JOHN FORD wrote for a circle of cognoscenti, fellows of the Inns of Court, who included dramatists such as Philip Massinger and James Shirley; He wrote for both the rival Blackfriars and the Phoenix theatres and his plays cannibalized what appeared at these theatres. In his apprenticeship as a dramatist he collaborated with three well-known Jacobean playwright s, Webster, Dekker and Rowley, before striking out on his own.

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Ford’s educated audience

When you are reading John Ford’s plays, you are meant by him to keep hearing echoes of earlier plays: just as movies these days rework the themes, plots and characters of earlier movies. In fact we find movies referring to earlier movies and movies that are remakes of earlier movies.

JOHN FORD wrote for a circle of cognoscenti, fellows of the Inns of Court, who included dramatists such as Philip Massinger and James Shirley; He wrote for both the rival Blackfriars and the Phoenix theatres and his plays cannibalized what appeared at these theatres. In his apprenticeship as a dramatist he collaborated with three well-known Jacobean playwright s, Webster, Dekker and Rowley, before striking out on his own.

Not only did Ford himself inherit a by now rich heritage of drama and literature which we call Elizabethan and Jacobean: he was writing for an audience that had this heritage in their bones. The audiences of these theaters, brought to the theatre the memory of previous performances. For such an audience an adequate dramatic language would have to show it was aware of previous dramatists and theatrical characters and situations, especially the memorable ones. It would have to pay homage to these earlier playwrights.

At the same time, Ford was staking out his own claim to originality: just as modern movie directors might want you to know the traditions they are drawing on and the way he or she is doing something quite new with the tradition. This is true of all the arts. Painters, sculptors, musicians and architects are always learning from and quoting their predecessors: what T.S. Eliot called ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.

Like Sophocles and Euripides, Ford is entering into competition with both dead and living authors before a highly knowledgeable audience. His plays are filled with the echoes of previous plays, from Marlowe to Ford's immediate contemporaries. He reworks previous plots, places characters derived from other plays and transfers them to unfamiliar situations, supplying them with a dramatic rhetoric that is laced with near-quotations from his predecessors. These echoes or quotations are deliberate, meant to be recognized, and their deviations from the originals appreciated.

In fact, Ford makes his audience an active participant in his plays: That is, a character or his or her situation seems to be asking to be 'read' according to a conventional formula, but then also acts contrary to that formula. This means the audience often finds it hard to decide if it is supposed to admire or condemn a character. The most flagrant example is ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore' where the incestuous lovers use a stage language (rhetoric) (deriving from 'Romeo and Juliet') that we are trained to hear ‘positively’: and we can’t help but hear this positive music even when Giovanni and Annabella are doing and saying the most appalling things. Giovanni speaks the language of a Marlovian superman while he is cutting out the heart of his lover. The lovers remain the hero and heroine of the play despite incest and murder.

A more subtle example is 'Perkin Warbeck' where the audience is put in the position of not being able to decide who, on the stage, is the rightful King of England, Henry or Perkin Warbeck. Each sounds like the true King and Perkin even sounds and acts more royally. In the Elizabethan/Jacobean theater we are trained to believe the convincing speaker (the best and most charismatic actor): we don’t have any other evidence! Ford is not playing a joke against the audience: he is raising the whole issue of rightful kingship, changing it from the ceremonial rhetoric of Shakespeare’s History plays, to a new psychological rhetoric. In Shakespeare, the rightful king is also the one the plot contrives to getting the most oaths of allegiance. In 'Perkin Warbeck', this is Henry; but we, the audience, are tempted to decide it is Perkin. The play uses the convention of the history play and then disturbs its rules.

In 'The Broken Heart', Ford constructs a world whose values and imperatives are designed precisely to bring out the virtues that are the characters' motives of action . It is pointless to protest against the extraordinary 'Sparta' of this play with the moralistic and realistic objections deriving from quite another kind of world. The world of this play is Ford's own creation, so he hardly can be passing judgment on it. Indeed all dramatists work this way. The selective process behind HAMLET or GHOSTS is less evident only because we are more familiar with their world vision. I know of no parallel in the theater to THE BROKEN HEART'S extraordinary Sparta except, perhaps, the Rome of Racine's BÉRÉNICE. There is an extreme disjunction between the culture (Caroline England) and what we believe to be the nature of the culture dramatized (classical Sparta).

