’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Other Plays: The Lover’s Melancholy; The Broken Heart; ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Perkin Warbeck

420 Pages·1999·42.38 MB·English

by  John Ford

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
OXFORD ENGXTSTrTTRAMA
JOHN FORD
’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE
AND OTHER PLAYS
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Copley Square
Boston, MA 02116
OXFORD ENGLISH DRAMA
General Editor: MICHAEL CORDNER
Associate General Editors: PETER HOLLAND • MARTIN WIGGINS
’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE
AND OTHER PLAYS
JOHN FORD began his literary career as an occasional poet and pamphle-
teer before becoming a dramatist who wrote six plays in various collabora-
tive combinations with Middleton, Rowley, Webster, and Dekker. Later
he was sole author of eleven plays, three of which were subsequently
lost, but ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Broken Heart, and Perkin Warbeck
eventually became famous. This edition sets his earliest surviving drama,
The Lover’s Melancholy, alongside his best-known work.
Ford may have been born just before his baptism on 12 April 1586,
the only date known. A ‘J°hn Ford Devon gent.’ matriculated as a
member of Exeter College, Oxford, on 26 March 1601, and there is a
record of John Ford entering the Middle Temple in November 1602,
but no indication of him ever being called to the bar. It is possible that
Ford remained in law chambers all his working life, perhaps managing
property for the gentry. It is supposed that he returned to settle in Devon
just before the Civil War and died there later. His death could have taken
place at any time after 1639, when he published his last play and then
disappeared from public view.
MARION LOMAX is the author of Stage Images and Traditions: Shake-
speare to Ford (Cambridge University Press, 1987). The Peep-show Girl
(Bloodaxe, 1989), a libretto, Beyond Men and Dreams, commissioned
by the Royal Opera House Garden Venture (performed 1991), and
numerous articles on early drama, poetry, and feminist literary theory.
She has also edited The Rover by Aphra Behn (New Mermaids, 1995).
MICHAEL CORDNER is Reader in the Department of English and Related
Literature at the University of York. He has edited editions of George
Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, the Complete Plays of Sir George
Etherege, and Four Comedies of Sir John Vanbrugh. His editions include
Four Restoration Marriage Comedies and he is completing a book on The
Comedy of Marriage 1660-1737.
PETER HOLLAND is Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of
the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.
MARTIN WIGGINS is a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute and Lecturer
in English at the University of Birmingham.
OXFORD ENGLISH DRAMA
J. M. Barrie J. M. Synge
Peter Pan and Other Plays The Playboy of the Western World and
Other Plays
Aphra Behn
The Rover and Other Plays John Webster
The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays
George Farquhar
The Recruiting Officer and Other Plays Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest and
John Ford Other Plays
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and
Other Plays William Wycherley
The Country Wife and Other Plays
Ben Jonson
The Alchemist and Other Plays Court Masques
ed. David Lindley
Ben Jonson
The Devil is an Ass and Other Plays Five Romantic Plays
ed. Paul Baines & Edward Burns
Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Faustus and Other Plays Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies
ed. Martin Wiggins
John Marston
The Malcontent and Other Plays Four Restoration Marriage Plays
ed. Michael Cordner
Thomas Middleton
A Mad World, My Masters and Four Revenge Tragedies
Other Plays ed. Katharine Maus
Thomas Middleton London Assurance and Other
Women Beware Women and Victorian Comedies
Other Plays ed. Klaus Stierstorfer
Richard Brinsley Sheridan The New Woman and Other
The School for Scandal and Emancipated Woman Plays
Other Plays ed. Jean Chothia
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
JOHN FORD
♦
The Lover's Melancholy
The Broken Heart
'Tis Pity She's a Whore
Perkin Warbeck
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
MARION LOMAX
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1995
Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ford, John, 1586-c. 1640.
’Tis pity she’s a whore / John Ford; edited by Marion Lomax,
p. cm.—(Oxford world’s classics)
I. Lomax, Marion. II. Series.
PR2524.T5 1995 822'. 3—dc20 94-47318
ISBN 0-19-283449-5
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire
lO'f
i i
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
Note on the Texts XXV
Select Bibliography xxvii
A Chronology of John Ford xxxii
THE LOVER’S MELANCHOLY i
THE BROKEN HEART 81
’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE 165
PERKIN WARBECK 241
Explanatory Notes
324
Glossary
369
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am particularly indebted to Michael Cordner for being an extremely
patient General Editor and to Martin Wiggins for his scrupulous
attentions as associate General Editor: additional thanks go to Susie
Casement and Helen Gray of Oxford University Press.
I am also grateful to Michael Neill for helping to make material on
Ford available to me in the early stages of this work and for
generously giving his time to discuss Ford with me. Thanks are due
to G. R. Proudfoot for his helpful suggestions on The Broken Heart
2.3.31-2; to Sergio Mazzarelli for his modernization of the Italian
