JOHN FORD AND DARTMOOR - Mark Beeson, 1998John Ford has represented something of a puzzle to literary critics. There have been many studies of Ford the dramatist of the London stage during the closing years of Elizabethan theatre (known more accurately as the Caroline period). Few if any agree either on the nature of his achievement or the purpose behind his plays. Yet no modern study has looked at him in relation to Dartmoor and his upbringing there. Gifford (1827) edited his work with a West Country eye, but he lived before Dartmoors medieval and early modern culture was properly understood. Dartmoor was in those days regarded by some outsiders as a waste, a 'squalida montana' according to William Camden (1596), and on this basis might be thought to be the sort of place that once a young man had escaped he would want to forget. Certainly its terrain and still largely medieval architecture would have fitted ill with the Italianate renaissance and baroque sensibility of Jacobean and Caroline London. Nevertheless William Browne, who was born and brought up in the stannary town of Tavistock on the west side of Dartmoor, became a classical scholar and renaissance writer who could incorporate his local area into his work (Beeson, 1996). To him Dartmoor was not a waste. His conscious integration of the classical with the local is part of a thread in English writing which reaches back at least to Spenser, and continues forward to Milton and Pope. It was a thread associated with a Puritan outlook, concerned with establishing independence from Rome. In his more Catholic circles (Hopkins, 1994), in the middle of his working life in London, it is possible that Ford did not feel this political concern, but it does not mean that his Dartmoor background in childhood and in later life was necessarily less of an influence. The Fords of Bagtor were part of a stannary culture independent and confident enough to have imprisoned a Member of Parliament, Richard Strode, under its own jurisdiction in 1512 (Rowe, 1848, 242), only three quarters of a century before John Fords birth. What constitutes Dartmoor and what makes Dartmoor a coherent enough entity to merit historical treatment, rather than discussing Ford as a playwright from Devon, the county in which Dartmoor is situated? In the first instance we cannot be talking about the Dartmoor National Park, which is not even fifty years old. The geology of Dartmoor, however, has given most of the area included in the current National Park boundary an integrity over many centuries, not so much because of the obvious visual characteristics of the granite plateaux, but because of the effects of the granite on the way of life of those who live upon it (Beeson and Greeves, 1993). In essence, Dartmoor consists of a central upland portion called (from its early medieval designation as a hunting tract) the Forest, surrounded by the parishes whose valley farmlands lead up onto open moorland abutting on this central portion. What united Dartmoor geographically during medieval and early-modern times was this focus of the perimeter parishes on an upland centre at relatively high altitude, which traditionally provided summer pasture for grazing stock kept in the valleys during the winter months. Although the Forest boundary is less important today than the boundary between areas of open moorland and enclosed farmland, its influence is still felt in the form of its ownership by the Duchy of Cornwall, and the leases for military training granted to the Ministry of Defence by the Duchy. Another equally important unifying feature has been the presence of tin ore in the granite area, which led to the formation of the four stannary districts of Tavistock, Chagford, Ashburton and Plympton, with boundaries meeting in the centre of Dartmoor not far from Crockern Tor. This stannary jurisdiction served to unite those living in the Forest and its surrounding parishes possibly even more emphatically than the agricultural focus. Ford is recorded as being baptised at Ilsington on the south-eastern flanks of Dartmoor on April 12th 1586 . Ilsington is a parish lying just north of the stannary town of Ashburton, and includes Rippon Tor and Haytor Rocks within its boundaries, two of the highest and most rugged hills on Dartmoor's eastern plateau. It was also the scene of a great deal of tin-mining activity during the medieval and early modern period. The presumption is that Ford was born at Bagtor, just on the edge of open moorland stretching up to Rippon Tor. He was the second son of a yeoman farmer, Thomas Ford, who had married the sister or niece (there is some dispute which) of a famous judge, the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Popham. John Ford's grandfather George Ford had a close involvement with tinworking. The Fords of Bagtor owned the manor of Ilsington and can therefore be presumed to have been reasonably well-off, but they could have boasted nothing like the prestige, influence and level of education which the Popham family must have brought. John Prince, author of The Worthies of Devon, derives the Ford family ultimately from Elias Ford, who was given land in Moretonhampstead by William de Mandevil in the reign of Henry II (Prince, 1810, 380). We know very little about John Fords life. He had an older brother Hnery who when he died in 1616 left John left a legacy of twenty pounds a year for the rest of his life. A sister Jane is commemorated in an inscription the wall of Ilsington Chrurch as having died a virgin in 1664, leaving twenty pounds in her will for the schooling of children in Ilsington parish. William Gifford, an early editor of his work, presumes that Ford was educated at a local grammar school. The closest was in Ashburton, which Gifford himself attended. It is possible that, like Browne, he went on to Exeter College, Oxford - college records refer to the matriculation of one John Ford, Devon gent. in 1601 - but Gifford argues that, if so, he could not have spent very long there. Like Browne, he finished his education at one of the Inns of Court, in his case the Middle Temple, where he was enrolled in 1602. In 1605 he was suspended from the Middle Temple for failing to pay his buttery bill, but was reinstated again in 1608. In between, he published his first poetic works Fame's Memorial, an elegy dedicated to the Countess of Devonshire, and Funeral Tears, a shorter tribute to her husband the Earl of Devon, as well as a prose pamphlet Honour Triumphant. But there most of the resemblance with Browne appears to end. Ford moved in Catholic circles (Hopkins, 1994), whereas Browne was in the Puritan camp . Ford, who started by writing poetry, became a playwright in the tradition of Shakespeare, while Browne, whose earliest finished work seems to be his masque for the Inner Temple (Hazlet, 1869), made his name as a pastoral poet who served as a model for Milton. And far from championing Dartmoor and Devon, Ford more or less turned his back on his native area, certainly as far as subject matter is concerned. It is true that Fame's Memorial is dedicated to Penelope Devereux, Countess of Devonshire, and on the subject of her husband the late Earl of Devonshire, but that is likely to have been more because of his fascination with the nature of their life-history than out of any conscious promotion of his home county. Penelope Devereux had been engaged to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, Earl of Devonshire, and then forced to marry another man, Lord Rich, against her will. She and Mountjoy continued their relationship to produce several children, and eventually she either divorced Lord Rich officially, or became sufficiently estranged to pass for divorced. In any event, she and Mountjoy were eventually married, but this resulted in Mountjoy coming in for strong criticism (though perhaps not outright ostracism from court as used to be thought) and he died not long afterwards from what is said to have been a broken heart (Gifford, 1827). In Fame's Memorial we see the germ of Ford's over-riding interest in the psychology of love. We also infer that he himself had had an unhappy love-experience with a girl he calls Lycia, the Greek for she-wolf:Ah! that the goddess whom in heart I serveThough never mine, bright Lycia the cruel,The cruel-subtle, would the name deserveOf lesser wise, and not abuse the jewelOf wit, which adds unto my flame more fuel.Her thoughts to elder merits are confinedNot to the solace of my younger mind.Fames Memorial (Gifford, 1827, Vol 2, 604)According to Gifford, this girl was the daughter of a member of the Devon aristocracy, in which case Ford must still have been keeping up his links with home at the age of twenty. In Honour Triumphant, as it were Fames Memorials accompanying prose pamphlet, Ford, using a certain amount of irony, reveals his familiarity with the ideals of medieval courtly love which this stanza recalls. A poem signed IF and now attributed by many to Ford, Christ's Bloody Sweat, written in 1613, suggests a conversion to a more religious outlook. On the evidence of the plays it cannot have been a conventional one, but on the same evidence there is no reason to believe he recanted from some kind of Christian belief. Two other prose pamphlets, The Golden Mean (1614) and A Line of Life (1620), set out Ford's commitment to neo-stoical doctrines as a rule for living at this stage of his life, the combination of Christianity with classical Stoicism being a common one in his time. Up to this point, there is no hint of the originality that was to come in the plays. It seems plausible to suggest that something happened in Ford's own life between the writing of the conventionally moralistic Christ's Bloody Sweat and the writing of The Lover's Melancholy, or even his collaboration on the Witch of Edmonton, which jolted him into a broader way of thinking. Christ's Bloody Sweat gives the impression of being the work of a man who has rescued himself from an excessive turmoil of young love by turning to religion - the poem attacks the vanity of woman's beauty, and declares that 'love is no god', as if in direct refutation of Honour Triumphant. The plays, on the other hand, are clearly the work of a man with a profound, if painful, experience of mature love which has revived his natural admiration for women and deepened his sympathy for the human predicament. Childhood is an impressionable time. There are things in Ford's work which suggest that certain scenes from his childhood stayed with him. And there is one play in particular, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, whose subject matter as a whole suggests that an instinctive sympathy for the South West remained with him into his adult life. Ford's grandparents would have been in their prime at the time of the prayer-book rebellion in 1549, when Devon and Cornwall rose against Edward VI's reforms. Ford's parents would certainly have been able to relate this episode to their son. Perhaps stories of this rebellion led him to take as his subject the rebellion half a century earlier when the pretender to the throne of Henry VII, Perkin Warbeck, landed in Cornwall calling himself Richard IV, and marched through Devon gathering supporters along