Product Description

Ford wrote darkly about sexual and political passion, despair, thwarted ambition, and incest. This selection also shows his ability to portray the poignancy of love as well as write entertaining comedy and create convincing roles for women. His Annabella, Hippolita, Penthea, Calantha, and Katherine Gordon rank among the most dramatically powerful female characters on the post-Shakespearean stage. Setting Ford's earliest surviving independently-written play, The Lover's Melancholy, alongside his three best known works, this edition includes an introduction with sections on each play addressing gender issues, modern relevance, and staging possibilities. Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation, supplemented by detailed annotation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114152 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author
Marion Lomax is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language and Literature, St Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill.

Customer Reviews

amazing!
I read this for my english literature class and couldn't wait to buy myself a copy to keep. it is a brilliant story, the drama in this is very intense. I won't spoil the story, but I highly recommend it.

'Tis Pity He's Relatively Unknown
The plays in this volume really are exquisite. Beautifully crafted, subtly pitched, they obviously stem from a fine sensibility; they just go to confirm the verdict of later figures such as Coleridge, Lamb, and Swinburne that Ford was not only a great dramatist, but also one of the great English poets.

Dark, bloody and brutal little gems of Jacobean tragedy
Writing in the 1620s, well after Shakespeare and Marlowe, John Ford is now little read and rarely produced. Which is a shame as his plays have a dramatic power and tension that recall some of the gothic barbarity of Webster, though in much simpler language.

The highlight of this collection is 'Tis Pity She's a Whore: set in Italy, it tells the story of incestuous love between Giovanni and Annabella, brother and sister, and the sexual jealousy that ensues when she is forced into marriage. Stark, dark and bloody, this builds to a predictable but still shockingly visual climax.

With intertextual references to Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and classical literature such as Ovid's Metamorphoses, this weaves it's own taut and tense spell over the reader. Short but memorable.