Background
Through his mother he was related to Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England. Little is known of Ford's private or professional life.
Through his mother he was related to Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England. Little is known of Ford's private or professional life.
He may have spent some months at Exeter College, Oxford, before November 1602, when he was admitted as a student of law to the Middle Temple, of which he was still a member in 1617. He probably practiced law in some capacity.
Like other writers in the legal profession, Ford began with occasional pieces.
Ford may have written a play independently in 1612, but his first recorded work for the theater was in the years 1621-1624 when he collaborated with the veteran dramatist Thomas Dekker in five plays. Only two survive in print-The Witch of Edmonton (1621), in which William Rowley was a third collaborator, and the masque The Sun's Darling (1624). Among the three lost plays was The Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother, or Keep the Widow Waking, a hasty dramatization of two London causes celebres of 1624, written by Dekker, Ford, Rowley, and John Webster, and staged at the popular Red Bull playhouse.
Ford's mature, unassisted plays were all performed by the most distinguished companies of Caroline times, and were intended for the courtly and cultivated audiences of the exclusive private playhouses. In the first four or five years of the reign of King Charles I, Ford wrote three plays for the King's Men at Blackfriars and the Globe, before transferring his services, around 1630, to the companies- Queen Henrietta's Men and the King and Queen's Young Company-managed successively at the Phoenix in Drury Lane by Christopher Beeston.
Two of Ford's plays for the King's Men survive. The Lover's Melancholy (1628) is a tragi-comedy in the Fletcherian mode. It is a sober, well-contrived entertainment that makes good use of the psychological theories of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The Broken Heart (published 1633; acted earlier) is Ford's most characteristic play. It is a tragedy of frustration set in the Spartan court.
Ford wrote five plays for the Phoenix Theatre. Ford's plays, greatly praised by Lamb and Swinburne, are still occasionally acted by university groups. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore has been staged off-Broadway and played by Sir Donald Wolfit in London. The Witch of Edmonton has been performed at the Old Vic Theatre. It is misleading to stress unduly Ford's modernity and to suggest, as Havelock Ellis did, that Ford has a kinship with both Stendhal and Flaubert rather than with other 17th-century playwrights. Ford came toward the end of the first creative upsurge of English professional playwriting when many themes and emotional situations were becoming exhausted. This explains Ford's frequent preoccupation with the sensational and his reliance for his subplots on conventional Italianate intrigues. The Caroline theater was dominated by tragi-comedy, by spectacle, and by the emerging comedy of manners. Ford, by his sympathetic characterization, by the excellence of his dramatic verse, and by his fine sense of theater, ranks in his major plays as the only considerable tragedian in the years between Charles's accession in 1625 and the closing of the theaters in 1642.