the way. Ford displays great sympathy with Warbeck, and has the Cornish described in favourable terms: The Cornish blades are men of mettle. This pun leads on to Ford's mining imagery. Cornwall was famous for its tin-mines. But Dartmoor in the medieval and Tudor period was also a very significant tin-mining area, outproducing Cornwall in the late 12th century and enjoying a peak in productivity during the early sixteenth century (Greeves, 1992a). Productivity was tailing off somewhat by the end of the sixteenth century, but the industry and culture of the mines must have been all around Ford as he grew up, particularly given his familys recorded involvement, and it would be surprising if his frequent references to mining do not reflect Dartmoor experience. Consider the following passage from Tis Pity She's a Whore, III, VI,7-23: There is a place -List, daughter - in a black and hollow vaultWhere day is never seen; there shines no sun,But flaming horror of consuming fires;A lightless sulphur chok'd with smoky fogsOf an infected darkness; in this placeDwell many thousand, thousand sundry sortsOf never-dying deaths; there damned soulsRoar without pity; there are gluttons fedWith toads and adders; there is burning oilPoured down the drunkards throat; the usurerIs forc'd to sup whole draughts of molten gold;There is the murderer forever stabb'd,Yet can he never die; there lies the wantonOn racks of burning steel, whiles in his soulHe feels the torment of his raging lust.On the face of it, this is a conventional medieval picture of Hell, echoing a similar passage in Christopher Marlowes Dr Faustus Act V, II, 126-135:Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror stareInto that vast perpetual torture-house.There are the furies tossing damned soulsOn burning forks. their bodies broiled in lead.There are live quarters broiling on the coalsThat neer can die. This ever-burning chairIs for oer tortured souls to rest them in.These, that are fed with sops of flaming fire,Were gluttons, and loved only delicates,And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates.Yet considering what is added by Ford to Marlowes picture, I wonder if Fords description is not influenced by memories of blowing houses in the misty Dartmoor river valleys, where the tinners smelted tin and ladled the molten metal into moulds. To a student of Dartmoor history it cannot help but call to mind the legend (probably untrue) of how pouring molten metal down a man's throat was one of the tinners' punishments (Crossing, 1997, 121).Likewise in this passage from Loves Sacrifice IV, 2, 43-49:Were both of you hid in a rock of fire,Guarded by ministers of flaming hell,I have a sword - 'Tis here - should make my wayThrough fire, through darkness, death, and hell, and all,To hew your lust-engendred flesh to shreds,Pound you to mortar, cut your throats, and minceYour flesh to mites.a rock of fire is suggestive of the tinners furnaces, which were built with massive granite, and pound you to mortar calls to mind the mortar stones on which the mechanical stamps ground tin-bearing rock into a mortar for washing and dressing. Other references to mining and its associated processes are more direct. For example:Glowing FurnacesAre far more hot than they which flame outright.The Witch of Edmonton, V, 1, 54-5The constant lode-stone and the steel are foundIn several mines, yet is there such a leagueBetween these minerals, as if one veinOf earth had nourished bothThe Lover's Melancholy III, II, 77-80

But I digged for foodIn a much richer mine than gold or stoneOf any value balanced.'Tis Pity She's a Whore V, VI, 26-28Not Gloucester's own confusion....Can move this woman-monsterBut that she still from the unbottomed mineOf devilish policies doth vent the oreOf troubles and sedition.Perkin Warbeck I, I, 48-51For there's a fire more sacred purifiesThe dross of mixture.Perkin Warbeck IV, V, 62-3 Dross cannotCleave to so pure a metal.Perkin Warbeck II, III, 75-6Unearth the mine of jewels at your footThe Ladys Trial II, IV, 34These could of course be merely general references to mining; there is no mention of tin, or anything else which would help to locate the source of the experience as definitely belonging to Dartmoor. Even a reference to rabbit buries in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore IV, III, lines 156-7 But toKnow what ferret it was that haunted your cony-berry.and a reference to rock suggestive of a Dartmoor tor in Love's Sacrifice, II, I, lines 172-4I have sued and sued,Knelt, wept and begged; but tears, and vows, and wordsMove her no more than summer winds a rock.though they look as if they derive from Dartmoor experience, equally could have come from elsewhere.There are two passages in Ford, however, which in conjunction with this mining imagery, do appear to point the finger more firmly at Dartmoor.Thus witchesPossessed, even to their deaths deluded, sayThey have been wolves and dogs and sailed in egg-shellsOver the sea and rid on fiery dragons..Perkin Warbeck V, III, 100-104Besides, Lord Orgilus is fled to AthensUpon a fiery dragon..The Broken Heart II, I, 53-54What we should be concerned with here is the mention of 'Fiery dragons'. Marion Lomax, in her edition of Fords best-known plays, suggests a reference to Medea for the passage from The Broken Heart (Lomax, 1994). If the playwright had been anyone but Ford, this might be a good guess. Ford, however, is curiously uninterested in classical mythology, as if he had a particularly strong mythology of his own to call on. A little later in the same play, mention of a witch's familiar in connection with Orgilus journey shows that the reference is almost certainly an anachronistic one to medieval folklore. Thomas Tonkin, in the 18th century, describes how Cornish women used to see 'streams of fire to fall on them (undiscovered veins of tin), which they call fiery dragons'. More relevant still is a discovery by Tom Greeves. He reports that on a map of Ellisborough tin mine in Sheepstor parish, at the point where a vein of tin called South Draggon Lode is shown crossing an ancient working first documented in 1563, is written 'A Firey Draggon was seen to fall near this place (Greeves, 1992b). Fiery dragons were clearly part of Dartmoor's mining culture, and the Dartmoor tin industry is the most likely place for Ford to have come across mention of them. There is a tradition that Ford returned to Ilsington in about 1639, married and had children. If this was the case, then it is more than likely that he had kept in touch with his family and friends in and around Ilsington during his years in London, giving his adulthood a strong Dartmoor strand to add to that of his childhood. Do we know anything about the nature of educated Dartmoor cultural life at this time, and anything in particular which might enable us to explain elements in Fords work? While Ford and Browne were very much men who travelled away, there were other educated ones who both lived and worked on Dartmoor during the first half of the 17th century. Robert Herrick for example, the High Church poet of Hesperides, was vicar of Dean Prior just to the west of Ashburton, and must have known Ford from his London days; it is hard to think that these two did not meet and read each others work in Devon, until Herrick was deprived of his living in 1648. Herrick, though, was a product of London, who treated Dartmoor as a place of exile. John Elford of Sheepstor, on the other hand, who was an amateur poet and artist using the same kind of neo-platonist imagery (for example the phoenix) found in some of Fords work, was from a Dartmoor family and lived in the neighbouring parish of Widecombe between about 1630 and 1648 (Hamilton Rogers, 1895, 185-9). The Elfords were, like the Fords of Bagtor, deeply involved in the Dartmoor tin industry, as well as being farmers. John, educated at Cambridge, was later to pass into legend as the man who painted pictures along the walls of his cavern hide-out on Sheepstor at some point during 1655 while Cromwells troops were searching for him in vain. A comment attached to his signature in the Church Register at Meavy runs roughly (when translated from the Latin) God deliver us from the savagery and ignorance of the Puritans. He was not a Royalist - we know that he was a member of the Long Parliament in 1640, and was appointed by Cromwells administration to conduct civil marriages during the Commonwealth - but his artistic inclinations brought him into conflict with extreme forms of Puritanism. In this he shows the same independence of mind found in Fords work, neither Catholic nor Protestant. His love of symbolism too, as revealed in the monuments to his dead wives which he designed in Widecombe and Sheepstor churches, is reminiscent of Ford. Elford, in his poetic epitaph on his wife Mary, shows a fascination for the chronogram, which is a form of acrostic, and the anagram. The epitaph reads as follows:TO THE MEMORIE OFMARY THE THIRD WIFE OF IOHNELFORD OF SHITSTOR, ESQr., WASHEER INTERRED FEBr Ye 16 Ao 1642,HAVING ISSUE AT A BYRTHMARY & SARAHWed: poesie.AS MARYES CHOYCE MADE IOHNREIOYCE belowSoe was her losse his heauie crosse most knowYet lost she is not sure but found aboveDeath gaue her life timbrace A dearer love.Anagr: MARY ELFORD. - FEAR MY LORD.Then FEAR MY LORD whilst yet yu moust on moldThat soe those armes that mee may thee infoldNeer twelue moneths day her maridge heer did passHer heauenly nuptiall consummated wasShe fertile proud in soule and bodye bothIn life good workes at death she twyns brought forthAnd like A fruitfull tree with bearing dydYet Phoenix like for one there two suruiudWhich shortly posted their dear mother afterLeast sins contagion their poore soules might slaughterThen cease your sad laments I am but goneTo reape aboue what I belowe haue sowneAo aetat VIXIt obIIt SVperIsMarIa GaLe IohannI ELfroD Vxor tertIaheV obIIt eX pVerperIo Erectum fuit Ao 1650.The chronogram in the first Latin line reads 25 as her age. That in the two succeeding lines 1642, as the date of her death. The numerals 1650 indicate when the monument was erected. (Hamilton Rogers, 1895, 186)

