Staging Passion in Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy

LISA HOPKINS

John Ford’s tragicomedy The Lover’s Melancholy (first published

in 1629) appears to have been his first independently

written play. In it, a number of themes and motifs which

will later become established as typically Fordian appear

inflected in a rather different way from what will become

the norm. All Ford’s plays may be said to be concerned to a

greater or lesser degree with emotional states and their

effects upon action, but most are also structured around

violent and sensational events such as Giovanni’s cutting

out of his sister’s heart in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore or the death-

dance of Calantha in The Broken Heart. The Lover’s Melancholy,

however, is remarkable for its lack not only of sensational

action but almost of action of any sort. The event that

provided the catalyst for all subsequent plot developments,

the attempted rape of the heroine Eroclea by the late king

Agenor, has taken place before the play begins, and the fact

1

that Agenor himself is now dead means that there is no

character in the play who is guilty of anything other than

minor or venial faults. There are only a number of well-

intentioned people all trying very hard to do the right

thing.

And yet, paradoxically, it is in this that the interest of

the drama proves to lie, for however hard people try to

bring comfort to those around them, they find themselves

continually frustrated by something which this play posits

as an essential quality of the human psyche, a marked

slowness in the changing of emotional gears. Thus though

Eroclea is in a position to reveal herself both to her

father and to Palador almost from the outset, she refrains

from doing so, not because of any external obstacle - these

have all been removed - but through fear of the possible

effects of the shock to their systems. In The Lover’s Melancholy,

emotion proves not only to be staged in the sense of being

acted out; it is also staged in the sense of being always

accompanied by a time-delay mechanism - but staging in the

2

sense of performance may, it seems, help hasten those tardy

processes of cognition. In this essay, I hope to show that

though on the surface The Lover’s Melancholy may seem different

from Ford’s other plays, it is not really so. In fact, it

constitutes an exploration of the same concerns, but focuses

on examining a particular element of them in unusual detail,

almost as if it were frozen in time. As such, this play is

not peripheral to Ford’s oeuvre, but a crucial stage in his

ongoing enquiry into the nature of drama and with what can

and cannot be shown on stage. Thus I hope to cast light on

the dramaturgical and artistic ethos not only of The Lover’s

Melancholy but of Ford’s later plays too.

The performance of emotion is, in a Ford play, surprising.

Ford is above all the dramatist of reticence and silence: as

Havelock Ellis famously put it,

it is the grief deeper than language that he strives to

express…He is a master of the brief mysterious words,

so calm in seeming, which well up from the depths of

despair. He concentrates the revelation of a soul’s

3

agony into a sob or sigh. The surface seems calm; we

scarcely suspect that there is anything beneath; one

gasp bubbles up from the drowning heart below, and all

is silence.1

A predilection for silence can of course lead to

dramaturgical difficulties, as it undoubtedly does in Ford’s

penultimate play, The Fancies Chaste and Noble, where arguably

the most interesting character in the play, Flavia, has

virtually the least to say. However, it can also generate

moments of immense emotional power such as the eventual

revelation of the ‘silent griefs’ which have cut the

heartstrings of Calantha.2 That is not what we find in The

Lover’s Melancholy, however, because at this early stage of

Ford’s dramatic development he is still interested in

1 John Ford, edited by Havelock Ellis (London: n.p., n.d.),

introduction, pp. xiv-xv.

2 John Ford, The Broken Heart, edited by Brian Morris (London:

Ernest Benn, 1965), V.iii.75.

4

attempting to represent the processes of emotional change.

Here, emotions must find expression, and R. F. Hill well

observes that, almost uniquely in Ford’s oeuvre, ‘the idea

of heterosexual love remaining Platonic does not arise in

this play’;3 love must be acted out, and cannot remain

merely internally felt.

This may be partly as a result of the play’s historical

moment. Published in 1629, and celebrating the loving

reunion of a young and virtuous prince and his partner after

the removal of a powerful blocking figure, it looks very

like a gratulation on the renewed amity of Charles I and

Henrietta Maria in the wake of the assassination of the Duke

of Buckingham; moreover, the young couple’s newfound wedded

3 John Ford, The Lover’s Melancholy, edited by R.F. Hill

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985),

introduction, p. 25. All quotations from the play will be

taken from this edition and reference will be given in the

text.

