ABSTRACT
In plays like The Witch of Edmonton the individuality of the collaborators is to some degree submerged in the group enterprise. One of the collaborators, Dekker, was a leading exponent of the old, robust popular school. Another, John Ford (1586-c. 1640), was just beginning a career that was to make him the most original and imaginative playwright of the Caroline period, a specialist in refined and courtly drama. The individuality of Ford is not yet apparent in this early play, and he seems to work easily with Dekker and the others. But his later, independent work shows the stamp of a very distinctive mind. Paradoxically, one of his peculiarities is the way he uses conscious allusion to earlier drama. His tragedy Love's Sacrifice (published 1633) is full of echoes of Othello and of the tragedies of Webster. Perkin Warheck (published 1634), in its opposition of the pragmatic politician (Henry VII) and the doomed, romantic figure who has a much fuller sense of the mystique of kingship (Perkin himself), recalls Richard II, and there are verbal echoes of this and other Shakespearean history plays. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (published 1633) presents two young lovers, aided by a bawdy nurse, in opposition to their society; we think of Romeo and Juliet. These echoes are not the signs of a tired, imitative art. The allusiveness, for one thing, is consciously advertised; sometimes it is the first thing the audience is given. The opening of Love's Sacritice, 'Depart the court?', is meant to recall the famous 'Banisht?' that opens The White Devil; in its tone and phrasing the first speech of Perkin Warbeck ('Still to be haunted, still to be pursued ... ') recalls, with equal deliberateness, the opening of Henry I V Part One ('So shaken as we are, so wan with care ... '). Ford's awareness of the literary past advertises a reach and grandeur like that of earlier drama, something that had been lost in the more relaxed manner of the later Jacobeans. But he is not just turning the clock back; the old material is there to be re-shaped in a new way. In Perkin Warbeck the mystique of royalty is represented not by a king but by a pretender, and the young lovers of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore are brother and sister.