Ford has an acrostic - a series of lines whose first letters spell a word or name - in his prefatory dedication of his poem Fame's Memorial to Penelope Devereux, countess of Devonshire, and uses the anagram of his name (spelt Iohn Forde) Fide Honor on the title pages of his later plays. In the churchyard at Ilsington there is a chronogram written on the tombstone of George Ford who died in 1663, almost certainly a close relative of the playwright. The lines on an hourglass in The Lovers Melancholy, IV, III, 56-63:Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands;As by an hour-glass, the span of timeDoth waste us to our graves, and we look on it.An age of pleasures reveld out, comes homeAt last and ends in sorrow, but the lifeWeary of riot, numbers every Sand,Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down,So to conclude calamity in rest.recall the hourglass John Elford designed on the small monument now over the porch of Sheepstor Church, with the caption Ut hora, sic vita. While Ford appears at home in the same symbolic world as Elford, and the poem Christ's Bloody Sweat is certainly a work of religious devotion, the conventional religious content in Elfords monuments, as typified by the epitaph on Mary Elford in Widecombe Church with its emphasis on a better life after death, is eschewed by Ford, whose concern in his plays is very definitely with how we should live on earth. This is an important difference and points towards the conclusion that the striking similarity in tone between the work of Ford and Elford (small and amateur though the latters output was), involving an imaginative independent stoicism in the face of granite circumstance, hardly Catholic but certainly anti-Puritan in its dependence on symbolism, is not the result of a possible personal link, but limns out a Dartmoor culture as common ancestor to the work of both. John Elford, a man who like some of Fords male relatives was a yeoman farmer cum tinner living and working on the moor, is the only truly representative figure in early 17th century Dartmoor culture whose work we have any knowledge of, at a time when (as we can deduce from the popularity of Elizabethan drama across the social scale) educated culture had still not quite diverged from that of uneducated people. Through studying the work of Elford, we can see something of the nature of the cultural influence that Dartmoor would have had on Ford during his childhood particularly, but also throughout his working life. In Ford's last play, The Lady's Trial performed at the Cockpit in 1638, two men who are close friends have the curiously similar names of Auria and Aurelio - could the el difference be a reference to the difference between Ford and Elford? If he was living in Devon, or even coming to visit, we can speculate that some of his work would have been read and performed in private houses on Dartmoor, perhaps Elfords.There is another Dartmoor man from this period who should be mentioned in connection with theatre - William Strode. Like Ford and Elford, he came from a family well known for its connection with the Dartmoor tin trade, this time in the stannary district of Plympton. One of his ancestors was Richard Strode, the Member of Parliament for Plympton who, a tinner himself, was imprisoned by the stannary authorities in Lydford Prison for trying to bring in a bill which would protect river mouths and harbours from pollution caused by tinworking. Williams father, Philip Strode, seems to have had an interest in a minimum of seventy five tinworks in the Plympton area, some of which were passed on to his son when he came of age (Greeves, 1985, 87-89). William was born in or near the parish of Plympton (Prince, 1810, 730) and baptised at Shaugh in 1603 (Greeves, 1985, 89). He was sent away to school at Westminster, and thence elected to Christchurch College, Oxford. He became a distinguished scholar, was ordained in holy orders and eventually rose to the office of public orator at the University of Oxford. Described by Prince as a rare poet, he is recorded by him as having written an ingenious comedy under the title of The Passions calmd or The Settling of the Floating Island. It was performed in the great hall at Christchurch as an after-dinner entertainment for King Charles I and his court during a visit to Oxford in 1636, acted by the young gentlemen of the house with great applause. Strode died in 1644 but his play was later printed in London in 1655 as The Floating Island, a Tragi-comedy (Prince, 1810, 732-3) .The Floating Island is an allegory more reminiscent, as a play, of Tudor interludes and morality plays than the post-Shakespearean stage of Ford and his London contemporaries, although Ford had himself been part author of an allegory when he collaborated with Dekker on their masque The Suns Darling. The allegorical structure may have been Strodes way of appeasing his own conscience, since the printed preface declares that he wrote it at the instance of those who might command him; else he had scarce condescended to a Play, his serious thoughts being filled with notions of deeper consideration. Yet such an accomplished piece of work, using the blank verse rhythms and language of the London stage, could hardly have been created by a man who was not a student of contemporary drama. Indeed the authorities would have been unlikely to command a play from him for such an important occasion unless it was known that he had some ability in this direction. Perhaps because it was written for a royal audience, and the masque was a form popular at court, The Floating Island has something of the feel of a masque about it; for example at the outset a floating island does actually appear, presumably through some kind of stage machinery. Moreover, the title page announces that music to the songs was composed by Henry Lawes, indicating the importance attached to the musical element, another feature of masque. Lawes was at that time the Kings Master of Music. Nevertheless The Floating Island is a play not a masque; despite the lack of characterisation, the centre of the work is its blank-verse dialogue rather than its stage directions or songs, and the writing is not only accomplished but sometimes thought-provoking, as this extract shows:Fancy. What think ye of transforming Amorous?Hilario. Hes undone then, he cannot show his legs, nor use his postures nor enjoy his idol Morphe. No, change Sir Timerous, hes as fearful as a hare, and may be as changeable: he hath many symbolical conditions of womanhood already: he is female in every part but one, and half female in his clothes. Give me but an inch of ribband from Fuga, and Ill undertake to present the lady Timida.Fancy. Fuga, Give him one of your changeable fancies.Thus first ourselves must whet our own invention;Else others will not stir. Men do not striveMethinks to please me as they ought to do.No other rarities these many AgesBut powder, printing, seaman card, and watches?So much vain dotage for the fond elixir?Why are not yet my crystals malleable,To make our gold no gold, and foil the diamond?Why want I instruments to measure outThe year, the day, the hour, without the helpOf sun, or turning of these tedious wheels?Nothing to carry me but barges, coaches?Sedans and litters? Through the air Id passBy some new waftage. I must have my houseConveyed by wheels and sails and plummets hungIn some deep pit, deep as the way is distant,To hurry me, my family and it,Whether I please. Ill travel like the snailWith all my house; but swifter than the falcon...I will have vaults which shall convey my whispersInstead of embassies to foreign nations;Places for echoes to pronounce a speech,Or give a suffrage like a multitude:Consorts well played by water; pictures taughtBy secret organs both to move and speak:We spend our selves too much upon our tailor;I rather would new mould new-fashion nature.The Floating Island, III, III The plot concerns King Prudentius, who is deposed by the Passions over whom he rules and replaced by Queen Fancy, only to be reinstated to sort out the chaos which ensues. Whether this was a veiled hint to King Charles not let his Catholic queen Henrietta have too much influence over policy is a matter for conjecture, as is the possibility that Strode was caricaturing Ford in the character of a Passion called Melancholico, but the message is certainly the stoic one that ruling oneself is a prerequisite for ruling others. When we compare Strodes disapproval of Queen Fancy with The Fancies Chaste and Noble in which Ford extols the chaos of feeling out of which happiness emerges, we see encapsulated the difference not only between The Floating Island and Fords work, but to some extent the difference between Ford and his age. Yet, as we have seen, Ford evinces evidence of a stoic viewpoint in his plays, and it is interesting that Strode does the same. Although he seems to have spent his working life away from Dartmoor at Oxford, William Strode had a Dartmoor tinworking background. The fact that he wrote a play well enough of to be printed after his death reinforces the link between drama and the tin industry - a link that runs all the way through the history of Dartmoor theatre before the Civil War, not least in the work of John Ford. What of the dramatic background on Dartmoor? The best-documented tradition of religious plays in Devon is recorded from the Dartmoor stannary town of Ashburton; likewise the most detailed records for a Robin Hood play tradition in Devon come from the Dartmoor stannary town of Chagford (Wasson 1986). Since the tin-mining stannaries of Dartmoor had links with those in Cornwall - until the twelfth century they were a single organisation - and Cornish drama was vigorous during the medieval period (Bakere, 1980) it may be no coincidence that strong dramatic traditions in Devon should be linked with tin-mining areas. There is no direct evidence for plays at either Ashburton or Chagford after 1564, but Ford perhaps refers to the Hood play in The Lover's Melancholy 1, II, lines 10-14, when Rhetias says, in an apt and perceptive summary of its function:Why should not I, a May-game, scorn the weightOf my sunk fortunes? Snarl at the vicesWhich rot the land, and without fear or witBe mine own antic?and it is possible that the tradition of playing Hood in the East Dartmoor area continued far enough into Ford's Dartmoor childhood for him to witness it - there is a mention of a silver arrow, possibly used in a Hood play, in a Chagford church inventory as late at 1587 (Wasson, 1986 xxv). Catholicism was tolerant of such traditional activities - Mary's reign, for instance, brought about the revival of the Hood game in Chagford. Hood traditions continued underground in more remote, unreformed areas of the country after the accession of Protestant Elizabeth, even to the extent of surfacing on one or two occasions during the seventeenth century (Wiles, 1981). Dartmoor, in places like Ilsington which later during the Civil War hid Royalists on the run (Crossing, 1912, 310), may have been remote enough for the Hood play to have escaped the attention of the Protestant authorities. The play is recorded in East Devon (at Woodbury) as late as 1582 , and there is no particular reason, given its earlier prevalence on East Dartmoor, why it should not have been part of the childhood cultural background of John Ford. Probably his parents and certainly his grandparents would have memories of both Hood plays and religious plays in Ashburton and Chagford. On the other side of Dartmoor, we find a reference to the Queens Players coming to the stannary town of Tavistock and being paid for a performance in 1561, and a record of the Players of Tavistock also being paid for a performance in the same year . The Players of Tavistock are recorded as being paid for a performance in the Plymouth Receivers Accounts for 1568-9 . Again, the Earl of Warwicks Servants were paid for a play in Tavistock in 1572-2 .Visits to Devon by touring theatre companies from London occurred throughout the second half of the 16th century. When Edward Alleyn led Lord Strange's Company on a tour in 1593, they performed Marlowe's Dr Faustus at Exeter in a building. A manuscript in the British Museum records that 'wherein the play of Dr Faustus, the evil one himself suddenly appeared by the side of