The emblematic names of the characters of 'The Broken Heart' suggest the play is, in fact, a form of extended masque. {There is evidence Ford collaborated in writing a masque shortly before this play} The masque itself is an allegorical abstract of drama, drama with all its uncertainty and danger removed. In 'The Broken Heart' this masque form is then crossed with elements of Revenge Tragedy to create an extraordinary hybrid, where the revenge and its consequences are conducted as a solemn ritual.

Elements usually important to revenge melodrama are here quietly evaded - or abandoned, as in Orgilus elaborate early disguise in the first two acts which is so strangely inconsequential to the later action. The disguise prepares us for something like e.g., the plot of Vindice in Middleton's 'The Revenger's Tragedy' but such a plot is far from Ford's purpose. One is reminded of Samuel Johnson's stricture on Hamlet:

Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there seems no adequate
cause; for he does nothing which he might not have done with
the reputation of sanity.

One might say that ORGILUS does nothing with his disguise that he might not have done with complete candor.

More surprisingly, the situation of 'The Broken Heart' seems at first more suited to comedy. The jealousy of Bassanes, the retirement from life of Penthea, (like Olivia in 'Twelfth Night') and Orgilus' extravagent anger just at the time when Ithokles is conscious of his crime and ready to make amends, all seemed eminently ready for comedic resolution.
The exalted sentiments and expressions of the characters, too, which would seem to preclude the vulgarity of violence, seem ripe for comedic deflation or disenchantment, for a civilized reconciliation, as in a comedy of manners.

And here is where Ford is at his most surprising for he sets about creating what is a new genre - a Tragedy of Manners. For the exalted level of the characters' sentiments is revealed to be, not an absurd overvaluation of the dramatic situation which will be deflated as in a comedy like 'Twelfth Night', but a civilized but implacably demanding code of conduct with completely lethal and tragic consequences. The plot again and again seems to offer the characters comedic - or at least happy - ways out of their predicaments but which they loftily and resolutely refuse to take. Where comedic resolution might have seemed the civilized solution Ford rescues tragedy by showing it to be obeying a higher idea of civilized conduct.

It is, in fact, quite early in the play, in Act II Sc. III, that Ford signals to us that all the hopeful signs of comedic development, up to the absurdity of Orgilus' disguise, are likely to be frustrated. After Orgilus had thrown off his disguise to claim Penthea as his true wife, she replies with a concept of her situation so extreme and unyielding as to lock her forever in tragedy. To her mind, she is truly married to Orgilus, so that her enforced marriage to Bassanes is a shameful adultery, forever making honest love impossible. When Orgilus urges that she is his wife, "and ever shall be" she replies:

Never shall nor will.
Hear me; in a word I'll tell thee why
The virgin dowry which my birth bestow'd
Is ravish'd by another. My true love
Abhors to think that Orgilus deserv'd
No better favors than a second bed.....
........To confirm it
Should I outlive my bondage let me meet
Another worse than this, and less desir'd,
If of all the men alive thou shouldst but touch
My lip or hand again.

To her brother Ithocles she expresses an equally fantastic idea of her situation. By forcing her to marry Bassanes, Ithocles has made her:

a faith-breaker,
A spotted whore.......
For she that's wife to Orgilus, and lives
In known adultery with Bassanes
Is at best a whore.

By holding on to the highest concept of the love-relation with absolute integrity, Penthea can see any qualification of this relation only in the extremest terms: terms which preclude the compromise offered by a common sense we are more familiar with in the theater..

We see Penthea snatching tragic catastrophe from the jaws of comedic resolution! I think we are meant to 'register' this: and to recall all earlier forms of common-sense and theatrically sanctioned solutions offered to the lovers' dilemma. These are solutions we have gone along with in innumerable plays; but here they are dismissed as being beneath the dignity of the play's fantastic Spartan code of honor. Our sense that we have accommodated ourselves earlier to these less demanding plot-solutions which this play is cunningly evoking, is a subtle reproach to us. We are being presented with a code of conduct we are inclined to evade.