5

bliss, soon leading to the queen’s pregnancy, may have

contributed to an emphasis which was more on consummation

than on the cult of Platonic love which is sometimes seen as

having influenced Ford’s later plays. Equally, however, this

difference in tone can be seen as part of this play’s

distinctive interest in not only the results but also the

causes and manner of the interplay of emotions and action.

Ford himself is quick to point out his debt to Burton’s The

Anatomy of Melancholy, which interrogated both the physiology

and the psychology of unhappiness:4 R. F. Hill observes that

‘While Burton accepts that bodily disorders may work upon

the mind to produce melancholy…he regards much melancholy as

not inevitable but proceeding from the indulgence of

passions that can and should be controlled by reason’.5 As

Hill further points out, Ford himself had demonstrated a

similarly quasi-medical approach to emotion in the

humorally-based account of behavior in The Sun’s Darling, which

he co-authored with Dekker, and here too a similarly

physiological grounding for behavior is posited when the

physician Corax says to Rhetias,

6

Have at thee! Thou affect’st railing only for thy

health; thy miseries are so thick and lasting that thou

hast not one poor denier to bestow on opening a vein.

Wherefore, to avoid a pleurisy, thou’lt be sure to

prate thyself once a month into a whipping, and bleed

in the breech instead of the arm.

(I.ii.119-24)

Corax - who is a doctor - is sure here that Rhetias’

aggression is directly linked to a humoral imbalance.

Similarly, Meleander warns Cleophila,

But take heed: Amethus

Was son to Doryla, Agenor’s sister.

There’s some ill blood about him, if the surgeon

Have not been very skilful to let all out.

(II.ii.54-7)

The implication, clearly, is that the blood in Amyclas’ body

is liable to produce bad behavior. And Meleander again

draws on anatomically-based explanations for emotions and

behavior when he tells Cleophila,

Thy sister, my Eroclea, was so gentle

7

That turtles in their down do feed more gall

Than her spleen mixed with

(II.ii.35-7)

Here, then, the emphasis seems to be less on the mind, as in

later Ford plays, than on the body, as in his earlier co-

authored work.

Physical causes are not the only ones posited for emotional

states in The Lover’s Melancholy, however. Indeed, Corax

explicitly denies that the primary cause of melancholy is

physiological, or at least avers that it is so only in a

highly complex way:

Melancholy

Is not as you conceive, indisposition

Of body, but the mind’s disease. So ecstasy,

Fantastic dotage, madness, phrenzy, rapture

Of mere imagination, differ partly

From melancholy, which is briefly this:

A mere commotion of the mind, o’ercharged

With fear and sorrow, first begot i’th’brain,

8

The seat of reason, and from thence derived

As suddenly into the heart, the seat

Of our affection.

Aretus. There are sundry kinds

Of this disturbance?

Corax. Infinite; it were

More easy to conjecture every hour

We have to live, than reckon up the kinds

Or causes of this anguish of the mind.

(III.iii.108-22)

Moreover, Ford in this play also mingles the idea of a

physical grounding for emotions with a pointedly metaphysical

perspective: ‘the therapeutic of the play operates within a

clear ethical and Providential frame work’ (introduction,

pp. 29 and 7) which complicates the relatively simplistic

moral scheme present in The Sun’s Darling.