passages in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; to Lisa Hopkins who kindly
provided me with her work prior to its publication and supplied
helpful references on Ford’s life; to members of the University of
London’s Centre for English Studies conference, ‘Editing Renais-
sance Dramatic Texts’ (1994), who provided useful feedback; to past
and present colleagues at Strawberry Hill, for their friendship and
encouragement (particularly Janet Clare and David Worrall); and to
the staff of the British Library (especially those in the North Library).
Above all, I would like to thank my husband Michael, who travelled
the length of the country with me to see Ford’s plays in action and,
throughout the years of this project, gave me more help than I can
ever acknowledge here.
ML.
St Mary’s University College,
a College of the University of Surrey
vi
INTRODUCTION
John Ford began his literary career as an occasional poet and
pamphleteer before becoming a dramatist who wrote in various
collaborative combinations with Middleton, Rowley, Webster, and
Dekker. Later he was sole author of eleven plays (having already been
co-author of six). Three of his own eleven plays were subsequently
lost, but three others, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Broken Heart, and
Perkin Warbeck, eventually became famous. This edition sets his
earliest surviving independent drama, The Lover's Melancholy,r along-
side his best-known work.
Ford’s life presents scholars of his writings with a challenge. We
don’t know when he was born or where and when he died: his birth
may have been close to his baptism in April 1586/ but his death could
have taken place at any time after 1639 when he published his last
play and then disappeared from the public view. He may or may not
have been the ‘John Ford Devon gent.’ who matriculated as a member
of Exeter College, Oxford, on 26 March 1601, and while there is a
record of him entering the Middle Temple in November 1602, there
is no indication of him ever being called to the bar. It is possible that
he remained in law chambers all his working life, perhaps managing
property for the gentry. When he left and where he went is still
unclear, but the popular view supposes that he returned to settle in
his native Devon just before the Civil War and died there later.
Lately we have experienced a revival of interest in the work of the
man who, according to Charles Lamb, was ‘of the first order of
poets’.3 Ford’s plays have now been subjected to literary theory
and feminist scrutiny. His family, friends, patrons, and possible reli-
gious sympathies (which have always seemed ambiguous) have been
researched with new vigour by Lisa Hopkins,4 who has uncovered
some hitherto unnoticed Catholic associations, providing welcome
The Lover's Melancholy was his first independent play to be published, although it
may not have been the first written.
See Anthony Telford Moore, ‘The Date of John Ford’s Baptism’, Notes and
Queries, 239 (1994), 70-1, for a revised date of 12 April instead of 17 April, as was
formerly believed.
3 Charles Lamb, Works, ed. C. Kent (London, n.d.), 582.
4 Lisa Hopkins, John Ford's Political Theatre (Manchester, 1994).
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INTRODUCTION
additional information on one of the most elusive biographical
subjects since Shakespeare. Perhaps best of all, there has been an
increase in the number of performances of his plays.
Ford’s work is accessible and invites us to take issue with it. His
own attitude to his characters is often ambiguous, so that whether he
is a moralist or a decadent libertine, an unequivocal supporter of
patriarchy or a challenger of gender restrictions, is still a matter of
opinion. Ford was expert in the creation of defeated women who
possessed great strength of will. Annabella, Hippolita, Penthea,
Calantha, and Katherine Gordon rank among the most dramatically
powerful female characters on the post-Shakespearian stage, at a time
when women’s roles were still exclusively played by male actors.
He is not Shakespeare; we are under no pressure to idolize him or
be in awe of the range of his achievements. Like John Webster and
Thomas Middleton, he tantalizes with apparent echoes of, or allusions
to, other Renaissance dramas (including some of Shakespeare’s best-
known plays), which is not a sign of slavish dependence but a way of
stressing the different contexts and perspectives of his own work—
and those contexts and perspectives often owe their fascination to
their very perverseness. Ford’s life may give us the impression of
having been shadowy and relatively uneventful, but the same cannot
be said of his best plays. Ronald Huebert is not the only critic to have
thought that a ‘poet who chooses witchcraft, melancholy, masochism,
misogyny, and incest as major themes must have a taste for the
bizarre’.5 A closer look at some of the transformations which Ford
engineers is revealing.
The Lover's Melancholy
Ford wrote The Lover's Melancholy for the King’s Men (previously
Shakespeare’s Company). It was licensed for performance in Novem-
ber 1628 and published in 1629. Apart from a moment of dubious
fame when Charles Macklin attributed the play to Shakespeare and
staged it as part of a Drury Lane advertising stunt in 1748,6 there is
no record of a production after its original performances at the Globe
and Blackfriars, even though there is evidence that a performance may
have been planned just after the Restoration.7
5
Ronald Huebert, John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist (Montreal and London,
1977), 1.
6 The Lover's Melancholy, ed. R. F. Hill (Manchester, 1985), 32.
7 Ibid. 33.
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