Mephistopheles to the dismay of the audience, who fled from the house and to the terror of the players who left the town' (Crane, 1980, 13). Ford would have been seven years of age at the time, and he could have attended this performance, or at least had the incident related to him by someone who did. The Witch of Edmonton (1621), on which Ford collaborated with Thomas Dekker and William Rowley, shows the influence of Dr Faustus, seen through the eyes of a Dartmoor boy, in an especially unnerving manner when, during a scene which Ford is generally agreed to have written (Onat, 1980), a devil disguised as a dog prompts a young man to murder his girlfriend in a field by rubbing up against him. It is highly probable that he would have come across Dartmoor legends of evil dogs - the same legends that eventually inspired The Hound of the Baskervilles. The combination of Dr Faustus and Dartmoor folklore at an early age would have been a potent force on the imagination of an intelligent and sensitive boy, and can perhaps be directly traced in passages from later plays of which Ford was sole author.Fords role in writing The Witch of Edmonton suggests he had an interest in and knowledge of witchcraft which Dartmoor folklore would have been well-placed to provide, even in days when witchcraft was a regular topic of conversation. And passages from other plays such as:The doublers of a hare, or, in a morning,Salutes from a splay-footed witch, to dropThree drops of blood at th'nose, just and no more...The Broken Heart, V, I, 12-14where the odd precision of the lore echoes Dartmoor folktales (for example Brown, 1983), contribute to the impression that Ford's experience of witch lore was had at first hand during his Dartmoor childhood. The Witch of Edmonton also gives us the first theatrical glimpse of Ford's sympathy for women who have broken societys sexual code in his depiction of the character of Winnifrede. Could it be that Ford had a hand in writing a play with an overtly Dartmoor connection, The Play of Dick of Devonshire? (Rowe, 1905). This is an anonymous play, written after 1625 but probably not much after, and based in part on the adventures of Richard Peeke of Tavistock, who travelled with an ill-fated expedition to Cadiz in 1625, and performed a series of heroic feats about which he almost immediately published a pamphlet. In spite of the play's title, the main plot is a story about rape and its aftermath, set in Spain. This is exactly the sort of subject which would have appealed to Ford at this time, and the style of some of the play has similarities with the Ford scenes in The Witch of Edmonton. Compare for instance:Eleonora: I know you will defend me.HenricoWill defend thee!Have I a life, a soul that in thy serviceI would not wish expir'd! I do but borrowMyself from thee.Eleonora:Rather you put to InterestAnd for that principal you have creditedTo Eleonora her heart is paid backAs the just Usury.Henrico:You undo me, sweet,With too much love: if ere I marry theeI fear thou'lt kill me.Eleonora: How?Henrico: With tend'ring me too much, my Eleonora:For in my conscience thou'lt extremely love me,And extremes often kill.Eleonora: There can be no extreme of love, Sir.Henrico: Yes, but there may: and some say JealousyRuns from the Sea, a rivolet but deductedFrom the main channel.Eleonora: This is a new language.The Play of Dick of Devonshire II, II (Rowe, 1905, 46)with the psychology of The Witch of Edmonton Act II, Scene II, agreed to be Fords work (Onat, 1980), in which Susan's too open display of affection begins to irk Frank. Compare also these linesEleonora: Your father's house will prove no castle to meIf you at home do wound me. 'Twas an angelSpoke in you lately not my cheek should beMade pale with fear. Lay not a lasting blushOn my white name. No hair should perish hereWas vowed even now: Oh let not a black deed,And by my sworn preserver, be my death,My ever living death. Henrico, callTo mind your holy vows: think on our parents,Ourselves, our honest names: do not kill allWith such a murthering piece. You are not longT'expect, with the consent of men and angels,That which to take now from me will be loss,A loss of heaven to thee. Oh, do not pawn itFor a poor minute's sin.Henrico: If't be a work , madam, of so short timePray let me beg a minute's privacy:'Twill soon be done.Eleonora:Yes, but the horror ofSo foul a deed shall never: there's laid upEternity of wrath in hell for lust. Oh 'tis the devil's exercise. Henrico,You are a man, a man whom I have laid upNearest my heart: in you 'twill be a sinTo threaten heaven and dare that justice throwDown thunder at you. Come, I know you doBut try my virtue, whether I be proofAgainst another's battery: for these tears-Henrico: Nay, then I see you need will try my strength:My blood's on fire, I boil with expectationTo meet the pleasure and I will.The Play of Dick of Devonshire. II, II (Rowe 1905, 49-50)with The Witch of Edmonton Act I, Scene I, 156-208, also acknowledged to be by Ford (Onat, 1980), particularly lines 175-179:Winnifrede: O blush to speak it further:As y'are a noble Gentleman, forget A sin so monstrous: 'tis not gently doneTo open a cur'd wound. I know you speakFor trial; troth you need not.Sir Arthur. I for trial?Not I......or again with these lines from The Queen:Alphonso: Yare too saucy.Return and quickly too, and tell her thus -If she intend to keep her in our favour,Let us not see her.Columella:Say you so, great Sir;You speak it but for trial.The Queen or the Excellency of her Sex, D2In addition to the striking similarities in the sympathy evinced for the plight of women, the language in these passages from The Play of Dick of Devonshire is suggestive of Ford in his later sole-authorship plays, even down to the echoing of an earlier famous play, The Revenger's Tragedy, in 'poor minute's sin'. It has Ford's typical clarity, his sparing use of imagery, his procession of simple but powerful symbolic nouns and verbs such as soul, love, heart, angel, hell, devil, blush, wound, heaven, sea, tears, blood, fire, lust, and boil (Huebert, 1977, 129-161), with a rhythmic pace often held back for emotional effect by line endings which break the sense. The denouement of the play turns on a law-court scene which demonstrates exactly the sort of concerns with justice which Ford exhibits in his later plays. Ford even uses the name Guzman, which is the name of the leading family in The Play of Dick of Devonshire, to represent a Spaniard in The Lady's Trial. Yet ironically the episodes in The Play of Dick of Devonshire which deal specifically with the Tavistock man Richard Peeke do not form a likely subject for Ford. What is the explanation? It has long been recognised, as J. Brooking Rowe remarks in his introduction to the play, that the Peeke episodes have little connection with the main plot, and seem to have been inserted to give the play an English, or a Devonian interest. The playwright, or playwriting team, has faithfully adapted the pamphlet which Peeke published about his adventures and skilfully joined it to another narrative set in Spain by using the name Fernando, who is merely an ancient soldier in Peeke's account, as the father of the wronged Eleonora, as well as arranging for Peeke to be tried in the same court as Henrico. This suggests an original unperformed play by Ford, perhaps written just before The Witch of Edmonton, which he himself later cannibalised (because it happened to be set in Spain) to produce a topical play about a Devon hero in Spain at the request of a theatre manager, probably in conjunction with others. That manager may have had a tour of Devon in mind which would take in Tavistock and turned to Ford because Ford was a Devon and Dartmoor man. The fact that the city of Plymouth at this time was avidly paying touring companies not to play (Wasson, 1986, xx) indicates companies from London were still touring the West Devon area.It was not, however, for an interest in witches or fallen women that Ford was caricatured among his contemporaries; it was for his melancholy:Deep in a dump Jack Ford was alone gotWith folded arms and melancholy hatruns the couplet in a jingle by one of his contemporaries. Ford collaborated on a number of plays apart from The Witch of Edmonton, most of which are lost , but the first surviving play to be performed of which he was sole author was probably The Lovers Melancholy in 1628 (although we have no idea of the date of The Queen). The Lovers Melancholy uses ideas from Robert Burtons recently published The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and may have earned Ford his melancholic reputation. The idea expounded in the play, that the melancholy resulting from the frustration or abuse of love can gradually poison a society, is one which goes on to permeate Fords three tragedies - The Broken Heart, 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore, and Loves Sacrifice. Starting almost where Shakespeare left off in his late romances Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winters Tale and The Tempest (plays which seem to shift the centre of dramatic gravity towards heroines who have been wronged by the uncontrolled passions of a male world) Ford proceeds in his first four plays to draw a series of sympathetic female characters who suffer at the hands of male authority but maintain their love for the man of their choice. Eroclea in The Lovers Melancholy is preyed on by the father of her lover, and has - almost literally - to change her sex (by disguising herself as a boy) in order to survive. Penthea in The Broken Heart is forced by her brother to break off a relationship with the man she loves and to marry another against her will; she crushes all hope in her lover for his own sake, and eventually goes mad and dies. Calantha in the same play is told as she dances at a state marriage ceremony that her father, her friend and her lover have all died; her stoicism in the face of these calamities as she continues dancing out of duty to the occasion seems to have conquered the situation, but eventually such extremes of self-control exact their price, and in the last scene she drops dead from the eponymous broken heart. Annabella in 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore is forced by the consequences of being her brothers lover to marry another man she has no love for, and dies at the hands of her brother, because he believes that she has broken faith with him. Bianca in Loves Sacrifice is killed by a jealous husband who has trapped her in a loveless marriage, to which she has nevertheless remained loyal, in spite of loving his best friend. Bianca is the most complex of these heroines, a character in which human changeability, properly acknowledged, is shown as the raw material for nobility of spirit.T.S. Eliot (1953) accused Ford, among other playwrights of his time, of having no conception of what Shakespeare was trying to do. There is a sense in which this may be true - at least to the extent that few of Shakespeares contemporaries were able to approach his level of poetry-in-action and action-in-poetry. But the evidence of Fords plays, particularly when seen in the context of Fords childhood background on remote Dartmoor with its