely takes his own arguments seriously.

It requires a peculiar insensitivity to the nuances of characterization and verse in 'Tis Pity to treat Giovanni as Ford's spokesman. But it is no less an error to turn Ford into a champion of orthodoxy by identifying him with the Friar, who is, despite his choric role, a somewhat muddled moralist. Unless we understand the Friar's place in Ford's moral design, he must seem an ambiguous character: on the one hand, kind, earnest, and sincere; on the other hand, politic, insensitive, and unscrupulous. The contraditions disappear, however, when we realize that the Friar represents not traditional morality as such but a peculiarly legalistic, authoritarian religious ethic. Preaching sin and damnation, the Friar upholds a moral “ideal” that abases man before the divine will and negates his rational humanistic participation in divine government. When Giovanni first confesses his incestuous desires, the Friar counsels him to

                                                                                                    fall downe
On both thy knees, and grovell on the ground:
Cry to thy heart, wash every word thou utter'st
In teares, (and if't bee possible) of blood:
Begge Heaven to cleanse the leprosie of Lust
That rots thy Soule, acknowledge what thou art,
A wretch, a worme, a nothing: weepe, sigh, pray
Three times a day, and three times every night:
For seven dayes space doe this. …

(I. i)

The suggestion of superstitious, “magical” exorcism is not inappropriate, for the Friar's idea of morality does not rise far above a primitive fear of punishment. His later sermon to Annabella is an exercise in terror:

                                                                                                    … there is a place
(List daughter) in a blacke and hollow Vault,
Where day is never seene; there shines no Sunne,
But flaming horrour of consuming Fires;
A lightlesse Suphure, choakt with smoaky foggs
Of an infected darknesse; in this place
Dwell many thousand, thousand sundry sorts
Of never dying deaths; there damned soules
Roare without pitty, there are Gluttons fedd
With Toades and Addars; there is burning Oyle
Powr'd downe the Drunkards throate, the Usurer
Is forc't to supp whole draughts of molten Gold;
There is the Murtherer for-ever stab'd,
Yet can he never dye; there lies the wanton
On Racks of burning steele, whiles in his soule
Hee feeles the torment of his raging lust.

(III. vi)

The Friar's worldly “realism” does not clash with his other-worldly piety; it is instead a direct consequence of it. His literalistic mind views morality wholly in terms of crime and punishment; he regards sin with the mentality of a criminal lawyer. Deeply attached to Giovanni and Annabella, he would have them, if possible, avoid sin altogether. But if prayers, fasting, and self-mortification are unavailing, then he would have them commit the smallest possible crime and incur the lightest punishment. “Looke through the world,” he advises Giovanni,

And thou shalt see a thousand faces shine
More glorious, then this Idoll thou ador'st:
Leave her, and take thy choyce, 'tis much lesse sinne,
Though in such games as those, they lose that winne.

(I. i)

He is even more politic when he preaches comfort to the remorseful Annabella, who carries Giovanni's child:

… despaire not; Heaven is mercifull,
And offers grace even now; 'tis thus agreed,
First, for your Honours safety that you marry
The Lord Soranzo, next, to save your soule,
Leave off this life, and henceforth live to him.

(III. vi)

The Friar's idea of precedence is disturbing and his conception of heavenly grace ironic, for the deceitful marriage which he advises is neither an effective nor a moral solution. Nevertheless his legalistic mind is working here at full pressure. He does not consider that Annabella's marriage will be unjust to Soranzo and a travesty of the sacrament of wedlock. All that matters to him is that it will construct another legal and moral barrier between the sinning lovers. It succeeds, however, only in dragging Giovanni and Annabella into deeper spiritual and moral degradation.

The opposition between Giovanni and the Friar, then, is not a simple antithesis of sin and piety, darkness and light. Both are insensitive to the ideal claims of morality. The Friar forces Annabella into marriage to save her “honour”; Giovanni murders her to save her “name.” Giovanni rejects morality as “customary forme”; the Friar substitutes the empty “customary forme” of marriage for its true meaning. Giovanni exalts anarchic desire, the immediate sensuous response to beauty that denies all but the present ecstasy. The Friar stands for an ethical code that seems no more than a dread coercion. With the Friar we reject Giovanni's specious rationalizations, but we respond more sympathetically to his lovely description of Annabella.

