John Ford (playwright)

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John Ford (baptized April 17, 1586 in Ilsington , Devon , † after 1639 in or near London ) was an English poet and playwright of the late Renaissance. He is one of the most important playwrights of the Stuart period .

Life

Title page of the first print of 'Tis Pitty Shee's a Whore , 1633

Ford was the son of Justice of the Peace John Ford and his wife Elizabeth Popham. A maternal uncle was the lawyer John Popham . Little is known about Ford's childhood and youth. Ford studied law at Oxford ; probably at Exeter College . Like other members of his wealthy, long-established family, he was accepted into the Middle Temple , one of London's renowned law schools, after a short period of study in Oxford in 1602 . Possibly he then made his living as a lawyer; as with many of his contemporaries, however, precise biographical information is missing.

Ford began his literary work with occasional poems such as an elegy about the death of a nobleman or a prose pamphlet about chivalric virtue. However, he found entry into literary history exclusively through his dramas, which he wrote from the early 1620s, initially in collaboration with Thomas Dekker , William Rowley , Thomas Middleton and John Webster .

His solo work from 1626 onwards, such as The Lover's Melancholy (1628), The Broken Heart (1625–33), Love's Sacrifice (1632?), 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629–33?), The Fancies Chaste and Noble (1635/36) or The Lady's Trial (1638) made him a leading playwright of the Elizabethan-Jacobean theater, who was highly regarded by his contemporaries.

Works such as The Broken Heart ( The Broken Heart 1860) and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore ( Too bad she was a whore , 1982), the most famous perhaps incest tragedy, the English literary history, are still - not just English stage - successfully listed.

In his tragedies, Ford repeatedly treats passionate love beyond moral boundaries. The scenes are often Italy or Greece , where its heroes tragically succumb to death and are destroyed.

The drama The Broken Heart , enriched with numerous melodramatic and morbid details, shows the dark life and love story of two couples in a world of self-destructive passions and hopeless entanglements between an actual love relationship and a forced loveless marriage. Following on from Robert Burton's work The Anatomy of Melancholy , published in 1621, the central theme of the tragic melancholy of unhappy love is developed; the few glimpses of a third happy relationship suggest an alternative, but in the end do not really give rise to hope.

In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore , the incestuous relationship between the beautiful and clever siblings Giovanni and Annabella von Ford is primarily not portrayed as a sexual entanglement, but as a fateful coincidence that the two give in to only after a long period of hesitation. The execution of the incest is staged in clear similarity to a marriage; With the subsequent pregnancy of Annabella, an extremely complicated game of intrigue and counter-intrigue begins, which culminates in a gruesome and spectacular final scene. With the heart of his murdered lover impaled on a dagger, Giovanni appears and stabs his sister's husband, whom she married when she became pregnant, to hide the incest. In the end, Giovanni himself is killed by commissioned murderers; With this outcome of the piece, Ford ties in with the conventional structure of the Elizabethan-Jacobean revenge tragedy . The work is one of the not entirely undisputed classics of English theater. In later performances, especially in the 19th century, it was sometimes staged under less sensational titles such as Giovanni and Annabella or The Brother and the Sister .

Together with his colleagues Thomas Dekker and William Rowley, Ford published The witch of Edmonton around 1623 . He also worked with John Webster more often.

At the age of about 50, John Ford died in or near London after 1639.

Works

  • The Witch of Edmonton (1621; printed 1658), with Thomas Dekker and William Rowley
  • The Sun's Darling (revised 1638–9; printed 1656 ), with Dekker
  • The Lover's Melancholy (1628; printed in 1629; the melancholy of lovers , 1860)
  • The Broken Heart (ca.1625–33; printed 1633; The Broken Heart , 1860)
  • Love's Sacrifice (1632 ?; printed in 1633; The sacrifice of love , 1860)
  • 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629–33 ?; printed 1633; also known as Giovanni and Annabella ; pity ... she was a whore , 1946, and pity that she was a whore , newly translated by Erich Fried , 1982)
  • Perkin Warbeck (approx. 1629–34; printed 1634), with Dekker?
  • The Fancies Chaste and Noble (1635/36; printed 1638; The Fantasies, chaste and noble , 1860)
  • The Lady's Trial (1638; printed 1639, The Trial of the Woman , 1860)
Works with uncertain attribution
  • The Queen (c. 1621-33 ?; printed 1653)
  • The Spanish Gypsy (licensed July 9, 1623; printed 1653).