powerful maternal justice-orientated strand, can be used to argue that Ford knew what Shakespeare was trying to do well enough to find him wanting in his view of women and sexual love, and to challenge him on this important issue. Hence Fords reworkings of the plots of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Othello among other Shakespeare plays, as well as those by Shakespeares successors, such as Middleton and Webster, which deal with the relationship between men and women. Eliot calls 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore meaningless because it is not somehow dramatising... an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet (Eliot, 1953). He fails to see unity and development in the sequence of Fords work, because he fails to understand this challenge to Shakespeare. He misses Fords overriding concern with, and belief in the value of, sexual love between men and women as equal partners, which hides under the surface of the bizarre events his plays chronicle, but which makes him, as Havelock Ellis correctly argues, closer to our contemporary thought than is Shakespeare (Ellis, 1888). Ford chose plots containing these out-of-the ordinary events not for the sake of exotic sensation, but because he needed extreme conditions to develop and test his positive vision in order to make it proof against corrosive Jacobean cynicism .In each of Fords first four major plays, sexual love, in the form of concern for the loved-ones well-being, is seen as the central redeeming virtue, whether it leads to culminating happiness as in the Lovers Melancholy, or to tragedy, as in the other three, The Broken Heart, 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore, and Loves Sacrifice. Those who wilfully abuse or frustrate this redeeming love are generally repaid by disgrace, but not before they have brought ruin on the world court they inhabit, and destroyed the lives of those who exhibit it. To talk of redemption is not to exaggerate; sexual love for Ford has a religious value, symbolised for example by the persistent equation of the heart of a lover with the tomb or coffin. Giovanni says of Annabellas: 'Tis a heartA heart, my lords, in which is mine entombed.'Tis Pity Shes a Whore, V, VIand Fernando declares to Bianca: If, when I am dead, you ripThis coffin of my heart, there shall you readWith constant eyes, what now my tongue defines,Biancas name carved out in bloody lines.Loves Sacrifice, II, IIIThe religious connotations of this reach their full extent in the final scene of Loves Sacrifice when Fernando appears alive at the opening of Biancas tomb, in keeping with his promise to her that that supulchre that holds/Your coffin shall incoffin me alive. (L.S. V,I, 22-23). The use of the word sepulchre must put a church-going audience in mind of the tomb where Christ was laid after the crucifixion. The implication is that Biancas heart is the tomb in which Fernandos finds his resurrection. Unlike Shakespeares romance plays, love in Ford's three tragedies redeems the characters who show it without physically saving them or their world. This linking of sexual love with the passion of Christ is implicit in the title of Loves Sacrifice, and argues that sexual love between a man and a woman was for Ford the human experience most fitted to achieve transcendence. Reciprocated sexual love of itself is always presented by Ford as good, even when its practical outcome is recognised as wrong by the audience, and even when Ford suggests that those involved do not deal with it as well as they might. This is the meaning which Eliot failed to find in the subject matter of 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore and this is what distinguishes Loves Sacrifice, for instance, from The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, which it deliberately echoes in a number of places. Technically Websters Duchess is doing nothing wrong by marrying Antonio, her steward - she is a widow and he is unmarried. Although Antonio is beneath her in rank, there is no legal or religious reason for the audience of Websters day, or indeed ours, why their marriage should not take place. What argue against it are pragmatic considerations: the obstacles of snobbish expectations and political expediency which it is foolhardy for her to try and overcome. We pity and sympathise with her victimisation by the forces of political greed and male jealousy which destroy her. We are touched by the exquisite realism of the love-scenes between the Duchess and Antonio - touched but not torn, because it is all black-and-white. Websters protagonists hide their love not, as it were, from God but from a world which is hostile to God. Shakespeares problem with female sexuality has been side-stepped, not solved, by embodying male jealousy in the figure of the Duchess mad brother Ferdinand. The implication that the male is mad to have any problem with female sexuality does not make the problem go away. For all its tenderness and hints at companionship, the sexual relationship in The Duchess of Malfi is besieged by Shakespearean supernatural omens of doom, as if it went somehow against the natural order that two people should love like this. The difference here is that in Shakespeare the natural order is essentially good, whereas in Webster it appears essentially bad. Ford on the other hand, after isolating them as symptoms of melancholy in his first mature play, does away almost entirely with the spine-chilling but darkly imprecise symbols of ghosts, wolves, ravens, yew-trees and screech-owls that abound in Webster. He is out to demonstrate how the sexual love he leads his audience to sympathise with poses a potential threat not to the natural order, but to their own cultural sense of moral and social order. In a world where there are no obvious villains like Ferdinand, and where there is no outraged natural order foretelling doom and urging on revenge in portents, the unpredictable element in sexual love, particularly when sexual love is newly approved as a motive for behaviour by a society with ancient codes of honour and class, would still throw up conundrums as intractable as those at the centre of The Broken Heart, 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore and Loves Sacrifice. Fords plays consistently argue for women to be treated with compassion in sexual matters, rather than judged by higher standards than men as part of a self-centred struggle within the male soul, as the best way to face these conundrums. Fords early pamphlet Honour Triumphant , written in 1606 in honour of all fair ladies and in defence of these four positions following - 1, Knights in Ladies service have no free-will. 2, Beauty is the maintainer of valour. 3, Fair Lady was never false. 4, Perfect lovers are only wise suggests, even allowing for the irony evident in the extravagance of its propositions, that as a young man he was very taken with the cult of chivalry towards women as developed in medieval love poetry under the troubadours and brought to its fullest expression by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The combination of Ford's early enthusiasm for romantic love, evidenced by Fame's Memorial, with his later experience as a playwright working in a down-to-earth stage tradition which was haunted by images of women as whores meant that he was in a good position to understand the tension between these two positions. That it was a tension which ran right through medieval European culture is confirmed by the most cursory acquaintance with the work of Chaucer or Boccaccio. In the works of these two men, stories which glorify courtly love and religiously-inspired chastity rub shoulders with bawdy stories of uninhibited sexuality in which all the mores of the former are transgressed. It is as if two different moral worlds existed side by side in these men's work without any attempt being made to reconcile them. The influence of the earlier Dante, who had sought a coherent approach to his love for the opposite sex by transforming it into an allegory for divine love, proved more powerful as the Reformation gathered force, encouraging the non-physical elements of sexual love as Dante's allegory lost its force and came to be taken more literally. Once the concept of sexual love was allowed the religious position epitomised by Dantes treatment of Beatrice in his Divine Comedy, and the allegory was forgotten, of necessity 'romantic love' gained a place in moral thinking as a motive for belief and action rather than just a means to reproduction. As soon as this filtered through to the practical matter of marriage, with its economic implications, conflict inevitably ensued. If relationships between men and women are allowed to be contracted on the unpredictable basis of sexual love, which requires independent equals capable of exercising real choice, rather than using the calculated method of family arrangement for dependants who will do as they are told, respect for sexual love in women cannot help challenging the moral order of the extended family, dominated in the 17th century by male ownership. This is the challenge which leads so many powerful male characters in the plays of Fords time to brand women as strumpets or whores the moment they are suspected of exercising the sort of sexual choice which men take for granted. Websters Cardinal Monticelso sums up the perceived threat which the whore poses to the order of his day, ending with a tacit reference to the economic implications: Whats a whore?Shes like the guilty counterfeited coinWhich, whosoer first stamps it, brings in troubleAll that receive it.The White Devil, III, I, 99-102Allowing sexual love to govern a mans affairs was seen as so dangerous that such love either had to be fixed for ever, or at the first whiff of change condemned out of hand as lust, and escaped from: Woman to man/ Is either a god or a wolf, says Bracciano in The White Devil (Act IV, I 20-21), excusing his jealousy. By contrast, when Isabella in the same play exhibits jealousy (albeit as an act), she loses her brothers sympathy immediately and for the only time.Francisco: Look upon other women, with what patienceThey suffer these slight wrongs...Now by my birth you are a foolish, mad And jealous woman. The White Devil II, I, 238-9 and 262-3Unless men believed that women were more constant and less subject to sexual whim than men, it was not possible to approve of women exercising sexual choice in the personal sphere, while still espousing male ownership of the economic sphere, without inducing a vertiginous feeling of loss of control. The exaggerated sense of horror, out of all proportion to the reality of the situations, evinced by certain of Shakespeare and Websters male characters when they encounter what they see as inconstancy in women - Troilus, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Leontes, Posthumus, Bracciano, Ferdinand - can only be interpreted as being produced by a welling up of insecurity. In Hamlet particularly, the playwright is confronted by one of the most disturbing consequences of men contemplating women as psychological equals: men have to take a different view of their mothers, from whom they originate and derive their