View well her face, and in that little round,
You may observe a world of variety;
For Colour, lips, for sweet perfumes, her breath;
For Iewels, eyes; for threds of purest gold,
Hayre; for delicious choyce of Flowers, cheekes;
Wonder in every portion of that Throne:
Heare her but speake, and you will sweare the Sphaeres
Make Musicke to the Cittizens in Heaven.

(II. v)

Sweetness and affection hover in these lines; the worn Petrarchan conceits take on fresh beauty and meaning. Here is a love of the flesh that touches the spiritual, an ardor that is unsullied by the courtly sensual wit of Suckling and Carew.

If Ford endows Giovanni (particularly at the beginning of the play) with his own poetic sensibility, he does not apologize for his illicit passion any more than Shakespeare apologizes for Hotspur's rebellion by giving him the most memorable lines in Henry IV. Like Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra, Ford dares to find beauty, tenderness, and devotion in a forbidden love. Without confusing moral values, he explores the commonplace truth that there are crimes and crimes. There is a difference between Annabella's selfless love, Hippolita's vicious passion, and the disgusting animalism of Putana, who applauds Annabella's submission:

Why now I commend thee (Chardge) feare nothing, (sweete-heart) what though hee be your Brother; your Brother's a man I hope, and I say still, if a young Wench feele the fitt upon her, let her take any body, Father or Brother, all is one.

(II. i)

If it is true, as some critics claim, that Ford believed in an amoral deterministic psychology,⁷ then it is strange that he should state his “philosophy” in such revolting terms and through so despicable a mouthpiece. While he does not bow to the conventionally moralistic opinion that all illicit desire is sordid, he upholds the more profound truth that submission to illicit passion degrades. In his tragedies he pities lovers who are trapped by circumstances not of their own making—by the accident of their births or of loveless marriages; yet he recognizes full well that it is circumstances that try men's characters and lives. To Ford the romantic defiance of circumstances has a Marlovian beauty, but it is also a symptom of weakness, of an inability to endure misfortune and calamity. Even when Giovanni's affection is relatively innocent, it is incipiently corrupt. He lies to win Annabella, and his love is increasingly warped by the fear and jealousy that shadows its first ecstatic consummation. Because (as he realizes) there can be no lasting fulfillment of their love in marriage, their passion can only defile them as they grow accustomed to the stealthy satisfaction of incestuous and adulterous desire. Before the play ends Annabella is a helpless pawn in the struggle between a jealous lover and a jealous husband, both infatuated with revenge. Soranzo cannot bear the sting of cuckoldry although he seduced Richardetto's wife; Giovanni cannot bear the thought of another man possessing Annabella. Tormented by jealousy and coarsened by stealth, Giovanni's love changes from breathless adoration to insane possessiveness. In the final throes of despairing egoism he comes to believe that Annabella's life literally belongs to him. When their relationship is discovered, he murders her as part of his “revenge” on Soranzo.

Still loving her brother, Annabella feels before she dies the agony of their hopeless existence. And though he remains a defiant atheist, Giovanni eventually admits that the moral law which condemns his love is not simply a “customary forme”:

… if ever after times should heare
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The Lawes of Conscience and of Civill use
May iustly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, That love will wipe away that rigour,
Which would in other Incests bee abhorr'd.

(V. v)

But the moral order which he at last recognizes is far different from the Friar's, for having found damnation on earth, Giovanni does not fear another judgment. Urged by the Cardinal to “thinke on thy life and end, and call for mercy,” he replies: “Mercy? why I have found it in this Iustice.” Death comes to Giovanni as a “guest long look't for”; justice is merciful when it ends an intolerable existence. Thus despite its bloody finale, 'Tis Pity is not haunted by the earlier Jacobean preoccupation with death. It is, like The Broken Heart, a tragedy of spiritual disintegration, of heroes and heroines trapped in a living death which only death can end.

