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Gilles Monsarrat, Brian Vickers, and R. J. C Watt, eds., The Collected Works of John Ford
by Steven W. May

The Collected Works of John Ford, ed. Gilles Monsarrat, Brian Vickers, and R. J. C Watt. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012. xxiv + 696 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-959290-6. $217 cloth.

 

This first volume of the Collected Works of John Ford offers professionally edited texts of a fuller canon, and with more supporting material than any previous edition of Ford’s works.  Given that Ford began his writing career with non-dramatic poetry and prose and continued in this vein even as he turned out the plays for which he is better known, this edition traces his development throughout his active lifetime as a writer, thinker, and seeker after patronage. 

John Ford may be an author of the second magnitude, but he belonged to a well-defined and important cadre of like-minded young men who made a lasting contribution to English literature.  Two groups of talented writers from different educational backgrounds produced much that is memorable in Elizabethan and early Stuart literature. First were the “University Wits,” who began writing late in the 1570s.  All of them held degrees from either Oxford or Cambridge.  The greatest among them was Christopher Marlowe. His most talented contemporaries included John Lyly, Thomas Watson, Robert Greene, George Peele, and Thomas Nashe.  These writers set the tone for late Elizabethan literature, striking out in new directions in prose fiction, lyric and narrative verse, and drama.  All were dead before James VI ascended the English throne in 1603. In contrast, few of the talented young writers in the second wave of Elizabethan literati graduated from either university.  They emerged in the early 1590s at the Inns of Court, where their achievements centered on poetry, including verse drama, and prose essays of various kinds, but not prose fiction.  John Donne was the most talented among them; his fellow Inns-of-Court “Wits” included Everard Guilpin, John Marston, Sir John Davies, Benjamin Rudierd, John Hoskins, and Henry Wotton, all of whom lived well into the Stuart Era.  Whereas the University Wits became professional writers who sought to make a living through literature, most of the Inns-of-Court generation went on to careers in church and state. An exception to this pattern was a late-comer to the group, John Ford.

The second son born into a prosperous Devonshire family, John spent a year or so at Exeter College, Oxford before entering the Middle Temple in 1602. He may have undertaken some study of the law thereafter, for he was referred to as “of the Middle Temple” as late as 1638.[1]  But he was never called to the bar, and thus could not have made a living by pleading in the major law courts.  Meanwhile, his literary career was initiated at age twenty, no doubt less by artistic inspiration than by the more common motive of economic necessity.  Early in 1606 he was expelled from the Inn for failure to pay his buttery (dining) bill.  It can be no coincidence that on 25 July Honor Triumphant, Or the Peeres Challenge was entered in the Stationers’ Register in his name.  Ford took his cue from the tournament challenges issued as part of the festivities in honor of the visit of King Christian IV of Denmark that summer.  Ford’s witty pamphlet cultivated the fashionable genre of the paradox, the defense of a seemingly indefensible statement.  He argued, for instance, that “Faire Ladie was never false.”  (Donne wrote his “Paradoxes and Problems” in the same tradition.)  Ford appended to his prose tract The Monarchs Meeting, a hyperbolic description in verse of how James welcomed the Danish King to England.  At about the same time, and in similar high style, Ford published his verse elegy for Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire (who had died on April 3) under the title Fames Memorial.  His publishers would have paid him a few pounds for these works, but in addition both were dedicated to potential patrons in hope of securing some additional reward.  Fames Memorial was dedicated to Devonshire’s widow, the renowned Lady Penelope Rich (Sidney’s “Stella”), to whom the author also sent a handsomely penned presentation copy of the work in manuscript.  Further to advertize himself as an up-and-coming man of letters, Ford published a second verse elegy for Devonshire in a collection of works honoring the deceased nobleman and, also in 1606, wrote commendatory verses for Barnabe Barnes’s Foure Bookes of Offices.

Ford’s literary career, however, did not take off at once in the wake of these first ventures into print, perhaps because they resulted in no significant patronage.  The tournament in the Danish king’s honor was cancelled, and Penelope, Countess of Devonshire, could not long have patronized Ford since she died in 1607.  He is best known as a dramatist, yet he may not have begun writing plays much before the 1620s.  Just how he made a living (enough so to be reinstated at the Middle Temple in June, 1608), remains, with his date of death, among the mysteries of his biography.  Nothing else was forthcoming from his pen for at least five years, suggesting either that Ford’s finances had stabilized or that he had found a more satisfactory route to economic security than writing.