psychological security. Instead of being able to treat mother and girl-friend as if they were different species, idolising the first and playing with the second like a pet, Hamlet is forced by the events of the play in the direction of seeing both as vulnerable individuals like himself. And instead of being able to escape from the consequences of male sexuality by dividing the female sex into angels and whores, Hamlet is compelled by his humanity to examine the inconsistency in himself, and by extension in every man of his time. There were two ways out of this conundrum. One was to look backwards to the morality and feudal social structure of the middle ages, the path taken by Cyril Tourneur in The Revengers Tragedy, which was first performed in 1606 and follows Hamlet in having the guilt of a mother as a major theme. In passages such as:O, more uncivil, more unnatural,Than those base-titled creatures that look downward.Why does not heaven turn black, or with a frownUndo the world? Why does not earth start upAnd strike the sins that tread upont? OWeret not for gold and women, there would be no damnation;Hell would look like a lords great kitchen without fire int.But twas decreed before the world began,That they should be the hooks to catch at man.andWhod sit at home in a neglected room,Dealing her short-lived beauty to the picturesThat are as useless as old men, when thosePoorer in face and fortune than herselfWalk with a hundred acres on their backs,Fair meadows cut into green foreparts? O,It was the greatest blessing ever happened to woman,When farmers sons agreed and met again,To wash their hands and come up gentlemen.The commonwealth has flourished ever since:Lands that were mete by the rod, that labours spard;Tailors ride down, and measure em by the yard.Fair trees, those comely foretops of the field,Are cut to maintain head-tires - much untold.All thrives but Chastity, she lies a-cold.The Revengers Tragedy II, I, 208-222 and 246-254Tourneur, through his leading character Vindice, diagnoses the sickness of the times as the abandonment of old values. What enables Vindice to bear the appalling series of events depicted in the play with ultimate Senecan stoicism is the fact that his mother and his sister, after dark moments when they waver, are shown to revert to these values in the traditional manner by refusing an illicit male sexual advance. As a result his security remains intact:Ifaith, were well: our mother turnd, our sister true,We die after a nest of dukes - adieu.The Revengers Tragedy V, III, 121-3 It is precisely the troubling implications of female sexual choice exercised in a society where women are dependent on men which have led so many male critics since to prefer the picture of perfect innocence in Desdemona and Imogen to the reality of flawed good-nature in Bianca and Annabella. Yet it is Fords work which represents the other, forward-looking way out of the conundrum; in his plays a new standard for male behaviour is developed rather than an old standard for female behaviour harked back to. Up until the Reformation the split between religious asceticism on the one hand and pagan sensuality on the other had been a kind of universal fault line for the deep tensions at work between codes, sexes and classes. Deviation from what Christian religion stipulated could be passed off as sin and forgiven, as long as the eventual orientation was towards the ascetic. Sexuality could be embraced, provided that at the last it was repudiated, as in Chaucer's final recanting. As the Reformation progressed, with its Lutheran emphasis on the individual's direct relationship with God superseding the authoritarian mediation of the Catholic priesthood, the pressure of conscience argued for a more consistent approach to sexual behaviour than sin and forgiveness. Shakespeare struggled towards a view of life which promoted women's importance to men at the cost of sublimating their physical sexuality. His immediate followers reworked his conclusions in a more pessimistic light, suggesting not only that women's physical sexuality was essentially destructive, if only by default, but that it could not be satisfactorily sublimated because there was no belief-system worth sublimating it to. This pessimism, though, was still predicated on a paradigm in which asceticism was opposed to sensuality, even if the asceticism was now seen as having largely lost its religious meaning. Ford attacks the whole problem from a different angle to the earlier playwrights. Instead of regarding the physical side of love between men and women as a tempting serpent to be kept under control by various snake-charming rituals, which was Shakespeares final word on the matter in The Tempest, Ford sees it as the fountain of spiritual life. His plays chart what happens to the human spirit when this fountain is suppressed or forced into the wrong channels by cultural mixed-messages. The Broken Heart in particular suggests the horrific consequences of adhering rigidly to a view of chastity - the view implicit in Shakespeares late plays - which goes against the grain of natural human passions. By doing so, Ford prevents the familiar division along the old fault line of asceticism and sensuality, and this is what has made him so uncomfortable a figure. Forbidden sexual love in Fords tragedies is forbidden not so much by entrenched and reprehensible external authority as by the internal censure with which our culture programmes us. It is this division of the cultural soul which produces Fords characteristic effect on his audience, and has earned his work epithets such as melancholic and painful. In the most extreme manifestations of this division, characters who follow the incompatible courses of action their cultural code dictates - faithfulness to true love on the one hand, and on the other obedience to the status quo involving what we might refer to in positive terms as putting a brave face on things and making the best of a bad job - can pine away to death through unresolvable inner suffering almost without consciously articulating the conflict, as in the cases of Penthea and Calantha. In The Broken Heart the solution tried by Penthea in her forbidden love for Orgilus is to accept the husband, Bassanes, who has been forced on her by her brother Ithocles, and to persuade Orgilus that he must forget their previous relationship. In a blaze of self-sacrifice which consumes her inwardly, she even tries to overcome her resentment of her brother by undertaking to plead with Calantha on his behalf. Eventually Penthea comes to feel she has broken faith with Orgilus by accepting Bassanes, and she starves herself to death in madness. On the other hand Calantha in the same play is consumed inwardly by keeping faith with her dead lover Ithocles while outwardly keeping up appearances and upholding her duty to the Spartan state, traditionally a byword for mental toughness. She drops dead of the eponymous broken heart before she can marry the man she is compelled by her code to accept as husband, Nearchos, prince of Argos. Recalling the story of the Spartan boy who stole a fox and hid it under his cloak when accosted, refusing to admit to the crime even while the fox gnawed into his vital organs, The Broken Heart is literally a depiction of savage emotional evisceration underneath a cloak of honour. In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore Giovanni and Annabella try to solve the problem of their incestuous love by pursuing its physical fulfilment and hiding it. When Annabella becomes pregnant, she is forced to marry her unwanted suitor Soranzo to keep up appearances. She becomes habituated to living with Soranzo and cannot cope with continuing her relationship with her brother. The audiences sympathy is engaged in such a way that we feel on the one hand that incest is wrong, but on the other hand that Annabellas dawning habituation to the conventionally right course of action - sexual acceptance of husband Soranzo - is also wrong, a betrayal forced on her by her culture. Fords skill at character drawing allows us to sympathise with Annabella, even while we feel she is betraying what she has lived for by trying to accept convention and save her brothers life. Giovannis eventual complaint is that Annabella has not been steady, has not kept faith with their mutual oaths because she has decided to be a proper wife to Soranzo. To Giovanni, this is Annabella becoming a whore, and he kills her. In the eyes of their society, and in Giovannis eyes for entirely different reasons, Annabella is condemned for the whore of the title - but not in the eyes of the audience, who are left feeling compassion for her. In Love's Sacrifice Bianca at first rejects her husbands friend Fernando's advances; later, she comes to him at night and confesses she loves him, but states that if he fulfils his physical longing for her, she must kill herself because of her vows to her husband, Caraffa. They agree (with some waverings on both sides, whose exact degree is obscured by a missing passage in the text) to hold off from physical fulfilment, so neither suppressing nor indulging their passion. They die eventually because of other peoples envy and suspicion, Bianca murdered and Fernando by his own hand from grief. These two do manage to keep faith with each other and with the letter of societys code, but only because death intervenes. The three solutions in these plays, all of which end in death for the lovers, could be superficially categorised in Elizabethan philosophical terms as Stoic, Epicurean and Platonic. More than this, each play presents towards its ending a masque-like symbolic action which serves as an icon for the corresponding emotional state - in The Broken Heart it is Calanthas formal dance which continues uninterrupted despite the announcement of three deaths, in Tis Pity it is Giovannis entrance at the feast carrying Annabellas heart on the point of his sword, and in Loves Sacrifice it is Fernandos appearance from Biancas tomb wrapped in a winding-sheet. But over and above a sense that the three tragedies form a triptych , which studiedly sets each examination of forbidden love in a different context, the situations in which Ford's characters find themselves impress us as some of the most excruciatingly human in all drama; they are also psychologically extremely complicated, and it is Ford's achievement as a dramatist and poet that he is able to wrest out of this complexity a delineation of sexual love we can sympathise with. Shakespeare had found this hard, and his attitude to sexual love remained deeply ambivalent - in Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and particularly Antony and Cleopatra sexual love between men and women is linked to self-ruin, and his last plays are dominated by non-sexual love between father and daughter. In The Lovers Melancholy Ford is not yet quite sure of his subject - while suggesting the far-reaching effects of love frustrated, he goes along with the late Shakespearean paradigm of the good chaste daughter rejuvenating the disillusioned father figure. Explicit sexuality is relegated to an ugly incident which is got out of the way before the play starts, to some jokes around cross-dressing