Egyptian Singer” (1889), “Applause” (1893), “Glory to the Dead” (1901) and “Snowdrift” (1902). Ford’s influence on the younger generation of sculptors was considerable and of good effect. His charming disposition rendered him extremely popular, and when he died a monument was erected to his memory (C. Lucchesi, sculptor, J. W. Simpson, architect) in St John’s Wood, near to where he dwelt.
See Sculpture; also M. H. Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day (London, 1901).
FORD, JOHN (1586–c. 1640), English dramatist, was baptized
on the 17th of April 1586 at Ilsington in north Devon. He came
of a good family; his father was in the commission of the peace
and his mother was a sister of Sir John Popham, successively
attorney-general and lord chief justice. The name of John
Ford appears in the university register of Oxford as matriculating
at Exeter College in 1601. Like a cousin and namesake (to whom,
with other members of the society of Gray’s Inn, he dedicated
his play of The Lover’s Melancholy), the future dramatist entered
the profession of the law, being admitted of the Middle Temple
in 1602; but he seems never to have been called to the bar.
Four years afterwards he made his first appearance as an author
with an elegy called Fame’s Memorial, or the Earl of Devonshire
deceased, and dedicated to the widow of the earl (Charles Blount,
Lord Mountjoy, “coronized,” to use Ford’s expression, by King
James in 1603 for his services in Ireland)—a lady who would
have been no unfitting heroine for one of his own tragedies of
lawless passion, the famous Penelope, formerly Lady Rich.
This panegyric, which is accompanied by a series of epitaphs
and is composed in a strain of fearless extravagance, was, as
the author declares, written “unfee’d”; it shows that Ford
sympathized, as Shakespeare himself is supposed to have done,
with the “awkward fate” of the countess’s brother, the earl of
Essex. Who the “flint-hearted Lycia” may be, to whom the
poet seems to allude as his own disdainful mistress, is unknown;
indeed, the record of Ford’s private life is little better than a
blank. To judge, however, from the dedications, prologues and
epilogues of his various plays, he seems to have enjoyed the patronage
of the earl, afterwards duke, of Newcastle, “himself a muse”
after a fashion, and Lord Craven, the supposed husband of the
ex-queen of Bohemia. Ford’s tract of Honor Triumphant, or the
Peeres Challenge (printed 1606 and reprinted by the Shakespeare
Society with the Line of Life, in 1843), and the simultaneously published
verses The Monarches Meeting, or the King of Denmarkes
Welcome into England, exhibit him as occasionally meeting the
festive demands of court and nobility; and a kind of moral
essay by him, entitled A Line of Life (printed 1620), which
contains references to Raleigh, ends with a climax of fulsome
praise to the address of King James I. Yet at least one of Ford’s
plays (The Broken Heart, iii. 4) contains an implied protest
against the absolute system of government generally accepted
by the dramatists of the early Stuart reigns. Of his relations
with his brother-authors little is known; it was natural that he
should exchange complimentary verses with James Shirley,
and that he should join in the chorus of laments over the death
of Ben Jonson. It is more interesting to notice an epigram in
honour of Ford by Richard Crashaw, morbidly passionate in
one direction as Ford was in another. The lines run:
“Thou cheat’st us, Ford; mak’st one seem two by art:
What is Love’s Sacrifice but the Broken Heart?”