I do not choose the word ‘metaphysical’ casually. Ford’s

play was prefaced by commendatory verses by George Donne,

younger son of John, and Cuculus says to Grilla, ‘Answer me

9

in strong lines, y’are best’ (III.i.64). This seems not only

to allude to the dominant feature of metaphysical poetry,

and that by which it was first to be distinguished in

critical discourse, but also to form part of the play’s -

and Ford’s ongoing - project of not only staging emotions

but also reflecting on the aesthetic of that staging. The

play is, for Ford, unusually indebted and allusive,

something which is all the more striking since its actual

plot is, as is usual with Ford, entirely original. As well

as its affiliations with the currently fashionable

metaphysicals, it also situates itself squarely within the

far older aesthetic milieu of Sir Philip Sidney, since the

choice of the name Cleophila for Eroclea’s younger sister

points squarely to the Old Arcadia, where this was the name

adopted by Pyrocles when in disguise as an Amazon. It thus

may also serve to remind us that, in the new Arcadia in

particular but also in the Old,6 love is consistently

10

constructed as having to be utterly overwhelming and acting

in direct opposition to reason before it can be counted as

worthy of the name of love, as is emblematized in the fact

that throughout both narratives, Sidney invariably imagines

and constructs love and desire as drives acting almost

entirely in opposition to earlier allegiances in the shape

of familial and also national loyalties. Though Sidney’s

treatment of such events is generally comic in tone, we are,

nevertheless, never allowed to forget the seriousness of the

potential and sometimes the actual consequences (as in the

certain deaths of Argalus and Parthenia and the possible one

of Amphialus). Ford’s evocation of the Sidneian world means

that we are thus provided with a clear ideological framework

within which to read the passionate characters of The Lover’s

Melancholy as excessively and indeed dangerously emotional.7

It can indeed be seen to function in a proto-Brechtian

fashion: by making us perceive so clearly what is happening,

it inevitably invites us to consider how and why - and the

invitation to reflection applies not only to the events

themselves but also to the manner of their representation,

11

making us aware of the extent to which this is not only a

play but a part of an ongoing aesthetic experiment.

To develop this self-reflexiveness still further, other

authors are also invoked as points of aesthetic and

ideological reference as well as Sidney. Rhetias’ ‘Since I

turned wolf, I bark and howl, and dig up graves’

(III.iii.21-2) and the masque of melancholics echo The

Duchess of Malfi, with the latter also reminiscent of the

divertissement offered by the Seven Deadly Sins in Doctor

Faustus.8 The stage-managed restoration of Meleander,

attended by two devoted daughters one of whom is now to be

reunited with him, clearly recalls that of Lear, and the

same play seems again to be remembered when Meleander vows

‘till the cliffs / That overhang my sight fall off’, an

image which seems imaginatively to meld different aspects of

the scene (itself derived from the Arcadia) where blind

Gloucester seeks to throw himself off Dover Cliff (V.ii.88-

9). Other Shakespearean plays are also evoked: Grilla’s

description of Cuculus as ‘As rare an old youth as ever

12

walked cross-gartered’ (III.i.2) clearly recalls Twelfth Night.

Most notably, however, the presence of twinned miniatures,

the mention to a melancholy prince of his father, and

Amethus’s strictures on not flattering a friend all allude

unmistakably to Hamlet, and so, most significantly, does the

plan to use a dramatic performance to elicit a display of

emotion (which is also a factor in the performance of the

masque of madmen in The Duchess of Malfi).9 Here again the link

between emotion and action is foregrounded, along with an

emphasis on spectating and voyeurship to which I will

return. Again, though, it is not only the expression of

emotion per se which we are invited to consider but existing

models and protocols for the dramatic representation of it.

One of the strongest manifestations of this interest in

emotional expression in The Lover’s Melancholy is characters’

propensity for not only giving physical expression to the

emotion that they are currently feeling, but remarking on

the fact that they are doing so. Thus Pelias when Palador

arrives says, ‘But I am silent; now appears a sun / Whose

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shadow I adore’ (I.i.22-3). Emotions are similarly both

staged and commented on when the returning Menaphon greets

his father Sophronos and his friend Amethus:

Sophronos. From mine eyes, son, son of my care, my

love,

The joys that bid thee welcome do too much

Speak me a child.

Menaphon. O princely sir, your hand.

Amethus. Perform your duties where you owe them first

(I.i.24-7)

The word ‘perform’ here clearly indicates the sense that the

culture of the Cypriot court is one in which external

expression is important.

However, there are also difficulties attendant on the

expression of emotion. Amethus says to Menaphon,

Give me thy hand. I will not say, ‘Th’art welcome’;

That is the common road of common friends.

I am glad I have thee here - O, I want words

To let thee know my heart.

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(I.i.37-9)

Here, words are inadequate; it is only the gesture of hand-

holding which can suffice as a proper objective correlative

for the state of the heart, perhaps because there was

popularly believed to be a vein running directly from the

heart to the wedding-finger. The only other mode of

communication which seems always to be trusted by the

characters of The Lover’s Melancholy, as indeed is also the case

in Ford’s other plays, is the similarly physical and

gestural one of tears, which, as with handholding, are

generally not only shed but also formally commented on.

