John Ford. The last great romantic tragedy of the seventeenth century is The Broken Heart. This is the masterpiece of John Ford, a poet born twenty-two years later than Shakespeare, and detained, by some condition, the nature of which escapes us, from writing for the stage until long after that playwright's death. In another dramatist, Shirley, we shall presently see the splendour of Elizabethan poetry descend into weakness and incoherency; but this is not what we are called upon to witness in Ford. He, in his finest plays, and pre-eminently in the Broken Heart, reminds us less of the more glowing characteristics of the English school than of other dramatic literatures-that of Greece in the past, that of France in the immediate future. We must emphasise that severity, we might almost say that rigidity, which distinguishes Ford from all other English dramatists, and draws him nearer to Corneille and Rotrou in their devotion to dramatic discipline. John Ford was baptised at Ilsington, near Ashburton, in South Devon, on the 17th of April 1586. He was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1602, and he was probably the John Ford who had matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, early in 1601. In 1606, being twenty years of age, Ford published a collection of elegies on the Earl of Devonshire, which he entitled Fame's Memorial; in the same year appeared a masque, Honor Triumphant. These unimportant tracts are all that we possess of the youth of Ford; and his longsubsequent silence has never been explained. It has been suggested that some of his lost plays, particularly A Murder of the Son upon the Mother (in which he assisted Webster) and The Fairy Knight (with Dekker), may have been earlier than 1620, the date of his philosophical treatise, A Line of Life; but there is no proof of this. Ford reappears in 1624, when The Sun's Darling, a masque he had written with Dekker, was acted at the Cockpit. Soon after this date, it is probable, he took up the profession of a playwright in earnest. The Witch of Edmonton, a play by many hands, and his among the rest, belongs to this period, but was not printed until 1658. We cannot be sure that we trace the hand of Ford in any independent work of importance until he is between forty and fifty years of age. His tragic comedy of The Lover's Melancholy was acted in 1628 and published in 1629. These three great tragedies, 'Tis Pity, the Broken Heart, and Love's Sacrifice, belong to 1633, and Perkin Warbeck to 1634. The Fancies Chaste and Noble was printed in 1638, and The Lady's Trial in 1639. Ford's later works, a tragedy called Beauty in a Trance (1653), and three comedies were in existence until the eighteenth century, when they were burned, with so much else of irreparable value, by Warburton's infamous housekeeper. Ford took the anagram 'Fide Honor' as a sort of armorial symbol, and these words generally appear on his title-pages. Very little else is known of this poet, who appears to have led a retired life. Heywood (in 1635) wrote: Deep in a dump John Ford was alone got, With folded arms and melancholy hat. When Jonson died, in 1637, Ford contributed a poem of the Jonsonus Virbius, and he wrote commendatory verses for Shirley's Wedding. These trifles exhaust what is known of the personal history of Ford, who may have died at any time between 1640 and 1660; the probable date is 1656. He would then be seventy years of age. Charles Lamb, who was the earliest critic to perceive the value of Ford, boldly said that he 'was of the first order of poets.' But this generous praise may easily produce disappointment. in those who pass from it to the writings of Ford. He is austere, dry, monotonous; weighty with sustained intellectual and moral passion; deprived of the music and fancy and changing play of graceful ornament which are the gala-robes of the great, popular poets. Ford is a curiously isolated figure, not supple, not various, but always furiously bent, like a stern charioteer, in one unaltered attitude, as he streams along upon the storm of violent emotion. Hence to those who seek for beauty in poetry, Ford has it to offer only in its most sombre and lurid varieties; and even the precision of his thought and the purity of his style are not to every taste. His highest performance in direct poetry is, doubtless, the episode of the nightingale and the lutanist, in the romantic comedy of the Lover's Melancholy, which should be compared with Crashaw's study on the same theme (page 678). The play which deals with the ardours and agonies of Giovanni and Annabella is one of the most characteristic, if least pleasing, productions of the age. Here the suppressed horror which is so dear to the Elizabethan dramatists lights up the hollows of the human spirit in a way that is matchless for subtlety and intensity. The last scene in which the brother and sister appear is of the highest magnificence as tragedy, and has been justly praised by Mr Swinburne as the finest in Ford. Their subject, however, was so repulsive that neither to this great play nor to the less skilful Love's Sacrifice can full justice ever be done. It is natural to turn to more normal scenes in the correct but rather cold chronicle-play of Perkin Warbeck, or even to Ford's three graceful but somewhat ineffective comedies. But the real field for the unbiassed study of Ford's qualities is the incomparable tragedy of the Broken Heart, which remains to us as one of the purest monuments of seventeenth-century poetry. It is this play on which the attention of the general reader may with most safety be concentrated. There is no play, then, in the English language which gives the impression of a fine French tragedy so completely as the Broken Heart, with its exact preservation of the unities, its serried action, its observance of the point of honour, its rapid and ingenious evolution of