It seems likely, in fact, that Ford’s income was at least adequate during these years. While his biographers have made much of the paltry £10 he received in his father’s will (1610), and his complaint in Fames Memoriall that he was “at home disgrac’d” (l. 1055), this does not mean that he had been significantly disinherited.  In 1616, John witnessed the will of his elder brother, Henry, who left him an annuity of £20 for life in exchange for “two Tenementes” already in his possession.  John had apparently received these properties as his “portion” before his father made out his will, a fairly common practice. Nor are these tenements necessarily the only ones he had received.  His disgrace at home in 1606 may have resulted from a too-prodigal London lifestyle or some other youthful indiscretion.  By 1608 he had gotten his finances in order, with or without aid from those to whom he had dedicated his published works; he was reinstated at the Middle Temple, and sought no further patronage for several years thereafter.

 Ford’s publishing career resumed, apparently, in 1612 with publication of A Funerall Elegye for William Peter.  Brian Vickers’s “Counterfeiting” Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye[2] has wrested the hotly contested authorship of this poem from Shakespeare to Ford.  In the following year, Ford brought out a substantial devotional poem, Christes Bloodie Sweat, and his first publication entirely in prose, The Golden Meane, a philosophical tract grounded in Stoic philosophy.  Ford responded to the scandalous murder of his fellow Templar, Sir Thomas Overbury, with a lost work entered under his name in the Stationers’ Register as “Thomas Overbury’s Ghost” (1615).  He also wrote two verse commendations of Overbury’s A Wife that appeared only in the edition of 1614, along with two prose “characters,” describing “A Wise-man” and “A noble Spirit.”  These last have been accepted into Ford’s canon despite their lack of contemporary attribution.  His elegiac “Memoriall” for Overbury in heroic couplets appeared in 1616 subscribed “Io: Fo:.”  Ford set forth his last significant non-dramatic publication, A Line of Life, in 1620.  He sent a presentation manuscript to its dedicatee, James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, son-in-law to the Earl of Northumberland, to whom he had dedicated The Golden Meane.  In addition, however, Jeremy Maule discovered Ford’s verse “Elegy on John Fletcher” (d. 1625), edited here as well along with a verse celebration of the marriage of Mary Noel to Sir Erasmus de la Fontaine that Ford wrote c. 1630-34.  Both poems survive only in manuscript.

All of these works along with eight further commendatory poems and a verse elegy for Ben Jonson are edited in volume 1 of the Clarendon Press edition of the Collected Works of John Ford.  While Ford’s non-dramatic canon is now subject to very little debate, editing these works presents a number of other challenges.  Most of them offer multiple candidates for copy-text, and two of them must necessarily be edited from manuscript copies.  Ford’s language and allusions require substantial notes and commentary, nor can the editors draw upon extensive scholarship on his writings to help with their basic explication.

An even greater challenge, perhaps, is to differentiate this first volume of The Collected Works from the highly competent Nondramatic Works of John Ford, ed. L. E. Stock, Gilles D. Monsarrat, Judith M. Kennedy, and Dennis Danielson.[3]  The Oxford edition manages this by including two memorial works, the Funerall Elegy and Ford’s elegy for John Fletcher, that were omitted from the Nondramatic Works simply because neither had been attributed to Ford by 1991.  Both the printed and manuscript copies of Fames Memorial legitimately represent the author’s final intentions (for different audiences), so while the Nondramatic Works based its version on the printed text collated against the manuscript, the Collected Works sensibly chooses the presentation manuscript as copy text.  For A Line of Life, the Nondramatic Works used the 1620 edition as copy text, with conservative emendations involving fewer than a dozen words from the presentation manuscript.  The Oxford edition gives us in full the transcribed and printed texts on facing pages.  Another textual “bonus” here is Appendix II, full transcriptions of the eleven manuscript texts of the 1606 challenge which Ford defended in Honor Triumphant.  Appendix I offers a daily calendar of the Danish King’s visit to England beginning with the birth of Queen Anne’s daughter Sophia on June 22.