Amethus observes ‘Your eyes, Parthenophill, / Are guilty of

some passion’ (II.ii.145-6), and Eroclea tells Thamasta,

When you shall read

The story of my sorrows, with the change

Of my misfortunes, in a letter printed

From my unforged relation, I believe

You will not think the shedding of one tear

A prodigality that misbecomes

Your pity and my fortunes.

15

(III.ii.167-73)

Most notably, it is ‘[s]igh[s]’, ‘weeping eyes, and hearts

that bleed to death’ (IV.ii.120, 123) that Meleander demands

from Corax before he will accept him as a suitable

companion, and even then their fellowship will manifest

itself in actions rather than words: ‘we will sit together

like true friends / And never be divided’ (IV.ii.125-6).

The reason for this preference for gestural over verbal

forms of expression seems to be rooted in that vestigial

sense of humoral physiology which sees an integral

connection between bodily fluids and associated emotional

states. Language, by contrast, may be present in excess of

the emotional state apparently producing it. Thus Amethus

when Thamasta seems to repent of her earlier brusqueness

warns Menaphon,

’Tis a trick;

There is no trust in female cunning, friend,

Let her first purge her follies past, and clear

The wrong done to her honour, by some sure

16

Apparent testimony of her constancy,

Or we will not believe these childish plots.

(IV.i.67-71)

Amethus insists on action rather than words, which he thinks

mask false intentions. He is worried too about his own

expression, since he is concerned that words may make him

appear fulsome: when Menaphon asks if Thamasta has a lover,

he replies,

Not any, Menaphon. Her bosom yet

Is intermured with ice, though by the truth

Of love, no day hath ever passed wherein

I have not mentioned thy deserts, thy constancy,

Thy - Come, in troth I dare not tell thee what,

Lest thou might think I fawned upon a sin

Friendship was never guilty of; for flattery

Is monstrous in a true friend.

(I.i.62-68)

There are, it seems, strict if unspoken limits for the

verbal expression of emotion and sentiments, which must not

be exceeded lest they threaten to falsify feeling rather

17

than to convey it. Similarly, Rhetias praises Agelastus, who

laughed only once in his life (I.ii.42-7), and advocates the

stoic creed that

’Tis a sport to live

When life is irksome, if we will not hug

Prosperity in others and contemn

Affliction in ourselves.

(I.ii.13-16)

And Sophronos, the derivation of whose name from ‘wise man’

suggests that his advice is to be trusted, counsels Palador,

‘I think you too indulgent to such motions / As spring out

of your own affections’ (II.i.90-1), while Menaphon resolves

‘Henceforward I will bury / Unmanly passion in perpetual

silence’ (III.ii.194-5) - which will indeed be the mode of

behavior increasingly adopted in Ford’s later plays. Palador

himself, when Eroclea is eventually restored to him, says,

‘My ecstasy of joys would speak in passion / But that I

would not lose that part of man / Which is reserved to

entertain content’ (IV.iii.137-40).

18

The question of the appropriate expression of emotion

becomes all the more important because throughout this play

the possession and experiencing of emotion is stressed as

being a fundamental human characteristic. Menaphon tells

Amethus,

To be man, my lord,

Is to be but the exercise of cares

In several shapes; as miseries do grow,

They alter as men’s forms, but none know how.

(I.i.82-5)

It is, moreover, further assumed that people will be

intensely interested in the emotional states of other

people, and will naturally wish to see them displayed. Thus

Kala leads Menaphon to watch Thamasta making advances to

Parthenophill with the words ‘at that window yonder, / You

may see all their courtship’ (III.ii.45-7), almost as if she

were offering him a treat instead of a spectacle bound to

cause him excruciating emotional pain, and Menaphon himself

assures Amethus that Parthenophill was happy to accompany

him to Cyprus because

19

The fame of our young melancholy prince,

Meleander’s rare distractions, the obedience

Of young Cleophila, Thamasta’s glory,

Your matchless friendship, and my desperate love,

Prevailed with him

(I.i.182-6)

It is almost as if Parthenophill were being taken to the

zoo, to watch these strange creatures perform their

emotions.

