University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/58519 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. A note on this text This scanned text of Lisa Hopkins’s thesis was prepared by Rob Watt in November 2004 from the author’s typescript. The scanning process is far from perfect (unlike the original thesis) and the errors thus introduced have not been corrected. Reders should beware in particular of numerals; the scanner has made a big mess of the superscript numbers of footnotes. 2 JOHN FORD AND HIS CIRCLE: COTERIE VALUES AND THE LANGUAGE OF FORD'S THEATRE Catherine Lisa Mackenzie Cronin Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Ph. D. University of Warwick Graduate School of Renaissance Studies September, I986 1 INTRODUCTION John Ford seems to have begun his dramatic career by collaborating with Dekker and Rowley on The Witch of Edmonton, and to have ended it with The Lady's Trial. The distance which he travelled between these two works is extraordinary, for he moves from a reasonably conventional use of language and of the stage to a strange, dreamlike form of drama where much of the life and emotions of the characters is veiled from the audience. His later plays contain clear indications of a dissatisfaction with his medium. One of the principal reasons for this seems to be Ford's distrust of language, and this in turn is closely linked to another persistent strand in his thought, the difficulty of constructing and preserving one's identity. Perkin Warbeck is the play which is most obviously concerned with this, but it is present throughout Ford's works. Ford always presents his characters as battle grounds where conflicting elements of the self, and particularly the blood and the heart, struggle for dominance. The characters' response to this frightening multiplicity of possible selves is almost invariably to choose one of the conflicting selves and to adhere to it rigidly. Through a form of psychological self-mutilation they exclude all the other elements, and try desperately to stabilize their personalities. From this attempt to find a position of stasis and immobility it is of course only a short step to an active death-wish, and Ford consistently presents this inherent distaste for living as a repugnance to the basic support of life, food. The first section of this thesis begins, therefore, after a discussion of the canon and chronology of Ford's works, with an examination of the frequent references to food in Ford's plays, and I attempt to show how the changing tenor of these references indicates some of the reasons for Ford's transformation from the dramatist of The Witch of Edmonton to the dramatist of such a play as The Broken Heart. This is followed by a discussion of the distrust of language 2 which Ford so frequently evinces in his plays, which also played an important part in determining his development as a dramatist. There is then an examination of his obsessive and highly charged uses of the words heart, blood, sweat and tears. It is, ultimately, the lack of proof that speech is 'heartfelt' that renders it untrustworthy. The last section of this first part of the thesis considers the use of ceremony and stage action in The Broken Heart, which is here regarded as an attempt by Ford to discover an alternative, non-verbal method of conveying meaning. This section also discusses the possibility that Ford may have been a Catholic, a speculation which is treated more fully in the second part of the thesis. The second part begins with a study of Ford's dedicatees, and of his possible relations with them. This second part of the thesis is related to the first in two ways. The language of Ford's dedicatory epistles, like that of his plays, seems often to be used as much to obfuscate meaning as to convey it. In several instances he seems equally eager to advertise the fact of his connection with his dedicatee and to conceal the exact nature of the connection, as when he tells the Earl of Peterborough, dedicatee of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, that 'my services must ever owe particular duty to your favours by a particular engagement', but gives no details of the 'engagement'. Both The Golden Mean and A Line of Life, moreover, were originally printed with elaborate dedications, but without the names of the dedicatees: again, Ford seems deliberately to be drawing attention to the coterie nature of his work. Something of the same effect is also created by the commendatory verses from his friends which he published with his plays. This section contains, therefore, a close examination of the careers and affiliations of his dedicatees; and from this I go on to argue that Perkin Warbeck can, in many ways, be seen as an elaborate 3 and somewhat oblique compliment to a group of these dedicatees. It seems as though Ford, having failed to find a satisfactory way of making himself generally intelligible, had decided instead to speak only to the few. The other main connection between the two parts of the thesis lies in the fact that Ford's dedicatees appear to have had something in common with Ford's use of ritual: both had strong links with Catholicism. His uses of the words heart, blood, sweat and tears, too, seem in many ways more reminiscent of Jesuit devotional thought than of English Protestant tradition. It is of course pure speculation to suggest that Ford may have been a Catholic, but it would certainly provide a plausible explanation for some of the more curious aspects of his work. It could, too, have been the link between him and his dedicatees, in which case it would not be surprising that he was unwilling to make plain the nature of the connection; and if Ford was a Catholic that might explain why, although in later life he was apparently financially secure, he nevertheless felt the need to seek patronage, for a Catholic could never have too many friends and protectors. I have therefore made the suggestion at various points in the argument that Ford's works are perhaps best viewed as being written for ( or at least by a member of) a small and rather exclusive Catholic coterie. I have tried not to let this become an idée fixe, however, and if Catholicism is not accepted as the answer to some of the questions raised by Ford's works, I hope my discussion of the questions themselves will still stand. 4 THE CANON Any consideration of the canon of Ford's works is fraught with difficulty. During a period that is generally taken to have begun roughly around 1623, and that ended in 1638, he produced seven unaided, extant plays : The Lover's Melancholy, The Broken Heart, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Love's Sacrifice, Perkin Warbeck, The Fancies Chaste and Noble and The Lady's Trial. We also know that two decades earlier, in 1606, Ford had been the author of a eulogy on the late Earl of Devonshire, entitled Fame's Memorial, and of the prose tract Honour Triumphant; or, The Peers' Challenge, with its accompanying short poem 'The Monarchs' Meeting'; and that in 1620 he not only published another prose tract, A Line of Life, but also admitted his previous authorship of The Golden Mean, which had appeared anonymously in 1613. In 1934 Joan Sargeaunt suggested that Ford should be considered to be the author of the long religious poem Christ's Bloody Sweat, also printed in 1613, and the idea has on the whole found favour. 1. H. J. Oliver, for instance, accepts the work as 'probably but not certainly by Ford',2 and Davril both accepts Miss Sargeaunt's evidence and also adduces more of his own in favour of Ford's authorship,3 as also does G. D. Monsarrat.4 Certainly Christ's Bloody Sweat makes almost obsessive use of the words blood, heart, sweat and tears, which were to continue to be used and examined throughout Ford's literary life and which were apparently of the deepest interest to him. There are twenty-five uses of the words tear or tears in the poem, sixty of heart, ninety-five of sweat and one hundred and forty of blood. It is also interesting to place side by side the following two passages, the first from Christ's Bloody Sweat and the second from The Broken Heart: Love is no god, as some of wicked times (Led with the dreaming dotage of their folly) Have set him foorth in their lascivious rimes, 5 Bewitch'd with errors, and conceits unholy: It is a raging blood, affections blind, Which boiles both in the body and the mind. But such whose lawfull thoughts, and honest heat, Doth temperately move with chast desires To choose an equall partner, and beget Like comforts by alike inkindled fires; Such find no doubt in union made so even: Sweet fruité of succours, and on earth a heaven.5 With this compare the following exchange : Penthea. I have left me But three poor jewels to bequeath. The first is My youth; for though I am much old in griefs, In years I am a child.