A significant number of Ford's plays have not survived, including The Royal Combat and Beauty in a Trance , as well as some plays that he created with Dekker: The London Merchant, The Bristol Merchant, The Fairy Knight , and Keep the Widow Waking , which he has created in collaboration with William Rowley and John Webster.

The attributions in question include: The Laws of Candy, which is directed as a play by John Fletcher , but may contain some of Ford's work of the same name. Even The Welsh Ambassador and The Fair Maid of the Inn are considered as works that may contain some of Ford.

German translations

In 1860 a German edition of selected works by Ford appeared for the first time in a collected form in a translation by Friedrich von Bodenstedt .

Work editions

  • Dramatic Works of John Ford - Volume 1 . Murray, London 1831 ( archive.org ).
  • Dramatic Works of John Ford - Volume 2 . Murray, London 1831 ( archive.org ).
  • Alexander Dyce, William Gifford (Ed.): The Works of John Ford. 3 volumes. Rev. new edition, Russel & Russel, New York 1965 [1869]

literature

  • Lisa Hopkins: John Ford's Political Theater. Manchester University Press, Manchester 1994, ISBN 07-1903-797-2
  • Donald K. Anderson (Ed.): Concord in Discord: The Plays of John Ford, 1586-1986. AMS Press, New York 1986, ISBN 04-0462-287-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Uwe Baumann: Ford, John. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 208.
  2. ↑ See Uwe Baumann: Ford, John. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , pp. 208f. See also John Ford - British dramatist . On: Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved July 25, 2015. Likewise, John Ford (England) . On: encyclopedia.com . Retrieved July 25, 2015. Also John Ford (April 17, 1586 - 1640 / England) . On: poemhunter.com. Retrieved July 26, 2015.
  3. ↑ See Uwe Baumann: Ford, John. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , pp. 208f. See also John Ford - British dramatist . On: Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved July 25, 2015. Likewise, John Ford (England) . On: encyclopedia.com . Retrieved July 25, 2015. Also John Ford (April 17, 1586 - 1640 / England) . On: poemhunter.com. Retrieved July 26, 2015.
  4. ↑ See Uwe Baumann: Ford, John. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , pp. 208f. Likewise John Ford (April 17, 1586 - 1640 / England) . On: poemhunter.com. Accessed July 26, 2015. See also the reviews of German performances of Pity She's a Whore in the period from 7 May 1982 [1] and in the Berliner Zeitung of 16 January 2002 [2] . Retrieved July 25, 2015.
  5. ↑ See Uwe Baumann: Ford, John. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 209. See also John Ford - British dramatist . On: Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved July 25, 2015. Likewise John Ford (April 17, 1586 - 1640 / England) . On: poemhunter.com. Retrieved July 26, 2015.
  6. ↑ See Uwe Baumann: Ford, John. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 209.
  7. ↑ See John Ford (April 17, 1586 - 1640 / England) . On: poemhunter.com. Retrieved July 26, 2015.
  8. ↑ Mark Stavig: John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order. Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press 1968, p. 207.
  9. ↑ Friedrich Bodenstedt (ed. And translator): John Ford's dramatic poems together with plays by Dekker and Rowley. Decker Verlag, Berlin 1860 ( archive.org ).
personal data
SURNAME Ford, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English poet and playwright of the late Renaissance
DATE OF BIRTH baptized April 17, 1586
PLACE OF BIRTH Ilsington , Devon
DATE OF DEATH after 1639
Place of death London