And this is, of course, in one way precisely what Ford’s own

audience have come to do; the chief charms not only

intradiegetically but also extradiegetically are indeed

Meleander’s rare distractions, the obedience of young

Cleophila, Thamasta’s glory,

Amethus’ matchless friendship, and Menaphon’s desperate

love. This is so not least because all actual obstacles to

the various unions are in fact either illusory or obsolete,

and without its concentration on the emotional states of its

characters the play would not actually have a plot, – and a

20

plot, moreover, which we watch with dispassionate interest,

since Ford, as Larry S. Champion observes, ‘employs fictive

devices to distance the spectator from the action in such a

way as to block his full emotional involvement’.10 Menaphon,

however, does not mention what the audience are likely to

find the most central and affecting of all these emotional

4 On the relationship between body and soul in Burton, see

Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the human body in

Renaissance culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 20.

5 The Lover’s Melancholy, ed. Hill, introduction, p. 6.

21

displays, the love and eventual reunion of Palador and

Eroclea. Partly, this is because he cannot; despite their

friendship, he is in fact concealing from Amethus that the

supposed Parthenophill is actually Menaphon’s cousin Eroclea

in disguise, while the cause of Palador’s melancholy still

6 On differences between the two versions’ treatment of love

see for instance Margaret M. Sullivan, ‘Amazons and

Aristocrats: The Function of Pyrocles’ Amazon Role in

Sidney’s Revised Arcadia’, in Playing with Gender: A Renaissance

Pursuit, edited by Jean R. Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitz, and

Allison P. Coudert (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

1991), pp. 62-81, p. 62. On differences between the two

versions’ treatment of love see for instance Victor

Skretcowicz, ‘Categorising Redirection in Sidney’s New

Arcadia’, in Narrative Strategies in Early English Fiction, edited by

Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein (Lewiston, NY and

Salzburg: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), pp. 133-146, p.

139, Clare Kinney, ‘The Masks of Love: Desire and

Metamorphosis in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, Criticism 33 (1991):

461-490, 461, and Mark Rose, Heroic Love: Studies in Sidney and

22

remains a mystery. Equally, though, we seem to encounter

here again the typically Fordian aesthetic of reticence

which dictates that, however much emphasis may be placed on

the pleasure of seeing emotion acted out, true emotion is

hesitant to display itself, coupled with the phenomenon that

Spenser (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968),

p. 37.

7 On debts to Sidney elsewhere in Ford’s oeuvre, most notably

in The Broken Heart, see for instance Verna Ann Foster and

Stephen Foster, ‘Structure and History in The Broken Heart:

Sparta, England, and the “Truth”’, English Literary Renaissance 18

(1988): 305-328; Richard Hillman’s chapter ‘Romance

Exhausted: Philaster and The Broken Heart’, in Intertextuality and

Romance in Renaissance Drama (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992);

Frederick M. Burelbach jr., ‘“The Truth” in John Ford’s The

Broken Heart revisited’, Notes and Queries 212 (1967): 11-12;

Giovanni M. Carsaniga, ‘“The truth” in John Ford’s The Broken

Heart’, Comparative Literature 10 (1958): 344-8; Katherine

Duncan-Jones, ‘Ford and the Earl of Devonshire’, Review of

23

that which does find display is suspect. It is Cuculus,

the insincere lover who, in an early manifestation of what

would become the classic Ford pattern of a hierarchy of

emotional seriousness which Juliet McMaster long ago

identified as ‘love, lust and sham’, 11 makes the greatest

English Studies 29 (1978): 447-52; Cyril Falls, ‘Penelope Rich

and the poets: Philip Sidney to John Ford’, Essays by Divers

Hands 28 (1956): 123-37; R. Jordan, ‘Calantha’s Dance in The

Broken Heart’, Notes and Queries 214 (1969): 294-5; Michael

Neill, ‘New light on “The Truth” in The Broken Heart’, Notes and

Queries 220 (1975): 249-50; Shanti Padhi, ‘The Broken Heart and

The Second Maiden’s Tragedy: Ford’s Main Source for the Corpse’s

Coronation’, Notes and Queries 229 (1984): 230-1; and Stuart P.

Sherman, ‘Stella and The Broken Heart’, Publications of the Modern

Language Association of America 24 (1909): 274-85.

8 On Ford’s recollection of Marlowe in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, see

Cyrus Hoy’s ‘“Ignorance in knowledge”: Marlowe’s Faustus and

Ford’s Giovanni’, Modern Philology 47 (1960): 145-154.