Of course, if we assent to Penthea's odd decision we get the agreeable sensation that at last we are in a theater that addresses our own lofty spirituality. (I am trying to get into the 'mind-set' of those in Ford's audience that did approve of this kind of tactic.) This, in fact, is an anticipation of what T.S. Eliot does in such plays as 'The Family Re-union' and 'The Cocktail Party' where, one feels, there is a hierarchy of consciousness, with one level of discourse for the groundlings and another, altogether higher, for the discriminating cognoscenti.

This, I think, helps us to appreciate the very strange directions the plot of this play will take. The world of Ford's Sparta and its demanding code of conduct, is created so that just this form of lofty stoicism can come into being. In any other world, theatrical or other, these gestures would not make good sense. The Sparta Ford has devised permits them to come into their own, where such gestures can be assented to and applauded.

Just as the Spartan code defeats the challenge of comedy, Ford as unnervingly defeats our expectations of a conventional revenge tragedy. The almost unearthly motives of Penthea's self-inflicted martyrdom undercut Orgilus' justification for revenge against Ithokles, especially when we meet an Ithokles not only individually admirable and impressive - more so than Orgilus - but also one that is genuinely repentant. In fact, the danger of the play is that Orgilus might seem merely pathological, like the narrator in Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado', insanely destroying someone finer than himself.

In Middleton's 'The Revenger's Tragedy' the objects of the hero's revenge are so uniformly loathsome that their fates concern one no more than those in a Punch and Judy show. But the characters in 'The Broken Heart' mutually sustain the highest human values of their society.

Opponent and victim are equally noble, so that the scene in which Orgilos traps Ithokles in the chair-engine and kills him, also is enacted as a strange and lofty declaration of friendship and admiration. There are no villains in the Shakespearean sense. Each character behaves with the utmost nobility in the misfortune he or she suffers. The women are as noble and as heroic as the men: both sexes share the same ideal. Within this spiritual aristocracy there is genuine sexual equality, and Ford sets his play in Sparta, the one Greek city state in which the sexes were, reputedly, equal.

Penthea's 'madness', for example, is totally unlike Ophelia's, though it recalls this prototype. For Penthea's madness is willed: the same resolve that schooled her to starve herself is still visibly and audibly operating to discipline her responses to a masque-like decorum of complaint. She has given herself the authority, granted to madness, to speak out plainly. It is almost an 'obligatory scene', built into the name 'Penthea' [Sorrow/Complaint] In contrast to Ophelia's disjointed speeches, Penthea's suggest that her madness is just another level of control, an intensification of language that does not become disordered: merely more able to break through decorum for direct reproach and for description of her suffering.

Penthea's mad speeches decorously approximate the fantastic or grotesque imagery of Webster. We see, here, the dramatic convention of the obligatory mad-scene conscious of being a convention. Enough of the convention is supplied by Ford for us, as audience, to grant its function: but Ford does not exploit the situation, as Webster might, to make it more plausible, more grotesque or exotic. It performs its function in the total pattern: the madness is a stage towards the total annihilation of death: but she will go only as mad as the decorous structure of the play permits.

This civilized control over the mad scene comes not from the drama's need for plausible and enthralling mimesis: I think it comes from the alternative imperative of the masque ideal of ordered and balanced 'statement' towards which the action of the play is striving. Masque is drama with the dialectic and danger removed: it tends towards a static depiction of qualities: of attributes detached from individuality and from specific human passions and motives. Characters in masque are not specific individuals but generic figures. Ford's characters, uniquely in 'The Broken Heart' seem to waver between the two types of theatrical representation - drama and masque, individual and abstract.

This accounts for the way that all the major scenes become 'exemplary' - demonstrations of how such things should be. As Orgilus murders Ithokles he is forced to admire the manner in which Ithokles accepts his death, as if both murderer and victim are aware of the code of nobility that is an imperative more important than the motive for the murder, its suffering, or its occasion. This code creates the controlling aesthetic of the play, the decorum it must adhere to. It is quite an achievement by Ford that this somehow avoids being cold, unmoving, or absurd. He gets us, as audience, to recognize and assent to this code.

When Orgilus opens his veins before an admiring stage audience, when Calantha continues her ceremony of dance - another masque imperative - as her heart is being lethally broken and when, in the final tableau, the supreme ceremony of the play, she marries the corpse of Ithokles, Ford converts the dramatic situation into ceremony, into masque.