exalted intrigue. Were it not for the dates, we could hardly account this accidental, but the latest possible year of composition for Ford's play is 1633, when Corneille had not finished composing Clitandre, the earliest of his tragedies. Yet the reader should none the less be prepared for a performance more in the French than in the English taste, and for a piece perhaps the most 'classic' in our repertory. Individual beauties, gushes of exquisite lyrical extravagance, are not in Ford's way. The construction with him is not less solid than it is subtle, and it is the concentrated subtilty on which the solidity is built. Racine might have envied the skill with which, from the very first, the fate of Ithocles and Calantha, apparently so secure and so fortunate, flutters in the closed hand of Orgilus. His revenge has a quiet resolution which is absolutely demoniac, and it moves, as a stage-passion should, in full sight of the audience, though unsuspected by the other characters. The extreme consistency of Ithocles and Orgilus, as creations, throws into a certain disadvantage the more dimly-outlined Penthea and Calantha. When Ithocles dies there is a crisis in the plot so violent that we recover from it with difficulty. Penthea is dead and Orgilus assuaged; all the burden of the fifth act falls upon Calantha, whose part has hitherto been a vaguely passive one. The revelation of her ardent love for Ithocles, hitherto so modestly repressed, reawakens our sympathy, and the extraordinary merit of the fifth act consists in its revival, through the multiform passion of Calantha, of our interest in the dead Ithocles and Penthea, so that to the very last our emotions are centred on the beautiful, remorseful figure of Ithocles, for whom the play was certainly composed, and whose one error, followed though it be by a thousand excellent resolves, shatters the whole complicated structure of hope and happiness. Which I shall owe your goodness even in death for : Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams Glories Must be a winding-sheet, a fold of lead, Cal. Speak; I enjoy it. Pen. Vouchsafe, then, to be my executrix, And take that trouble on ye to dispose Such legacies as I bequeath impartially; I have not much to give, the pains are easy; Heaven will reward your piety, and thank it When I am dead; for sure I must not live; I hope I cannot. But three poor jewels to bequeath. The first is Cal. You mean to part with? Pen. A second jewel 'Tis my fame, I trust Beseeming charity without dishonour! Cal. How handsomely thou play'st with harmless sport Of mere imagination! speak the last. Song from 'The Broken Heart.' Glories, pleasures, pomps, delights and ease, Can but please Outward senses, when the mind Love only reigns in death; though art From The Lover's Melancholy.' Menaphon. Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales Which poets of an elder time have feigned To glorify their Tempe, bred in me To Thessaly I came; and living private, Without acquaintance of more sweet companions I day by day frequented silent groves And solitary walks. One morning early This accident encountered me: I heard I shall soon resolve ye. A sound of music touched mine ears, or rather This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute, Men. That such they were than hope to hear again. James Shirley. It has long been one of the commonplaces of literary history that the great series of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, which began with Marlowe, closed with Shirley. He was the youngest of them all, having been born on the 18th of September 1596—after the death, that is, of almost all the members of the pre-Shakespearean generation. It is thought that Shirley's birthplace was the parish of St Mary Woolchurch, in the city of London. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, and at St John's College, Oxford, where he attracted the attention of Laud, who was then Master. Laud was very kind to Shirley, but dissuaded him from taking holy orders on account of a large wen which disfigured his left cheek. This affliction, greatly softened down, is yet perceptible in the Bodleian portrait. As early as 1618 Shirley published a poem, Echo, or the Unfortunate Lovers, of which no copy is now known to exist. It was probably, however, identical with the Narcissus printed in 1646, and if so, was one of the sensuous and philosophical narratives fashionable at that time, of which Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is the most celebrated example. In this graceful exercise Shirley displays the influence of Marlowe and of Beaumont. As was not unusual in the seventeenth century, Shirley transferred himself from one university to the other; he did spend some precious years at Catherine Hall,' Cambridge, where he took his degree. He stayed there, perhaps, until in 1623 he was appointed a master in St Albans GrammarSchool. But in the meantime he had, in spite of Laud's objection, taken orders and been presented to a living, which, however, he resigned immediately, having become a convert to the Church of Rome. It is said that he continued to be a schoolmaster for about two years, but all this portion of Shirley's career is very indistinctly, and probably very inexactly, reported to us. In his twenty-ninth year Shirley took seriously to the stage, doubtless as the only mode of making a livelihood open to him. His first play, Love Tricks, was licensed in February 1625, but was not printed until 1631, when it passed through the press as The School of Compliment. It was very popular, although, to a modern judgment, it seems weak both from a literary and a theatrical point of view. It imitates Shakespeare and Fletcher in the pastoral scenes, and has no particular individuality. Yet the style, fluent, urbane, and correct, is that which was to characterise Shirley throughout his long