24

parade of his affections, although he freely admits that

‘Pish, I have not a rag of love about me. ’Tis only a

foolish humour I am possessed with, to be surnamed the

Conquerer’ (III.i.74-7). Palador, by contrast, seems

radically to distrust the communicative facility of all

those around him when he ignores their eloquent speeches and

turns instead to Rhetias with the remark ‘You have not

spoken yet’ (II.i.121), as though he finds what is not

spoken of greater interest than what is. Rhetias’ name

suggests that he ought to be an orator, and yet it is by

silence that he communicates most effectively here, and it

is indeed by indirection and omission, and by leaps of logic

dependent on the unspoken rather than the spoken - ‘Princes

who forget their sovereignty and yield to affected passion

9 On Ford’s debt to Webster in this play, see also Kathleen

McLuskie, ‘“Language and Matter with a Fit of Mirth”:

Dramatic Construction in the Plays of John Ford’, in John

Ford: Critical Re-Visions, edited by Michael Neill (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 97-127, p. 115.

25

are weary of command. You had a father, sir’ (II.i.134-6) -

that he eventually extracts the truth from Palador.

The world of the play thus becomes perversely peopled with

characters informed and actuated by two very different

drives, with a constant possibility of potentially explosive

intersection between them. On the one hand, there is the

strong desire to experience the vicarious thrill of watching

the emotion of others performed; on the other, there is the

equally strong sense that the peformance of emotion may

compromise its authenticity. These clashing imperatives meet

head on in the masque which is contrived by Corax in order

to discover the cause of Prince Palador’s melancholy. The

idea of the performance which will provoke such a strong

vicarious emotion in the spectator as to lead to a

revelation of his or her own inner self is a staple both of

Renaissance plays and of accounts of their production, from

the ‘Mousetrap’ in Hamlet to the various anecdotes about

women watching Arden of Faversham who were irresistibly moved

to confess that they had murdered their own husbands. Corax

26

is clearly drawing on this idea when he declares, ‘I’ll

shape ye all for a device before the prince; we’ll try how

that can move him’ (I.ii.155-6), and the theatre audience,

presumably, settle back to savor the enjoyment of a familiar

spectacle.

Ford, however, is interested not in simple replication of

earlier dramatic techniques but in experimenting with them,

and we soon find that Corax is not content to rely merely on

vicarious impersonation, but wants to mix and match his

dramatic modes: like Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, what he

has in mind is audience participation, at least that of the

onstage audience. Rhetias has already limned out the

technique which Corax will eventually, and with equal

success, deploy:

Rhetias…Now, noble sir, if you did love the lady Eroclea

why may not such safety and fate direct her as directed

the other? ’Tis not impossible.

Palador. If I did love her, Rhetias. Yes, I did.

(II.i.205-8)

27

Rhetias here has told a little story of a girl like Eroclea

whose story had a happy ending, and then cunningly baits his

own hook with the insidiously slippery rhetorical tactic of

saying that the same thing could happen to Eroclea herself,

if Palador loved her. The connection is as entirely

illogical as Rhetias’ abrupt introduction of Palador’s

father - there can be no possible reason why the survival of

Eroclea should have been dependent on the emotional state of

Palador - but what seems to draw Palador in is the desire to

identify with the narrative and to position himself within

it. It is a similar urge which Corax seems to hope to awake

when he deliberately omits from the personnel of his masque

of melancholics the one figure which he hopes would have

given vicarious expression to the emotions so closely hidden

by Palador:

One kind of melancholy

Is only left untouched; ’twas not in art

To personate the shadow of that fancy.

’Tis named Love Melancholy. As, for instance,

Admit this stranger here - young man, stand forth -

28

Entangled by the beauty of this lady,

The great Thamasta, cherished in his heart

The weight of hopes and fears, it were impossible

To limn his passions in such lively colours

As his own proper sufferance could express.

(III.iii.94-104)

Maybe Corax does not yet know that Parthenophill is Eroclea,

and hopes to catch two birds with one stone; maybe he does

know, and thus also knows that although Thamasta may not be

Eroclea’s actual love-object, she is nevertheless in love.

