The Other John Ford

April 17 was the baptismal day of Jacobean playwright John Ford (1586-ca. 1639). That’s my copy of his collected plays above. (If you’re looking for the director of Hollywood westerns, go here.)

John Ford’s career as a London playwright began around 1620, four years after the death of Shakespeare and around the same time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth. Most of his better known early plays, such as The Witch of Edmonton and The Spanish Gypsy were co-written with the likes of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. John Fletcher, a former collaborator of Shakespeare’s was one of his co-writers on The Fair Maid of the Inn.

Ford’s most notorious play, his most oft-produced and oft-discussed, was his sensationalist ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1631). The title is apt to provoke laughter to newbies nowadays. I’m sure that’s how I reacted when I first learned of the play when I was in my early 20s. It strikes us this way because of the evolution of language. The “pity” expressed by the title is quite genuine. It’s meant to evoke sorrow. It’s not like “too bad the bitch is a whore!” though it sounds that way to us. Because the sense of “whore” has altered a bit too. It was used much more broadly back then, and it took so little to “ruin” a woman. But that’s the sense of it: “too bad her life is ruined”. Still, it’s impossible not to look at the notion from a feminist angle, even for pretty conservative people I should hope, nowadays. Why should a woman who has been raped by a man be branded as anything? Brand the one who did something wrong! It is a mighty sick worldview to blame a victim for “yielding” to the assault of a bully and an animal, but that is how it has worked in this culture for centuries, and continues to in some quarters.

Because of course that’s what the play is about. They didn’t have plays about women with sexual appetites back then, because men wrote the plays and they also made the social rules enforced by church and state. Yes, there are minor bawd characters in comedies and so forth, but at this stage, there isn’t going to be a play about a woman who goes around whoring. So what is it about? Oh, something much worse. It’s about INCEST. The play’s content is that outrageous, and since so is the title, it has often been produced under other titles, and one of them is “THE BROTHER AND SISTER”. How do you like THEM apples? And naturally, the malefactor is the brother. The sister is far from into this unnatural relationship, but he won’t leave her alone. He’s pretty much an obsessed psycho. I don’t know if we’re meant to have sympathy for him, I sure don’t, but it seems to me that he’s the lead character, sort of wrestling with his conscience before yielding and then yuck and then because it’s a tragedy it all ends in death. Lower curtain. I don’t know what the moral is. “Kids, don’t try this at home”?

So though it remains a controversial part of the classical repertoire and gets produced from time to time ‘Tis Pity has always been a play that people sort of produce with hazmat suits on. The impulse to put on a production has always been exploitation on one level or another. It is not, erm, wholesome. The hell of it is, it’s one of Ford’s three masterpieces, or near masterpieces.

Another is Perkin Warbeck (1633), which is the play of his I read second, strictly because of the funny name. But Perkin Warbeck (ca. 1474-1499) was actually a significant person in English history, and I certainly hope British schoolchildren learn about him, but he’s unknown to most Americans. He was a pretender to the British throne who claimed to be one of the two princes in the tower murdered by Richard III. It’s a history play in the Shakespearean vein about the rebellions he led in order to capture the monarchy. But I still think it’s a funny name.

Ford’s third top-rated play is The Broken Heart (1629), a tragedy set in Classical Greece, famously revived by Laurence Olivier in 1962. His other plays include The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), Love’s Sacrifice (1633), and several others, many of which have been lost to time.

The specific date of Ford’s death is unknown but it is believed to have been around 1639. Which was a pretty good time for him to have passed from the scene, for he wasn’t alive to witness the shuttering of all English theatres in 1642 by the Puritans. The ban was for the supposed “wickedness” of the theatre — and with ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, they may have had a point!

In related theatre lore news, today is also the birthday of the world’s most believable Juliet Olivia Hussey (see previous post), and actor George Frederick Cooke, whose ghost is said to haunt the streets of lower Manhattan!