Unlike earlier dramatists Ford does not ponder universal questions. Certain that moral values are constantly reaffirmed by man's experience, he presents the rare individual instance that proves conventional moral generalizations. It is not surprising, however, that some critics have interpreted 'Tis Pity as a decadent apotheosis of passion,⁸ because Ford does not completely translate his moral vision into effective artifice. His judgment of Giovanni would seem clearer, for example, if there were another moral chorus than the Friar, whose vision remains narrow and prosaic and whose speeches do not impress the imagination as do Giovanni's. Because there does not seem to be any alternative to the Friar's and Giovanni's irreconcilable and unacceptable positions, moral knowledge and poetic intuition do not melt into a single humane, ethical perception. And because Giovanni grows more insensitive to ethical values as the play proceeds, his belated admission of guilt seems almost an afterthought, a sop to Nemesis rather than a final illumination.

It should be Annabella who positively affirms the humanity of moral law and who weds ethical judgment and poetic insight. Possessing a moral sensitivity which Giovanni lacks, she feels the loathsomeness of their sins while he knows only the torments of jealousy. Unfortunately, however, Annabella plays too ambiguous a role in the moral action to serve as an ethical touchstone. At one moment she seems to have risen above carnality; at another moment she seems like Giovanni corrupted by incest and adultery. Now she plays the repentant sinner, now the wanton who brazenly boasts of her lover to her husband. Even when she is conscience-stricken, Giovanni fills her mind. Her nobility lies in the generosity of her love for him, not in a victory over desire.

But the fact that we cannot erase all the ambiguities of 'Tis Pity should not lead us to exaggerate its failings. When we consider the daring of Ford's intention and the difficult problems of moral discrimination which his subject posed, we must admire his achievement. Indeed his boldness should offend only those who are dogmatic in their ethics and who can picture only stereotypes of virtue and vice. If Ford imperfectly executes the moral design of 'Tis Pity, he does not completely obscure it, and we need only turn to The Broken Heart to grasp the ethical viewpoint that does not completely and lucidly emerge from the earlier play.

THE BROKEN HEART

In contrast to the glowing life and passion of 'Tis Pity, The Broken Heart seems somewhat pale. The violence that erupts in the last act does not so much quicken the dramatic action as add to the hidden soul-destroying burden of silent griefs. An Elizabethan dramatist, one imagines, would have cast The Broken Heart in the romantic mold of Romeo and Juliet. He would have set upon the stage another tale of star-crossed lovers ruined by hostile circumstances. Ford is more interested, however, in emotional reaction than in romantic action. His play begins after the most dramatic incidents of the fable have occurred. He studies, as it were, the aftermath of romantic tragedy, the cumulative shock of misery and frustration on the lives of Penthea, Orgilus, and those who share their unhappy fates.

The tragedy of Penthea is to be betrayed by the three men who love her: her brother, Ithocles, who for ambition forces her into a loathsome marriage; her evil-minded “humorous” husband, Bassanes, who imprisons her to possess her entirely; and her former lover, Orgilus, who tries to seduce her from her marriage vows. To Ithocles and Bassanes, Penthea's misery brings a redeeming awareness of the sins of ambition and jealousy. Orgilus' spiritual fate is more uncertain. Although Penthea's death seals his decision to murder Ithocles, his revenge is motivated as much by self-pity and envy as by love; there is, in fact, a touch of Giovanni's crazed vanity in his thought and actions. On the other hand, his misfortune demands our sympathy and he achieves in the acceptance of death a dignity lacking in his struggle against the circumstances of his life. His revenge is certainly immoral, but his claim to Penthea's love is not explicitly refuted except by Penthea, whose feelings are ambivalent if not contradictory.