and to the waiting woman Kalas few frank comments. The same could not be said of 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore, and by the time Ford wrote Love's Sacrifice, which deals with some of the same themes as Shakespeares Othello but from a completely different angle, Ford was prepared to challenge Shakespeares view of the love-relationship head on. Bianca and Fernando tread the finest, yet most human, of lines between Platonic love which is bloodless because too good to be true, and unfettered sexual passion which is prepared to destroy vows and lives. Both feel the strongest of sexual passions for each other, both have been prepared to give themselves to the other, but both have respected each other's well-being at the highest level, and, almost in spite of themselves, both have retained their innocence (or integrity as we might now call it) not only in conventional terms, but - far more difficult - in terms of being true to themselves and to each other. Bianca in particular is a creation with which Ford deliberately challenges the unsatisfactory (because too innocent to be human) Shakespearean concept of female chastity embodied by Desdemona in Othello. The charge of moral collapse which Havelock Ellis (1888) levels at the ending of Loves Sacrifice is the complaint of a critic who for all his championship of Ford is unable to cope with something at the core of Fords enterprise. Ellis is able to go along with Ford so long as it is matter of compassion for human failings - what he balks at is Fords implicit assertion that human changeability, properly acknowledged, is the basic material of human steadiness. Loves Sacrifice argues that we cannot ask any more of human nature than we find in Bianca and Fernando in such circumstances. Their reaction to the position they find themselves in is all we can expect faith and chastity to be - moreover, what is crucial, Ford is still prepared to revere these concepts in the new light he casts on them. At the end of Loves Sacrifice Ford very deliberately shows how the deaths of individuals reveal the volatility of a conventional view of them. Death turns Bianca from a potential whore into a chaste wife in Caraffas eyes. More striking still, Fernando, who has been railed at by Caraffa as a man of darkness moments before, becomes his friend unmatched the instant he is dead. Caraffa's volatility serves to emphasise by contrast the consistency of Biancas character. Caraffa, with his black-and-white morality, does not seem to know what he really feels about any of his close associates, while Bianca is very sure of her feelings throughout the play. In spite of trying to put him off, she has always loved Fernando. She also respects Caraffa. Even when he calls her a whore and brandishes a sword at her, her liking for him shines calmly through:Alas, good man! put up, put up; thine eyesAre likelier much to weep than arms to strike:Loves Sacrifice, V, I, 70-1 Because the argument around faith and chastity in Fords time had focused very much on women, setting them far higher standards than men, ultimately Fords passion for fairness coincides with his concern for the psychological equality of women (although a concern with equality does not prevent him being well aware of the differences between the sexes, as the different responses of Bianca and Fernando to being in love demonstrate). This concern is what makes him seem modern to us. With something of a legal instinct, he allows women, as human beings, exactly the same sexual license as men. As Spinella puts it in The Ladys Trial: womens faultsSubject to punishments, and mens applauded,Prescribe no laws in force.The Ladys Trial V, II, 114-116The sub-plot in Loves Sacrifice involves a young man called Ferentes betrayal of three women, each of whom he has made pregnant and promised to marry, indulging in the sort of sexual license commonly allowed to men down the ages. The public disgrace and consequences of this misbehaviour are borne not by Ferentes but by the three women, who decide to get together, laying aside their rivalry, to carry out their revenge. When Fernando suggests a device to entertain the Abbot on his visit:I saw in Brussels, at my being there,The Duke of Brabant welcome the ArchbishopOf Mentz with rare conceit, even on a sudden,Performed by knights and ladies of his court,In nature of an antic; which methought -For that I neer before saw women antics -Was for the newness strange, and much commended.Loves Sacrifice, Act III, Scene II, 16-22the scene is set for the women to exact a very public retribution. Allowed to act along with Ferentes in an antic or masque, they surround and stab him to death in front of the assembled court. It is significant that Fernando agrees to speak for one of the women who has no male relative available when they are imprisoned, showing his sympathy for the female sex even when fallen. This episode may seem rather horrific to us today, but the action - and as a good dramatist Ford was always seeking actions as icons for ideas - represents a stark reminder to the audience of his time that a woman had little or no access to the judicial system in cases such as this. As one of the three, Julia, declares with a baby in her arms, they are unable to revengeOur public shames but by his public fall:Love's Sacrifice III, IV 33-4At a deeper level, Fords radical attachment to the psychological equality of women is evinced by Biancas reply to her husband in response to his accusation of infidelity (Act V, Scene I, 69-131):Duke. Tell me, bad woman, tell me what could moveThy heart to crave variety of youth?Bianca. Ill tell you, if you needs would be resolved.I held Fernando much the properer man.Duke. Shameless, intolerable whore!Bianca.. What ails you?Can you imagine, sir, the name of dukeCould make a crooked leg, a scrambling foot,A bloodless lip, or such an untrimmed beardAs yours, fit for a ladys pleasure? no:I wonder you could think twere possible,When I had looked but once on your Fernando,I ever could love you again; fie, fie!Now, by my life, I thought that long agoYhad known it, and been glad you had a friendYour wife did think so well of.Duke. O my stars!Heres impudence above all history.Why, thou detested reprobate in virtue,Darst thou, without a blush, before mine eyesSpeak such immodest language?Bianca. Dare! yes, faith.You see I dare: I know what you would say now;You would fain tell me how exceeding muchI am beholding to you, that vouchsafedMe, from a simple gentlewomans place,The honour of your bed: tis true, you did;But why? twas but because you thought I hadA spark of beauty more than you had seen.To answer this, my reason is the like;The self-same appetite which led you onTo marry me led me to love your friend:O, hes a gallant man! if ever yetMine eyes beheld a miracle composedOf flesh and blood, Fernando has my voice.I must confess, my lord, that for a princeHandsome enough you are, and - and no more;But to compare yourself with him! trust me,You are too much in fault. Shall I advise you?Hark in your ear; thank Heaven he was so slowAs not to wrong your sheets; for as I live,The fault was his, not mine...I must confess I missed no means, no time,To win him to my bosom; but so much,So holily, with such religion,He kept the laws of friendship, that my suitWas held but, in comparison, a jest;Nor did I ofter urge the violenceOf my affection, but as oft he urgedThe sacred vows of faith twixt friend and friend:Yet be assured, my lord, if ever languageOf cunning servile flatteries, entreaties,Or what in me is, could procure his love,I would not blush to speak it.The element of taunting is less here than in Annabellas similar reply to Soranzos accusations in 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore Act IV Scene III, which Bianca echoes and develops with a calmer and more devastating argument. This passage has made uncomfortable reading for Ford's male admirers, not only because of its emphasis on the psychological right of a woman to love where her fancy pleases, regardless of vows or obligation, in the same way that men have done from biblical times to the present, but also because of its elaboration of those uncontrollable elements of sexual feeling which threaten male security in a male-ordered society. Caraffas response shows his inability to cope with the real woman and her sexual appetite:Duke. Such anotherAs thou art, miserable creature, wouldSink the whole sex of women: yet confessWhat witchcraft used the wretch to charm the heartOf the once spotless temple of thy mind?For without witchcraft it could neer be done.Love's Sacrifice V, I, 131-6Rather than totally abandon his illusory and inhuman picture of Bianca as spotless, he starts to accuse his friend Fernando of using witchcraft. He forgets that Bianca has only done what he himself asked of her in the first scene of the play:Philippo and FernandoShall be without distinction - Look, Bianca,On this good man; in all respects to himBe as to me: only the name of husband,And reverent observance of our bed,Shall differ us in person, else in soulWe are all one.Love's Sacrifice I,I,,131-7.Right to the end of the play Bianca is seen by Caraffa either as a devilish whore or a model of purity. She must either be his entirely, or go to hell. His attitude echoes that of Bracciano in The White Devil, who in his most anguished condemnation of his mistress Vittoria calls her changeable stuff, and above all that of Othello: O curse of marriage,That we can call these delicate creatures oursAnd not their appetites! I had rather be a toadAnd live upon the vapour of a dungeonThan keep a corner in the thing I loveFor others uses.Othello III, III 272-276Only once can Caraffa countenance anything between, and that is when he hesitates over her murder: Why should I kill her? she may live and change,/ Or -. As Brian Opie points out, this forward-looking thought is swept away by his sisters appeal to the ties of blood and the past with the words: Dost thou wish to blemish all thy glorious ancestors? - just as Annabellas forward-looking intention to change is ignored by Soranzo and literally killed off by Giovanni in 'Tis Pity Shes a Whore. Ford has a particular concern with change, and psychological problems with change raised but not resolved by Shakespeare, Webster and others. Ultimately Ford sees change - despite the consequences this may have for security based on external fixed points - as something positive, provided that his characters have developed the inner security of personal integrity. The contrast with Thomas Middleton's play Women Beware Women (1611), in which an ordinary girl also called Bianca leaves her marriage with a courtier to become a Duke's mistress, setting in motion the moral corruption of all those around her, is most pointed and surely intended by Ford. The conventional morality of Middleton's characters cannot cope with human weakness in the face of temptation - once tempted, there is no way back for them. By accepting human 'weakness' as natural and unalterable, Ford allows his characters to develop a morality which is preserved in the face of disaster. Another play which is echoed by Loves Sacrifice is The Changeling (1622) written by Middleton with William Rowley. The Changeling contains the same motif of a young woman changing her mind about an initially unwanted suitor. But the tone and the moral framework of the two plays are worlds apart. