Originally published in 1988, John Ford: Critical Re-Visions offers a wholesale reconsideration of the reputation of a major Caroline playwright. The volume takes an historical perspective and offers a better understanding of Ford's achievement in the light of the theatrical and social conditions of his own day. The collection of essays was assembled for the 400th anniversary of the playwright's birth. The contributors, well known scholars in the field, work from a variety of critical positions: insights associated with a new historicist, feminist, structuralist and post-structuralist theory are represented, together with more traditional approaches. The essays range from detailed readings of the individual plays, including 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Perkin Warbeck, Love's Sacrifice and The Lady's Trial to more wide-ranging studies of imagery and theatrical convention; several help to illuminate our understanding of Ford's plays in the theatre of his own time, while another offers a detailed account of post-war stage, film and television productions.

Volume IV of the Collected Works of John Ford is the first of two volumes in the series to contain his sole-authored plays. It contains three of his most celebrated plays: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1622), The Lovers' Melancholy (1628), and The Broken Heart (1629), as well as the less well-known The Queen (1629). The volume opens with a general introduction to Ford's work as a sole author by Sir Brian Vickers and each play is given a detailed introduction emphasizing Ford's linguistic creativity and his effective use of the indoor private theatres. Authoritative old-spelling texts, freshly edited from the original quartos with full textual collations, are accompanied by a full commentary on all aspects of the plays, from archaic or obsolete words to classical allusions and historical references to people, places, and social customs.

A. T. Moore's thorough commentary on "Love's Sacrifice" is designed to be of use to all kinds of readers, from students of Early Modern drama to specialists in the field. The notes provide full explanations of obscure words and phrases, and offer analyzes of many aspects of staging and interpretation. The text for this edition is based on a fresh study of the quarto of 1633, the only authoritative early text. In his introduction to the play, Moore reappraises the evidence for the play's date of composition. He also looks at the circumstances of the play's genesis, presenting detailed discussions of both the theater where "Love's Sacrifice" was first performed and the acting company for which it was written. Arguing that Ford's adaptation of his source materials is the key to interpreting this remarkably allusive play, Moore provides a wealth of new information about Ford's sources.The introduction also includes a survey of critical responses, an overview of the play, stage history, and a bibliography of relevant secondary material. This new volume in the "Revels Plays" series is the most detailed and comprehensive edition of "Love's Sacrifice" ever published - and the first modern-spelling edition of Ford's tragedy in more than a century. The play's textual history is discussed in an appendix. A second appendix examines possible links between "Love's Sacrifice" and the real-life story of the murdered Italian prince and musician Carlo Gesualdo.

An original study of the ways in which temporal concepts and gendered identities intersect in early modern theatre and culture.

The most neglected of the English Renaissance playwrights are the major Carolines—Philip Massinger, John Ford, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. Writing in the 1620s and 1630s, always in the shadow of their great precursors, Shakespeare and Jonson, they have often been dubbed mere purveyors of slick, escapist sensationalism who avoided the great issues of their day and turned away from the impending breakdown of English society. Ira Clark's revisionist book shows us these dramatists and their time whole, particularly through analysis of their treatment of sociopolitical issues—issues that find echoes in twentieth-century concerns. For each of these playwrights, Clark sketches his known social circle, describes characteristic social and political stances and dramatic techniques, and provides a detailed reading of an exemplary play. In considering their artistry, he notes their variations on traditional dramatic characters, situations, and styles. Where their predecessors had offered deep psychological portrayals, the Carolines, he finds, present characters whose roles grow out of their social relations. The issues they engage range from the sovereignty of King or Parliament and the criteria for social mobility to parental dominion and the rights of women and children. Their presentations range from conservatism—Ford's distilled and Shirley's playful—through Massinger's accommodation, to Brome's extemporaneous experimentation. The Carolines' theatrical world, Clark argues, is accessible to modern readers through the social theories of our time, which depend on their "world as a stage" trope for such concepts as symbolic interactionism and the ritual inculcation of social cohesion. This important book sheds new light on both the artistic and the political climate of seventeenth-century England.

In The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts, Cynthia Marshall reconceptualizes the place and function of violence in Renaissance literature. During the Renaissance an emerging concept of the autonomous self within art, politics, religion, commerce, and other areas existed in tandem with an established, popular sense of the self as fluid, unstable, and volatile. Marshall examines an early modern fascination with erotically charged violence to show how texts of various kinds allowed temporary release from an individualism that was constraining. Scenes such as Gloucester's blinding and Cordelia's death in King Lear or the dismemberment and sexual violence depicted in Titus Andronicus allowed audience members not only a release but a "shattering"—as opposed to an affirmation—of the self. Marshall draws upon close readings of Shakespearean plays, Petrarchan sonnets, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs, and John Ford's The Broken Heart to successfully address questions of subjectivity, psychoanalytic theory, and identity via a cultural response to art. Timely in its offering of an account that is both historically and psychoanalytically informed, The Shattering of the Self argues for a renewed attention to the place of fantasy in this literature and will be of interest to scholars working in Renaissance and early modern studies, literary theory, gender studies, and film theory.

Jacobean actors fascinated audiences with their convincingly mimetic performances; often they appeared to assume the identities of the fictional characters they impersonated. A similar dynamic emerges in several tragedies of the period, where dramatic characters are frequently changed--for better or worse--by the roles they adopt within the play illusion. This study discusses how certain plays of Jonson and Middleton reveal the destructive consequences of assuming new personae; how three of Shakespeare's tragedies explore the ambivalent results of characters' experimentation with roles; and how Webster and Ford treat role-playing (including ceremonial behavior) creatively, as a vehicle for expressing and consolidating the dramatic self.

Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences? And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship, theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights’ professional and linguistic networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies. In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances of hall playhouses, court masques, women’s drama, country-house theatricals, and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.