By conventional standards Orgilus' love for another man's wife is adulterous, even though Penthea's marriage was tyrannically enforced and is a shameful travesty of the wedding vow. Before Ithocles interfered, Penthea and Orgilus shared a chaste and “approved” affection. Indeed, according to Elizabethan custom, they were “married” by plighting their troth even though an official ceremony had not yet been performed. When Orgilus confronts Penthea he does not place the rights of love above the bond of marriage. He claims a wife, not a courtly mistress: “I would possesse my wife, the equity / Of very reason bids me” (II. iii). More than anyone else, Penthea is aware of the immorality of her marriage; she feels violated, defiled, and even prostituted by her loveless servitude. In effect she admits Orgilus' prior claim when she later says to Ithocles:

… she that's wife to Orgilus, and lives
In knowne Adultery with Bassanes,
Is at the best a whore.

(III. ii)

And yet when Orgilus presses his claim she denies it:

How (Orgilus) by promise I was thine,
The heavens doe witnesse; they can witnesse too
A rape done on my truth: how I doe love thee
Yet Orgilus, and yet, must best appeare
In tendering thy freedome; for I find
The constant preservation of thy merit,
By thy not daring to attempt my fame
With iniury of any loose conceit,
Which might give deeper wounds to discontents.

(II. iii)

When he continues to plead for her love, she turns on him angrily:

                                                                                Uncivill Sir, forbeare,
Or I can turne affection into vengeance;
Your reputation (if you value any)
Lyes bleeding at my feet. Unworthy man,
If ever henceforth thou appeare in language,
Message, or letter to betray my frailty,
I'le call thy former protestations lust,
And curse my Starres for forfeit of my iudgement.
Goe thou, fit onely for disguise and walkes,
To hide thy shame: this once I spare thy life.

(II. iii)

We may admire Penthea's strength of will and still question her wisdom. We may wonder what value resides in an utterly meaningless dedication, or what purpose is served by fidelity to a marriage that exists in name only. By spurning Orgilus she condemns him as well as herself to a living death and ensures catastrophe. Perhaps in this instance Ford suggests that it would have been wiser to challenge circumstances than to submit passively. Perhaps it would have been more moral for Penthea to find happiness with Orgilus than to observe the “customary forme” of marriage.

How easy it is to falsify the central issue in The Broken Heart by reducing it to a simple conflict of values—the “promptings of the heart” versus “conventional morality.”⁹ Actually Ford's presentation of character leaves no doubt that Penthea is wiser as well as stronger than Orgilus, who advances the claim of love as an absolute that negates circumstances and time itself. Penthea does not deny that she was once promised to Orgilus, but she will not confuse the past with the present. Admitting the vileness of her marriage, she nevertheless accepts it as one of the irremediable accidents that distort the shape of men's lives. The opportunity for happiness which she and Orgilus once possessed no longer exists because they have themselves changed. Like Giovanni (indeed, like most of Ford's heroes), Orgilus is weaker than the woman he loves and crushed by a far lighter burden than she bears. The misery that makes her compassionate and generous makes him selfish and self-pitying. Although he attacks Ithocles' tyranny, he insists on the privilege of authorizing his own sister's marriage and enjoys the power even if he does not abuse it. Embittered, wretchedly frustrate, he enters into a labyrinth of deceptions and disguises that ends in murder and self-destruction.

Far more realistic than Orgilus, Penthea recognizes the true nature of the alternatives that face her. If she flees with Orgilus it must be outside society and law, without hope of the joyous fulfillment of marriage. If she refuses, Orgilus may yet find happiness and she will preserve intact the citadel of her mind. Her thoughts are pure even though her body is defiled; the shame of her “adultery” rests upon Ithocles. Thus while Orgilus' claim to Penthea is in the abstract just, he demonstrates his unworthiness of her by pressing it. She spurns him pityingly, aware of the gulf that has sprung between them, recognizing that he is “fit only for disguise” and a ruin of his former self. There is obviously more frustrate desire than selfless devotion in his plea. He speaks of Neoplatonic devotion but his imagery reveals the hunger of sensual appetite:

All pleasures are but meere imagination,
Feeding the hungry appetite with steame,
And sight of banquet, whilst the body pines,
Not relishing the reall tast of food. …

(II. iii)

For Penthea, then, the choice is between an evil-minded husband who feverishly schemes to inter her alive and an embittered lover who feverishly schemes to steal her away. Both are ungenerous, both are wildly possessive. The gentle Penthea, who had almost attained the strength to endure her life with Bassanes, is crushed by the shock of Orgilus' betrayal.