We find this element of masque in Shakespeare's last Romances, too, in 'Pericles', 'The Winter's Tale', 'The Tempest'. In Shakespeare the masque form is inserted abruptly into the drama - though 'The Tempest' shows a more perfect balance between the two genres. In 'The Broken Heart' it gradually predominates over the dramatic, so that the busy violence of the revenge plot of Orgilus is the challenge which the masque element overcomes; in the same way that the characters must surmount individual and particular passions for the higher code of behavior they all subscribe to.

In Court society or the society that responded to Milton's 'Comus' the masque performance is a display of ideal values requiring only a perfunctory plot. 'The Broken Heart' offers a more substantial plot than 'Comus' and the play therefore has dramatic interest: but it subordinates this plot in order to permit the perspectives of the masque structure, ultimately, to predominate.

'The Broken Heart' Ford constructs a stage world that corresponds to no known existing world; least of all historical Sparta. All the play's actions aspire to the music of Court Masque that the play attains in the last scene. All through the play there seems a 'struggle of the genres' in which, finally, masque wins out. The struggle of the genres is mutually beneficial. The dramatic content of the Revenge tragedy supplies the 'risk' and 'danger' lacking in the masque: the masque attains the 'grace' and 'ceremony' so difficult for the revenge drama to attain.

Instructive, here, would be to contrast the closing scene of THE BROKEN HEART with the closing scene of HAMLET. In both plays, a prince from the outside - Nearchus-Fortinbras - ascends the throne over the bodies of the would-be rulers. In Hamlet, Fortinbras' assumption of the throne can, mistakenly, seem an intrusion, added onto the ending. In 'The Broken Heart' Nearchus' ascent to the throne is more firmly integrated into the whole fabric of the play: he has been a contender for Calantha's hand: he shares with Calantha and Ithokles the code of grace, integrity they live and die by. By taking over the kingdom, Nearchus completes the movement and pattern of the play, closing its action as if at the closing moment of the masque. The play concludes, in fact, with a song, as if the dramatic action now has been completely subsumed under masque formality; as if attaining a state of grace that is the merited reward for the noble human actors.

5. 'The Broken Heart' sets out a pattern of how admirable people behave in adversity. Bassanes, though jealous, is finally magnanimous. Orgilos, though he murders Ithokles, does so while admiring his victim. (96-7 IV. iv) Ithokles actually urges Orgilus to kill him, forgiving his murderer. Penthea dies rather than be unfaithful to the husband she does not love, and Calantha dies of a broken heart just after she stages a dignified marriage ceremony with the corpse of Ithokles. The play does not set out to be an account of life as it is, but as it should be: it is an ideal mirror held up to courtly, that is Cavalier, society.

6. While this gives the play its refinement, it also narrows down considerably its range of poetic and psychological interest. The verse has no surprises, no startling metaphors, bold analogies. We stay locked within a fine but narrow milieu of aristocratic culture. This probably was like pre-Restoration British aristocracy itself, shut away from such things as concern for money, trade, the world of commerce, the new movements in politics, science, etc. It is poetry in seclusion.

Coming to this verse from Shakespeare one is struck by its narrow range of reference, its lack of boldness of imagery, its melancholy (which, however, is not enfeebling). The mighty Marlovian line has now contracted into the quiet, melancholic, reticent language of Ford. We can see what a loss of range of reference is involved: the outside world almost is put aside for an inward, personal world.

Staging the play, and instructing the actors, then, one would work for a kind of tough, yet graceful, somewhat melancholy nobility, a fineness of speech and gesture - but definitely not 'foppery' or artificiality. The paradox of the Cavalier type was that it was a combination of soldier and courtier; a combination of grace and strength.

Look at the portraits of the family and courtiers of Charles 1 painted by Peter Leyly. You will notice that, for instance, though the Cavaliers are elegant with full locks of hair, they often are wearing armor and their bodies are the tough bodies of horsemen. The ladies of the court are impressively beautiful, not 'pretty', and seem similarly strong as personalities. It is an odd, but impressive, society.

Here is such a Cavalier Poet going into battle:

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind
That from nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Richard Lovelace


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