FORD'S WORLD
Article by Tim Goodwin from the 1988 RNT production of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore
It was a long way from the thinly-populated, rural Devon of John Ford's childhood, to bustling, thriving London, home to quarter of a million souls, where he arrived in 1602. Hackney and private coaches rumbled up and down the narrow, dark, stinking streets, while inside the precarious three or four-storey houses, which often collapsed, people lived six or seven, and more, to a room. In the great markets you could buy goods from anywhere in the world. Chinese silks, Moluccan spices, arctic whale oil, African ivory, American tobacco, all were brought to London by the hundreds of ships that packed the river. Coal from Newcastle filled the heating needs of citizens who had long ago cut down the surrounding forests. It was a city where the strong preyed ruthlessly on the weak, the knowledgeable on the ignorant, where coney-catchers waited like vultures for naive country 'rabbits' to fleece.
The next year the old queen, Elizabeth I, died, and James I, surrounded by a horde of penniless Scots courtiers, descended on the capital. The first years of James's reign saw perhaps the greatest ever flowering of British theatrical talent. Shakespeare was at his peak, but he was just one of a galaxy of writers - Jonson, Dekker, Rowley, Beaumont, Fletcher, Tourneur, Webster, Massinger. Inigo Jones designed settings of unimagined beauty and complexity, while great actors - Burbage, Armin and others - trod the stages.
By the time Ford struck out on his own, twenty or so years later, Charles I had just ascended the throne and things looked very different. Most of the great names were dead, and there were few new ones, except Ford himself, and the prolific James Shirley, who worked mostly in Ireland. Ford's first known solo play, The Lover's Melancholy, was put on at the Blackfriars Theatre, across the river from the bear-pits, pleasure gardens and brothels of Bankside. But the Blackfriars followed the traditions of Burbage and Shakespeare, and Ford soon moved to the more appropriate Phoenix Theatre in Drury Lane, which concentrated on contemporary writing.
The decline of Jacobean drama was not just due to a shrinking pool of talent. Important social forces were at work; London itself was changing fast. The mediaeval monasteries and convents were gone. The king's strongholds, Whitehall and the Tower, flanked the city, but did not penetrate it. Now the aristocracy were leaving also, following the king into the healthier, less crowded suburbs, where, in the words of Henry Vaughan:
'Riotous sinful plush and tell-tale spurs
Walk Fleet Street and the Strand, When the soft stirs
Of bawdy ruffled silks turn night into day.'
The withdrawal of the nobles from London left business and the bourgeoisie supreme. Parallel with this domination came the growth of a new religion, a religion of hard work and stern morals, which soon came to represent the rising aspirations of the middle classes: Puritanism. Theatres, where the upper classes flirted, gossiped, and showed off their wealth, while the groundlings guffawed at coarse jokes or gasped at foul murders, were an abomination to the Puritans. Ben Jonson may have poked fun at them in Bartholomew Fair, but political and social pressure on the theatre grew steadily. At last, in September 1642, parliament, with ill-concealed satisfaction, passed an ordinance declaring: 'While these sad causes and set-times of humiliation do continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne.' Ford, probably aware of the way things were going, had retired to the country three years earlier.
It has long been said that the obsession with sex, death and violence in Jacobean theatre reflects a society that had lost its bearings. But perhaps the playwrights simply needed stronger stories to tempt jaded palates, or reacted against the strict uprightness of the Puritans by swinging to the opposite extreme. It was a vain gesture. The future belonged to the Puritans, to middle-class businessmen, the protestant work ethic and, above all, to trade. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 ushered in another time of theatrical excitement, but the Puritans had done their work well. Most of the population now stayed away from playhouses - Restoration theatre was an elite pleasure, froth on the surface of a society that no longer cared for it. The elegant satires, courtly comedies of manners, and poetic romances of Dryden, Etherege, Congreve and the rest never had the wide, popular appeal of Ford's thundering, action-packed dramas.
fordsworldJohn Ford was perhaps the last flowering of an England which was born in the Reformation, when the Catholic Church was expelled and a thousand years of history with it. He wrote his plays under the influence of the masters who preceded him, but also under the growing threat of Puritan disapproval. The Jacobeans were fascinated by incest (Massinger, Middleton, Tourneur, and Beaumont and Fletcher all touch on the subject) but Ford was the only one to treat it head-on. He also investigated the brother-sister relationship in at least three other plays. As one of the last Jacobean playwrights, he shows a world that was splitting irrevocably into two. British society had passed through a few decades of artistic triumph and precarious peace, but now, in the words of the visionary, Gerrard Winstanley: 'the old world is running up, like parchment in the fire'. The nation was on the dark path to hatred, and long years of civil war and revolution.
THE STORY with PRODUCTION PHOTOS
THE CHARACTERS
THE THEMES
THE COMPANY