For from exalting the claim of individual desire over the bond of matrimony, The Broken Heart, like Ford's other tragedies, depicts the warping of love that cannot grow and mature. It is quite true that Giovanni and Orgilus express Ford's romantic idealism—his poetic worship of love—but they also betray that idealism by their jealousy and by their desire to possess rather than serve beauty. Indeed, the highest expression of love in Ford's drama is not the reckless ardor of Giovanni and Orgilus but the generous devotion of Annabella and Penthea.¹⁰ And though Tecnicus is the official “philosopher” of The Broken Heart, it is Penthea who, expressing in the beauty of her own life the correspondence of poetic vision and moral knowledge, reaffirms the essential humanity of ethical ideals. If the portrayal of Penthea leaves any doubts about Ford's attitude towards marriage, those doubts are erased by the solemn beauty of Euphranea's betrothal and Calantha's wedding to Ithocles in death.

LOVE'S SACRIFICE

I have withheld discussion of Love's Sacrifice until now, not because I assume that it was Ford's last tragedy but because we can scarcely understand Ford's intention (or failure) in this bewildering play except by reference to 'Tis Pity and The Broken Heart. Miss Sargeaunt and Professor Harbage place Love's Sacrifice before The Broken Heart; G. E. Bentley and H. J. Oliver place it after.¹¹ I would argue only that Love's Sacrifice is not a shaky piece of apprentice work by an inexperienced tragedian. If anything it is a careless, perhaps hasty, composition by a very skilled dramatist who was too confident of his ability to camouflage a splintered plot with the trappings of melodrama.

To begin with, the moral confusion that surrounds the heroine of Love's Sacrifice is quite different from the contradictions in the portrait of Annabella. Ford is not uncertain about Bianca's nature, nor is there any inconsistency in his development of her character. She does not abruptly change in the last act; instead Ford abruptly shifts his standard of judgment (his moral point of view) in order to assimilate the last act within his tragic design. One notes, moreover, that when Love's Sacrifice staggers into obliquity it is because Ford deliberately abdicates artistic responsibility. Instead of resolving imaginatively the tragic situation developed in the first two acts, he patches together a conclusion out of the First Folio. There are also imitations of Shakespeare in 'Tis Pity: lines from Othello, a recollection of Laertes' poisoned rapier, and remembrances of Romeo and Juliet in the roles of the Friar and Florio and in the enforced marriage. But these echoes are relatively unobtrusive and seem unconscious tributes to a dramatist whose art had become an integral part of Ford's poetic experience. The imitations of Othello in Love's Sacrifice are an entirely different matter; they constitute a gross and uninspired plagiarism of scenes and situations, characterizations and dialogue. One can easily believe that Ford wrote the latter half of the play (especially scenes III. iii and IV.i & ii) with a copy of Othello before him, taking care only to drag what is marvelous in Shakespeare down to a pedestrian level. This kind of imitation would be inconceivable in a young dramatist making his first bid for the laurel of tragedy; it would be more understandable in a writer who had already enjoyed success as an independent playwright and was secure in or indifferent to his reputation.