In either case it is clear that he either thinks or knows

that he is presenting an actual victim of love-melancholy,

as opposed to an actor of the part. Love-melancholy, it

29

seems, is an emotion rooted so deep that it is both

impossible to feign and difficult to winkle out, except by

showing it a vicarious enactment of itself - in which case,

as Palador’s subsequent disorder reveals, ‘love pent ne’er

so close yet will be seen’ (III.iii.114). In this scene,

which comes so close to the ‘Mousetrap’, we surely see why

Hamlet is so often alluded to as an aesthetic counterpart to

The Lover’s Melancholy.

There is, however, also a significant difference. Claudius

in Hamlet is ‘frighted with false fire’,12 deceived by an

unreal and indeed unconvincing performance on whose archaic

and unfashionable representational practices the play lays

much stress. Palador in The Lover’s Melancholy can catch fire

only from true tinder which burns with a flame the same as

his own, and which cannot be acted. It is almost as if

Hamlet were to halt the performance of ‘The Mousetrap’ to

invite Claudius to step up on stage and play the killer.

Theatrically the effect is to bring about the resolution of

the play; metatheatrically, it is implicitly to disable all

30

resolutions and indeeed all plays by its suggestions of the

inadequacy of acting and of the false position of an

audience with no personal involvement. It is easy to see

here how what seems to have been Ford’s first independent

play would also lead directly to the refusal of the dramatic

which is characteristic of his last plays.

In this emphasis on the desirability of audience involvement

and the superiority of ‘real’ performers, indeed, even this

early play already comes close to deserting the traditions

and aesthetic of the public theatrical performance, and to

aligning itself instead with those of the masque. It is

appropriate that it should do so at this moment which

heralds not only the transition from grief to joy for the

characters but also the modulation - formally essential for

tragicomedy but tonally often difficult to handle - from the

multiplication of problems in the first half to first their

potential and then their actual resolution in the second.

The flirtation with the masque genre does more than merely

help to negotiate the play’s own generic transactions,

31

however; the direct targeting of the reaction of Palador

serves also to remind the audience that the Jacobean masque

had indeed centred on the figure of the ruler, and thus to

point out that the play might have an extradiegetic as well

as a metatheatrical project. William Kerwin has recently

suggested that the intersection of medical performance and

questions of rule in the masque of madmen in The Duchess of

Malfi (which is clearly recalled here) is a deliberate

strategy to interrogate the legitimacy of the government

depicted: ‘[t]he play’s use of medical theater - the

representation of healing as a performance - repeatedly

connects the authority of educated physicians and the

attenuated legitimacy of the court of Malfi’.13 Does The

Lover’s Melancholy, with its sharp comments on the reign of the

precedent prince and its freely expressed hope that all the

legacies of his rule can now be left behind, show similar

signs here of an extradiegetic focus on Charles I? If so,

its drift would seem to be clear, if dangerous. While the

king’s new-found love for his queen promised heirs, it also

disturbed those who had always feared a Catholic bride for

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Charles - and who thought, moreover, that there were already

heirs enough to the crown, and Protestant ones at that, in

the shape of the numerous offspring of his fecund sister

Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Winter Queen. Although I suspect,

as I have argued elsewhere, that Ford himself was friendly

rather than hostile to Catholicism,14 and use of Greek might

sometimes signal a refusal to espouse religious orthodoxy15

(all the characters except the insincere Cuculus have Greek

names), it nevertheless seems clear that if this play may

seem to celebrate affection in ways which perhaps recalled

the newfound concord of Charles and Henrietta Maria, it

nevertheless also advocates restraint in the demonstration

of it. Most specifically, the motif of refraining from

performing in a masque that which is really felt, combined

with the cross-dressing which draws such attention to the

use of boy actors, may well have looked like sounding a

quiet but definite note of caution to Henrietta Maria, who

throughout the late 1620s was taking the leading and active

interest in theater which was eventually to lead to her

causing outrage by acting herself. In that sense,

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therefore, perhaps the metatheatrical and the extradiegetic

projects are in fact one.

If acting is dangerous, however, spectating is,

paradoxically, not only beneficent but essential, since it

proves to offer one of the few available mechanisms for

effecting emotional change. One of the most remarkable

manifestations of the play’s hesitant treatment of emotion

as a force of potentially alarming magnitude in need of

restraint and guidance is that even when the cause of

Palador’s melancholy has been securely established, it still

does not prove simple to banish it. Aretus opines that

‘Passions of violent nature by degrees / Are easiliest

reclaimed’ (II.i.25-6), an observation that seems to be

abundantly borne out by Thamasta’s confession on discovering

Parthenophill’s true identity as Eroclea that

It will be

A hard task for my reason to relinquish

The affection which was once devoted thine;

I shall awhile repute thee still the youth

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I loved so dearly.