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in the final treatment of the heroines. Middleton and Rowleys heroine, Beatrice-Joanna, turns on her lover De Flores in a degrading attempt at self-preservation, in retaliation for which De Flores stabs her to death. Bianca, on the other hand, is prepared to incriminate herself in order to defend the man she loves. It is the defence of Fernando by Bianca to Caraffa which necessitates not only admission but exaggeration of the guilt of her passion for Fernando. And in return Fernando defends Bianca by admitting and exaggerating his own part. While Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores leave us with an impression of the power of sexual love to degrade and destroy, Bianca and Fernando leave us with an impression that sexual love is a positive force, even in an impossible situation. Both Bianca and Fernando confess their guilt, yet both turn out to be not only literally innocent, but exonerated in terms of the dynamics of the plays climax, keeping the audiences sympathy. Further, Ford also manages to keep our sympathy for their self-appointed judge, Caraffa, who fights his corner as his naivet is swayed this way and that way by the avalanche of revelations, and retrieves some kind of dignity by accepting Fernando and Biancas love. In achieving this within the confines of society as it stood in those days, Ford nevertheless has to sacrifice the lives of all three of his protagonists. What gives Loves Sacrifice a particular balance among Fords works, is the character of Fiormonda, Caraffas sister, who instigates the tragic ending out of spite for her rejection by Fernando. There are not many bad women in the plays of Ford, and Fiormonda is a necessary reminder that if women are to be seen as mens equals, then they can be equally bad as well as equally good. With an irony worthy of Christs forgiveness on the cross - and we should remember that the play's title has exactly such religious connotations - this woman, who cut short her brothers thought that Bianca should be allowed to live because she might change, is the one major character in the play given the opportunity to live and change. It is perhaps fitting that Ford should choose a woman in love as the vehicle to embody his cancelling of the Elizabethan revenge ethic derived from pre-Christian codes of honour with a Christian ethic of forgiveness. Learn to new-live Roseilli tells her, turning on her the same injunction she herself delivered to DAvalos her servant in an earlier scene. DAvalos, whose motive has been that of a man calculatedly courting favour with his superior, is a kind of Judas-figure, unable to repent. Fiormonda, whose motive has been passion, albeit passion transformed to hatred, is able to see the error of her ways. She recognises that in spite of remaining technically chaste, and obeying the more ancient code of honour accepted by convention, she has allowed her behaviour to be governed by the self-interest of lust rather than the concern for the beloveds well-being implicit in love:Abbot: Purge frailty with repentance.Fiormonda. I embrace it.Happy too late, since lust has made me foul.Henceforth Ill dress my bride-bed in my soul.Loves Sacrifice V, III, 161-3There is one event deep in the heart of the play that has predisposed the audience to accept Fiormondas reprieve. Mauruccio is an elderly minor courtier whose love for Fiormonda has seemed so ridiculous to the court that he has been publicly laughed at. When he becomes unwittingly involved with Ferentes murder, he is imprisoned and only pardoned through the intervention of Fernando and Bianca, who sanction his marriage to the fallen waiting-woman Morona. Caraffa , in his capacity as ruler of Pavy, allows Mauruccios freedom and his marriage to a woman who already has a baby out of wedlock, but banishes him from court. Fiormondas response is immediate and unprompted, and prompts Fernando:Fior. Mauruccio, you did once proffer true loveTo me, but since you are more thriftier sped,For old affections sake here take this gold;Spend it for my sake.Fern. Madam, you do nobly, -And thats for me Mauruccio. [They give him money]Loves Sacrifice IV, I, 200-204For a moment Fiormonda and Fernando are united in human sympathy which is made possible by seeing sexual love in its religious sense as charity rather than love in its cynical sense as lust. Loves Sacrifice is the most criticised and least understood of Fords three tragedies. Havelock Ellis (1888) is not alone in being unable to come to terms with the realism of Fords depiction of Bianca as a chaste woman, with its implication that chastity in every desirable, full-blooded and kind-hearted woman is a broad attitude of mind which must include a roving eye, unfaithful thoughts and even actions, a positive tendency rather than something absolute. Gifford (1827), for instance, is unrestrained in his condemnation of Bianca, and the list extends to modern times - as recently as 1988 Michael Neill has described the protagonists of Loves Sacrifice as degenerate(Neill, 1988). In many ways, though, Loves Sacrifice stands at the centre of Fords output, his most carefully-constructed and most probing work, dramatically and psychologically radical in its investigation of love not from the view-point of the individual nor from the view-point of society, but from a position balanced somewhere between the two. It represents the culmination of his interest in the rights and wrongs of forbidden love which began with Fames Memorial, and through the character of Bianca he is able to exorcise the demon of the lust-ridden devilish female which haunts the other major Elizabethans as corollary of the inhumanly pure angel they sought in woman. Bianca is both full of sexual appetite and behaves with integrity. Perhaps because of the intensity of the focus he achieves on this problem in Loves Sacrifice, his blank verse in this play is at its clearest, and while it may lack some of the magical poetry of the love scenes in Tis Pity, the imagery is more consistent, and more insistent, in its economy and simplicity. Repetition of a few central key-words and phrases takes the place of elaboration through extended simile and metaphor - blood, the heart, the soul, the womb, spheres and stars, mirrors, tombs and coffins, Heaven, angels, devils, temples, horns, tables (meaning tablets), slaughter, butchery, leprosy, ice, the flames of hell, the flames of love: these are symbols which would be immediately understood by an audience which had only just emerged from the Middle Ages, and which was used to seeing them on the monuments, and hearing them from the pulpits, of their churches, deeply conventional yet powerfully emotive symbols with which to anchor the extremely unconventional thoughts and feelings of Fords characters (Gibson, 1988). The dramatic construction of Loves Sacrifice, too, is particularly cogent, not least for its constant use of the gallery. The gallery is a device which allows Ford time after time to show characters witnessing, at a distance and often incompletely, an intimate scene between other characters , from which conclusions are drawn which are only partly right. This enables him to question, like a good lawyer, our tendency to make unwarranted presumptions and to force into simple categories behaviour which is often too complex to fit them. It has been pointed out that Fords literary circle was closely bound up with the Inns of Court, and that he was writing at least in part for men trained at law. Loves Sacrifice is dedicated to his cousin, another John Ford, who was a member of Grays Inn: appropriately enough, in view of the almost judicial trial of love-behaviour which the playwright carries out as a probing but impartial judge, with his audience rather than himself as jury. The primitive revenge-justice which the Duke brandishes, in the form of a dagger dripping Biancas blood, at his friend Fernando with the following words: Stand and behold thy executioner,Thou glorious traitor! I will keep no formOf ceremonious law to try thy guilt:Look here, tis written on my poniards point,The bloody evidence of thy untruth,Wherein thy conscience and the wrathful rodOf Heavens scourge for lust at once give upThe verdict of thy crying villanies.I see thourt armed: prepare, I crave no oddsGreater than is the justice of my cause;Fight, or Ill kill thee.Loves Sacrifice Act V, Scene 2, 26-36is nevertheless packed full with reference to a legal system which should have superseded it, but in sexual matters had not. The sub-plot in which the courtier Ferentes meets his revenge at the hands of three waiting-women both serves to emphasise the powerlessness of contemporary law to help in this area, and to contrast the Dukes obsession over Biancas chastity with his inability to condemn Ferentes lechery. In Fords last major play, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, which is superficially modelled on the Shakespearean-style history play, love is neither abused nor frustrated. The love of Katherine Gordon and Perkin is returned, persists and is allowed full and unshadowed expression in the face of the most adverse circumstances, even when Perkin is almost universally regarded as a counterfeit. In this play melancholy is overcome by the full extension of love and self-belief, although these mental states are at odds with the pragmatism required by the outside world. Rebellion has become communal and external, rather than individual and interiorised. Katherine Gordon can love the wrong man in societys eyes, because he is prepared to take arms against society. Perkins death, the eventual penalty for doing so, is dignified and well-prepared and he takes his leave of Katherine with a tacit acceptance of her right to have other lovers in the future, even though she protests her intention not to. None of Fords other characters are able to believe in each other and themselves quite like this, and it gives Perkin Warbeck an air of personal liberation missing from the other tragic plays. While Giovanni is thoughtless of Annabellas future, Perkin and Katherine are prepared for it, and Katherine alone of Fords tragic heroines survives the death of her lover. Through the fulfilment of her love, and through Perkins non-possessive care, she has become strong enough and independent enough to live without him. Once again, Ford is interested in presenting a case almost as if he were in a law-court, teasing out the rights and wrongs of a man who believes he is something the world decides he is not. The description of Perkin as the Christian worlds strange wonder suggests that the parallel with the history of Christ is a conscious one, Ford taking on, and once more being contentious about, the religious overtones of Shakespeares cycle of chronicle plays. We are given no insight into whether Perkins claim to be of royal blood is factually true or false - from the play we cannot tell. What we can judge is the quality of Perkins behaviour, which at the same time as being unmanly in the conventional se