Despite the inanities of the last act, we can, I think, infer from it Ford's original intention. He set out, it would seem, to write a more ironic and richly plotted version of Othello, in which Iago (D'avolos) exaggerates but does not completely fabricate the unfaithfulness of Othello's (Caraffa's) wife. In Ford's version, the trusted young friend does betray the husband's confidence. In Caraffa's absence Fernando repeatedly importunes Bianca, who, unlike Desdemona, does not actually love her aging husband although she is grateful to him and is determined to be a loyal wife. Innately gracious and dignified, she does not invite Fernando's illicit courtship and she falls in love with him against her will. For three acts, she is Ford's most subtle psychological portrait, a woman who fights a silent and losing battle against her ambivalent feelings. Though she angrily rejects Fernando's pleas, she allows them to continue, even providing an opportunity for him to speak when they are alone. When she protests too well her indignation (which is unfeigned if impure), and Fernando pledges to end his courtship, she comes to his bed and offers herself to him with the threat that she will kill herself if he takes her.

Here is the familiar Fletcherian boudoir scene with a moral difference. Despite the latent eroticism of the situation, it has a rare psychological delicacy. Hungering for Fernando's affection and too weak to resist his passionate demands, Bianca thrusts the burden of restraint on his shoulders. At first skeptical, Fernando is at last convinced of Bianca's integrity; through a daring gamble she is now able to accept his devotion without fear of guilty consequences.

If Ford had left Fernando and Bianca's relationship as it is at the end of the second act, his play might seem more coherent. The murder of Bianca would then be deeply ironic because she would have preserved her innocence only to be “punished” by the horn-mad Caraffa. But Ford knew the human heart too well to portray Bianca's “victory” as a genuine solution to her emotional conflict. At the very moment that she disarms Fernando, she lowers her own defenses; indeed, her triumph over passion is built on the sands of her weakness. Because she spends her total moral capital in refusing Fernando's adulterous advances she cannot endure in her resolve; too confident of his restraint, she feels free to enjoy his love in every way short of adultery. As their “harmless” dalliance grows more brazen, adherence to her marriage vow changes from a positive article of faith to a meaningless bar to her desires. And finally she joins the libertines in attacking the chains of custom:

Why shouldst thou [Fernando] not be mine? why should the laws
The Iron lawes of Ceremony, barre
Mutuall embraces? what's a vow? a vow?
Can there be sinne in unity? Could I
As well dispense with Conscience, as renounce
The out-side of my titles, the poore stile
Of Dutchesse; I had rather change my life
With any waiting-woman in the land,
To purchase one nights rest with thee Fernando,
Then be Caraffa's Spouse a thousand yeares.

(V. i)

By now there is little resemblance between Bianca and Desdemona. The tragedy of martyred innocence is no longer possible; we can only anticipate the tragic fall of a woman who attempted an impossible compromise between fidelity and passion. Since Ford's characterization of Bianca overstepped the bounds of his original intention, he had either to alter his dramatic design or juggle his moral values. He chose to do the latter. Returned to the court, Caraffa hears D'avolos' venomous report of Bianca's lechery. The great temptation scenes in Othello are drearily rehashed; Caraffa gives Bianca fair warning of his jealous suspicions, and when he discovers her kissing Fernando, he murders her. Fernando is about to defend himself against Caraffa when he learns of Bianca's death. Dropping his sword, he exclaims:

Unfortunate Caraffa; thou hast butcher'd
An Innocent, a wife as free from lust
As any termes of Art can Deifie. …
                                        If ever I unshrin'd
The Altar of her purity, or tasted
More of her love, then what without controule
Or blame, a brother from a sister might,
Racke me to Atomies.

(V. ii)

While Caraffa sneers, Fernando continues:

                                                  … glorious Bianca,
Reigne in the triumph of thy martyrdome,
Earth was unworthy of thee.

(V. ii)

Impressed too late by Fernando's sincerity, Caraffa sees the “truth.” In the silliest final scene in Jacobean tragedy, Fernando, wrapped in a winding sheet, drinks poison in Bianca's tomb. Caraffa, not to be outdone, washes away his “sinne” in blood, his last thoughts dwelling on his “chaste” wife and “unequall'd” friend.