career. The first of Shirley's published plays, his comedy of The Wedding, 1629, has more merit of construction, and The Grateful Servant, 1630, placed the poet high among the dwindling band of dramatists who still kept up something of the great Elizabethan tradition. Of these survivors, Marston, Heywood, Chapman, and Dekker had long been silent, and the only serious rivals whom the new poet had to encounter were Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Ford. Shirley was now resident in London, and he took a prominent part in the literary life of the capital. His temperament seems to have been, like his verse, graceful and gentle. Among his friends he counted Ford, Massinger, Randolph. Stanley, and Thomas May. He now took to the composition of tragedies, of which the earliest may have been The Traitor, acted in 1631 and published in 1635. He wrote other tragedies, and then turned back to the romantic comedies which best suited his talent. From 1631 to 1635 Shirley produced twelve consecutive comedies, closing with what is his finest work in this class, the admirable Lady of Pleasure. Shirley had by this time gained a high reputation for the modesty of his writings, and in July 1633, when registering The Young Admiral, the Master of the Revels volunteered a testimonial to that effect, in which Shirley was encouraged to pursue this beneficial and cleanly way of poetry.' Charles I. said that The Gamester, which was acted in 1633, was 'the best play he had seen for seven years.' It is believed that Shirley went over to Dublin in the early part of 1636 to help Ogilby in working the new theatre which had been built in Werburgh Street. He seems to have remained in Ireland until 1639 or the beginning of 1640. Among the plays which he produced in Dublin, St Patrick for Ireland is the most original, or at least the most eccentric; the extremely selfcontained dramatist appears on this one occasion to kick over the traces of a studied sobriety. Among the Irish plays, The Royal Master and The Humorous Courtier deserve special mention. Between Shirley's return from Dublin to London and the first ordinance for the suppression of stage plays, he was the foremost playwright in England, and is believed in this short time to have produced ten dramas. Of these last plays, The Cardinal is the best. Shirley, who was a pronounced Royalist, and had been valet of the chamber to Queen Henrietta Maria, lost all at the Rebellion. After the battle of Marston Moor he accompanied to France the Duke of Newcastle, whom he had aided in poetical composition; but he presently crept back to England, where Thomas Stanley protected him. He went back to his old trade of education, and started a successful school in Whitefriars. In 1646 he issued a collection of his poems. It would seem that he did not benefit from the Restoration. In the Great Fire of London, Shirley and his second wife fled from their house near Fleet Street, and, dying of terror and exposure on the same day, were buried in St Giles-in-theFields, in one grave, on the 29th of October 1666. We gather that Shirley had suffered from fire before, since his The Grammar War (1635), a didactic production, contains 'A lamentation upon the conflagration of the Muses' habitation.' In the plays of Shirley, which are curiously uniform in manner, we find grace, melody, and fancy. The violent elements of the great Elizabethan age seem to have been entirely, absorbed, and only the gentle and playful ones left. Shirley wrote with pertinacious industry, and, although a great part of his work is probably lost, between forty and fifty of his tragedies, comedies, tragicomedies, pastorals, and masques have come down to us. In this mass of writing-produced between 1625 and 1655, while English poetry was being subjected to a rapid and surprising transformatiónthere are no signs of change. From The Wedding to The Sisters, Shirley remains exactly the same suave, sweet-tongued, and florid poet, although the England of Shakespeare was shortly to become the England of Dryden. The plays of Shirley seem to have been popular on the stage, at all events in the early part of his career, and if we are inclined to consider them loosely constructed and thinly conceived in comparison with those of the great playwrights of the preceding generation, we have only to turn from them to those of his immediate contemporaries-such as Cartwright, Brome, and Jasper Mayne--to see that Shirley preserved far more than any other Commonwealth man the practical tradition of the stage. Of his comedies, the Witty Fair One and the Lady of Pleasure display his ornate and profuse fancy to the greatest advantage. In the Traitor he comes nearest to being a fine tragedian. Ami. Pray do not mock me, Your hearts were promis'd, but he ne'er had mine. Ami. Alas, poor maid! We too keep sorrow alive then; but I prithee, When thou art married, love him, prithee love him, For he esteems thee well; and once a day Give him a kiss for me; but do not tell him 'Twas my desire: perhaps 'twill fetch a sigh From him, and I had rather break my heart. But one word more, and heaven be with you all.Since you have led the way, I hope, my lord, That I am free to marry too? After your own solemnities are done, To grace my wedding; I shall be married shortly. Pis. To whom? Ami. To one whom you have all heard talk of, Song from 'The Imposture.' To keep your wealth from cruel men, Now lovers' eyes may gently shoot Sing Io, Io! for his sake, Who hath restor'd your drooping heads; Whilst we whole groves of laurel bring, (From Act 1. sc. ii.) From 'The Lady of Pleasure.' Steward. Be patient, madam; you may have your pleasure. Lady Bornwell. 'Tis that I came to town for. I would not Endure again the country conversation, To be the lady of six shires! The men, How they become the Morris, with whose bells Stew. These, with your pardon, are no argument |