(III.ii.176-80)

If the human mind is so slow to adjust, even joy may be

dangerous, so that Cleophila prays over her sleeping father,

May soft dreams

10 Larry S. Champion, ‘“Factions of Distempered Passions”:

The Development of John Ford’s Tragic Vision in The Witch of

Edmonton and The Lover’s Melancholy’, in ‘“Concord in Discord”: The Plays

of John Ford, 1586-1986, edited by Donald K. Anderson, Jr (New

York: AMS Press, 1986), pp. 109-130, p. 122. See also

Michael Neill, ‘The moral artifice of The Lover’s Melancholy’,

English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 85-106.

11 Juliet McMaster, ‘Love, lust and sham: structural pattern

in the plays of John Ford’, Renaissance Drama 2 (1969): 157-

66.

12 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins

(London: Methuen, 1982), III.ii.260.

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Play in his fancy that, when he awakes,

With comfort he may, by degrees, digest

The present blessings in a moderate joy.

(V.i.11-14)

It is for this reason that those about both Palador and

Meleander embark on a carefully planned and staged - in both

senses - programme of emotional reclamation, because only by

a slow process of manipulation mixed with representation can

full recognition of the new situation be achieved.

13 William Kerwin, ‘“Physicians are like Kings”: Medical

Politics and The Duchess of Malfi’, English Literary Renaissance 28

(Winter, 1998): 96.

14 See Lisa Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1994).

15 I am indebted to Helen Ostovich for this information.

36

Given this idea, it is less surprising than it might be that

all the joyous restorations in the last act are accompanied

by a strangely dispassionate running analysis of the mode of

their experience of happiness by the very people who are

experiencing it. Cleophila says,

That I show

Myself a girl, sister, and bewray

Joy in too soft a passion ’fore all these,

I hope you cannot blame me.

(V.i.166-9)

(Here, as always in the Devon-born Ford, ‘girl’ is

disyllabic - ‘girrul’ - so that there is not even, as might

at first appear, any metrical irregularity to soften the

incongruity of the effect of this metadiscussion of one’s

own response.) The same dispassionate commentary on one’s

own passions continues as Meleander, Eroclea and Cleophila

discuss their sensations and Rhetias remarks both on the

quality of Meleander’s reaction and on his own feelings as

onlooker of the old man’s emotional display:

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Rhetias. [Aside.] The good man relisheth his comforts

strangely;

The sight doth turn me child.

Eroclea. I have not words

That can express my joys.

Cleophila. Nor I.

Meleander. Nor I.

Yet let us gaze on one another freely

And surfeit with our eyes.

(V.ii.121-124)

Meleander goes still further when he probes the aesthetic of

his own response:

My tears, like ruffling winds locked up in caves,

Do bustle for a vent - On t’other side,

To fly out into mirth were not so comely.

(V.ii.128-131)

And he continues both to act and verbally to describe his

own actions when he says,

‘I kneel before their altars / Whose sovereignty kept guard

about thy safety’ (V.ii.133-4) and ‘My tears must thank ye /

38

For my tongue cannot’ (V.ii.217-8). But his final resolution

on the matter is actually to declare the futility of all

passion:

O, what a thing is man

To bandy factions of distempered passions

Against the sacred providence above him!

(V.ii.168-70)

For in a play with a metaphysical as well as a physical

perspective, performing emotion not only raises the

troubling question of whether authenticity is compatible

with expressability, it is also blasphemous. Thus the final

effect of this intensely metatheatrical theatrical

representation of passion is, in the last analysis, to

condemn its own performers, and yet, by its emphasis on the

therapeutic quality of performance vicariously experienced,

cautiously to exculpate its audience. While it may be bad to

be a denizen of the zoo, it can, it seems, be very

educational to go and watch them in the proper spirit - only

we need to learn our lesson the first time round, for the

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result of Ford’s experiment in staging passion will be that

from now on the rest will increasingly be silence.

Notes

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