It would be pleasant to believe that this last scene is deliberately ironic or even a burlesque of romantic melodrama. But if there was any joke intended in Love's Sacrifice, it was played on the actors and the audience. I imagine that we must take the entire last act as seriously as we can, although we do not have to agree that Bianca should be worshipped as a saint because she could not be convicted of adultery. Whereas Penthea was defiled in body but chaste in thought, Bianca has adulterous appetites and the technical chastity of a loyal wife. To keep his play together, Ford travesties the moral viewpoint of his other tragedies; as Coleridge remarked of Fletcher's plays, chastity is here valued “as a material thing—not as an act or state of being.”

Perhaps some of the obliquity in Love's Sacrifice is the result of Fletcher's influence. The boudoir scenes are reminiscent of The Lover's Progress, and the retreat from a serious ethical problem through a twist of plot recalls the denouement of A King and No King. Still we cannot blame Fletcher for Ford's irresponsibility, for his use of cheap theatrics, and for his ranting parody of the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet. I suspect that Ford, having wandered into deeper water than he purposed in the first two acts of Love's Sacrifice, found it easier to drift along with scraps of other men's plays than to strike out for shore again. Bianca's role is the only spark of inspiration in the last act and that spark produces more smoke than fire. When Caraffa accuses her of adultery, she does not defend her technically sound “honor.” Instead she attempts to shield Fernando by assuming his guilt, by playing a brazen slut so effectively that we cannot decide whether she is an innocent posing as a wanton, or a wanton posing as an innocent acting the part of a wanton.

To a reader familiar only with the tragedies, confusion and sensationalism may seem more characteristic of Ford than the refinement and sensitivity which we find in The Broken Heart. Those who also study The Lover's Melancholy, Perkin Warbeck, and The Lady's Trial, however, will have a truer sense of Ford's quality. They will know a dramatist who did not always possess the tact required for the investigation of the darker ways of passion, but whose judgments were based on a clearly defined set of values. Indeed the very nature of Ford's subjects indicates that he wrote with a far greater ethical assurance than did his predecessors. In the absence of pervading skepticism, he was free to probe beneath the surface of conventional morality and to investigate the rare individual instance that proves the moral “rule.” Because he was concerned with the individual rather than the typical, Ford does not offer universal truths. Instead each of his plays, perhaps even Love's Sacrifice, adds another fraction to a cumulative knowledge of the human heart.

Twentieth-century criticism has insisted upon Ford's “modernity,” either by praising his psychological insights or by damning his “scientific” amoral view of the passions. I imagine, however, that we need no more modern a guide to Ford's view of character than the liberal ethic of Biathanatos. If Ford does not arrive at Donne's conclusion that “there is no externall act naturally evill,” he shares Donne's knowledge that circumstances “condition” acts and give them their moral nature. Like Donne he insists upon an ethical judgment that is individual, flexible, and humane, not rigid, dogmatic, and absolute. Like Donne he believes that moral values are shaped by the processes of life even as they in turn shape the nature of human relationships.

A modern dramatist might have viewed the tragic situation in The Broken Heart as an unresolvable dilemma that baffles judgment. Ford, however, challenges the reader to perceive those permanent values on which judgment rests. Although he lived in an age of warring factions, he wrote with a deeper sense of the communion between the individual and society than did Chapman or Webster. And unlike Middleton he had a clear view of the ideal in man's thought and conduct and a poignant awareness of the tragedy that befalls when the bonds of friendship, love, and devotion are warped or sundered.

Notes

1. A clue to the freedom with which Ford imitates Shakespeare may lie in the fact that there are no recorded Jacobean revivals of Romeo and Juliet and only one recorded performance of Othello (in 1629) between 1610 and the publication of Love's Sacrifice. There were, however, Jacobean quartos of both plays.

2. Because Ford's tragedies were apparently written within a very brief span of years, their unsettled chronology does not have a crucial bearing on the interpretation of his art. Traditionally it has been assumed that 'Tis Pity was Ford's first tragedy; recently H. J. Oliver has argued that it is Ford's last and finest tragedy (The Problem of John Ford [Melbourne, 1955], pp. 47-49, 86 ff.). In the absence of conclusive external evidence, I assume only that the tragedies were written fairly closely together some time between 1627 and 1633.