It has been concluded that in the latter part of his life he gratified the tendency to seclusion for which he was ridiculed in The Time Poets (Choice Drollery, 1656) by withdrawing from business and from literary life in London, to his native place; but nothing is known as to the date of his death. His career as a dramatist very probably began by collaboration with other authors. With Thomas Dekker he wrote The Fairy Knight and The Bristowe Merchant (licensed in 1624, but both unpublished), with John Webster A late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother (licensed in 1624). A play entitled An ill Beginning has a good End, brought on the stage as early as 1613 and attributed to Ford, was (if his) his earliest acted play; whether Sir Thomas Overbury’s Life and untimely Death (1615) was a play is extremely doubtful; some lines of indignant regret by Ford on the same subject are still preserved. He is also said to have written, at dates unknown, The London Merchant (which, however, was an earlier name for Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle) and The Royal Combat; a tragedy by him, Beauty in a Trance, was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1653, but never printed. These three (or four) plays were among those destroyed by Warburton’s cook. The Queen, or the Excellency of the Sea, a play of inverted passion, containing some fine sensuous lines, printed in 1653 by Alexander Singhe for private performance, has been recently edited by W. Bang (Materialien zur Kunde d. älteren engl. Dramas, 13, Louvain, 1906), and is by him on internal evidence confidently claimed as Ford’s. Of the plays by Ford preserved to us the dates span little more than a decade—the earliest, The Lover’s Melancholy, having been acted in 1628 and printed in 1629, the latest, The Lady’s Trial, acted in 1638 and printed in 1639.
When writing The Lover’s Melancholy, it would seem that Ford had not yet become fully aware of the bent of his own dramatic genius, although he was already master of his powers of poetic expression. He was attracted towards domestic tragedy by an irresistible desire to sound the depths of abnormal conflicts between passion and circumstances, to romantic comedy by a strong though not widely varied imaginative faculty, and by a delusion that he was possessed of abundant comic humour. In his next two works, undoubtedly those most characteristically expressive of his peculiar strength, ’Tis Pity she’s a Whore (acted c. 1626) and The Broken Heart (acted c. 1629), both printed in 1633 with the anagram of his name Fide Honor, he had found horrible situations which required dramatic explanation by intensely powerful motives. Ford by no means stood alone among English dramatists in his love of abnormal subjects; but few were so capable of treating them sympathetically, and yet without that reckless grossness or extravagance of expression which renders the morally repulsive aesthetically intolerable, or converts the horrible into the grotesque. For in Ford’s genius there was real refinement, except when the “supra-sensually sensual” impulse or the humbler self-delusion referred to came into play. In a third tragedy, Love’s Sacrifice (acted c. 1630; printed in 1633), he again worked on similar materials; but this time he unfortunately essayed to base the interest of his plot upon an unendurably unnatural possibility—doing homage to virtue after a fashion which is in itself an insult. In Perkin Warbeck (printed 1634; probably acted a year later) he chose an historical subject of great dramatic promise and psychological interest, and sought to emulate the glory of the great series of Shakespeare’s national histories. The effort is one of the most laudable, as it was by no means one of the least successful, in the dramatic literature of this period. The Fancies Chaste and Noble (acted before 1636, printed 1638), though it includes scenes of real force and feeling, is dramatically a failure, of which the main idea is almost provokingly slight and feeble; and The Lady’s Trial (acted 1638, printed 1639) is only redeemed from utter wearisomeness by an unusually even pleasingness of form. There remain two other dramatic works, of very different kinds, in which Ford co-operated with other writers, the mask of The Sun’s Darling (acted 1624, printed 1657), hardly to be placed in the first rank of early compositions, and The Witch of Edmonton (printed 1658, but probably acted about 1621), in which we see Ford as a joint writer with Dekker and Rowley of one of the most powerful domestic dramas of the English or any other stage.
A few notes may be added on some of the more remarkable of the plays enumerated. A wholly baseless anecdote, condensed into a stinging epigram by Endymion Porter, asserted that The Lover’s Melancholy was stolen by Ford from Shakespeare’s papers. Undoubtedly, the madness of the hero of this play of Ford’s occasionally recalls Hamlet, while the heroine is one of the many, and at the same time one of the most pleasing, parallels to Viola. But neither of them is a copy, as Friar Bonaventura in Ford’s second play may be said to be a copy of Friar Lawrence, whose kindly pliability he disagreeably exaggerates, or as D’Avolos in Love’s Sacrifice is clearly modelled on Iago. The plot of The Lover’s Melancholy, which is ineffective because it leaves no room for suspense in the mind of