In addition to these textual differences, the Collected Works generally delivers on its promise to provide fuller annotation than its predecessor.  Its glosses of unusual words and expressions will certainly make Ford’s writings easier to appreciate by non-specialist readers.  Its explanatory notes bring to light numerous insights not dealt with in the Nondramatic Works.  Whereas the latter, for example, cites the echo in Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore from ll. 751-54 of Christes Bloodie Sweat, the Collected Works notes that both passages rely heavily on a work published by Thomas Nashe in 1592.  At the same time, the Collected Works repeats many of the annotations from the Nondramatic Works (duly acknowledged as such where necessary).

The Collected Works editors follow state of the art protocols in editing these texts, collating, for instance, all extant copies of Ford’s printed canon to locate in-press corrections.  Their task was simplified by the solid textual work carried out by editors of the Nondramatic Works and the fact that The Golden Mean and A Line of Life are edited by Gilles Monsarrat, who co-edited them for the 1991 edition.  The Oxford Works reaches the same overall conclusions about the printing processes witnessed by these copies while offering additional evidence in some instances, notably the revised states of the inner and outer formes of signature C in the 1613 edition of Christes Bloody Sweate. With regard to bibliographic details, the new edition also allows some calculated omissions, ignoring, for instance, the misogynistic poem transcribed in a seventeenth-century hand in the British Library copy of Honor Triumphant and printed in the Nondramatic Works (21).  The distinctions between these two editions, I think, render neither one superfluous or inferior; instead, they work together to offer complete and reliable evidence for on-going, comprehensive appraisal of Ford’s achievement as an author.

The record of the bibliographic drudgery required to arrive at a reliable text of most authors’ works here yields some further and interesting evidence about Ford’s practice as a fledgling author seeking patronage. While Honor Triumphant was in general “carefully printed,” the Oxford Works lists a score of errors “present in all three copies” of the first edition (76).  This strongly suggests that Ford did not proofread his debut in print to be sure it was set forth to maximum advantage.  Perhaps he depended on presentation manuscripts (as with Fames Memorial) to deliver good texts where they counted most, to their dedicatees.  In the case of Honor Triumphant, however, that would have required six manuscripts aligned with the six parts of the work dedicated to different individuals. No such hypothetical manuscript has come to light, however.  Ford more likely simply trusted his printers to produce accurate texts, nor do the variants in different copies of his later works suggest that he proofread them during production.

After the rhetorical excesses of Fames Memorial and The Monarchs Meeting, Ford matured into a competent if not gifted poet.  Christes Bloody Sweate and the elegies for Fletcher and Jonson compare favorably with most of the age’s devotional and elegiac verse short of that written by such masters as Herbert, Crashaw, Milton, or Jonson himself.  But as with Ford’s philosophical treatises in prose, these genres leave few readers sitting on the edge of their seats today. For modern readers, Honor Triumphant is probably Ford’s most entertaining non-dramatic work (once they realize that his arguments are playful, not serious).  Ford takes the four outrageous tenets set forth in the challenge and defends each in detail.  The spirit of playfulness as high comedy comes in his absurd arguments, appealing to logic, classical precedent, and folk wisdom (proverbs) in support of contentions that are obviously ridiculous.  In arguing, for instance, that beauty is “the modell of all fortitude,” he asserts “For this proof (unlesse I be mistaken as I am not),” that, had Julius Caesar brought Cleopatra with him to the conquest of Britain, she would have inspired him to conquer the entire island (93-5). The tract is amusing throughout, but ultimately not of sufficient register to confirm Ford’s literary reputation. That rests with his plays, all to be re-edited in the forthcoming volumes 2 and 3 of the Collected Works.

 

By Steven W. May

University of Sheffield

 

[1] Michael Neill, “Ford, John,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[2] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

[3] (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, with the Renaissance English Text Society, 1991).

 

 

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43.2.36

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Steven W. May, "Gilles Monsarrat, Brian Vickers, and R. J. C Watt, eds., The Collected Works of John Ford ," Spenser Review 43.2.36 (Fall 2013). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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