3. Citations from 'Tis Pity and The Broken Heart are from John Ford's Dramatic Works, ed. H. De Vocht in W. Bang's Materialien, n.s. 1 (Louvain, 1927). Citations from Love's Sacrifice are from John Fordes Dramatische Werke, ed. W. Bang in Materialien, XXIII (Louvain, 1908). For ease of reference I have included the traditional scene divisions found in the Mermaid text. I have also preferred to use Bianca rather than the less familiar Biancha as the name of the heroine of Love's Sacrifice.

4. La Doctrine Curieuse (Paris, 1623), p. 964.

5. Of Wisdome, trans. Samson Lennard (London, 1608), Bk. II, Ch. 8, p. 310.

6. Of the Law of Warre and Peace, trans. C. Barksdale (London, 1655; first Latin ed. 1625), p. 365.

7. In The Tragic Muse of John Ford (Stanford, 1944), G. F. Sensabaugh argues that Ford “so absorbed the idea of [psychological] determinism that his plays are exemplifications of the formula of cause and effect” (p. 35). The only objective evidence that would support this theory, however, is the imitations of The Anatomy of Melancholy in The Lover's Melancholy. Moreover, Mr. Sensabaugh would have us believe that Ford viewed love as a “melancholic disease” (pp. 46 ff.) and idealized it as “all-important” (pp. 164 ff.) at one and the same time. One suspects that here the inconsistency is in the interpretation, not in the plays.

8. Even Joan Sargeaunt, one of Ford's most judicious critics, comments: “There might be some excuse for identifying Ford's point of view with Giovanni's in 'Tis Pity, because Giovanni justifies his passion on the very same grounds that Ford justifies the four positions in The Peers' Challenge. The similarity of the arguments extends to the use of the same Aristotelian text ‘that the temperature of the mind follows that of the body’” (John Ford [Oxford, 1935], pp. 133-34). It is true that Ford's romantic idealism, like most of the popular Neoplatonism of the Renaissance, involves a somewhat vague and unphilosophical identification of beauty and goodness. But Giovanni, like Orgilus in The Broken Heart, betrays this romantic idealism in thought as well as act (see n. 10 of this chapter). Moreover, we may agree that Annabella's beauty mirrors her original goodness and still condemn Giovanni for corrupting her beauty and despoiling her goodness.

9. For a discussion of The Broken Heart as a “problem play,” see S. P. Sherman, “Forde's Contribution to the Decadence of the Drama,” Bang's Materialien (Louvain, 1908), XXIII, pp. xi ff.

10. Although I agree with Mr. Oliver (The Problem of John Ford, pp. 11-12) that we cannot take all the casuistry of The Peers' Challenge seriously, nevertheless it does seem to express Ford's ideal of love. Perhaps the finest comment on Giovanni and Orgilus is the following passage from the Challenge: “For this, in the rules of affection, is text: whosoever truely love, and are truly of their ladies beloved, ought in their service to employ their endevours; more for the honour and deserving the continuance of their ladies good-will, than any way to respect the free-will of their owne heedlesse dispositions; else are they degenerate bastards, and apostates, revolting from the principals, and principall rules of sincere devotion. It is not ynough for any man, that hath by long suit, tedious imprecations, jeopardous hazard, toyle of bodie, griefe of mind, pitifull laments, obsequious fawnings, desperate passions, and passionate despaire, at length, for a meed or requitall to his unrest, gained the favourable acceptance of his most, and best desired ladie: … Perfect service, and serviceable loyaltie, is seene more cleerely in deserving love and maintaining it, than in attempting or laboring for it. How can any one be sayd truely to serve, when he more respects the libertie of his owne affections, than the imposition of ladies' command?” (Shakespeare Society Reprints [London, 1843], pp. 10-11).

11. See Sargeaunt, John Ford, Ch. II; Harbage, Annals of English Drama (Philadelphia, 1940), p. 100; Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1956), III, 451-53; Oliver, The Problem of John Ford, p. 48.