The Laws of Candy: who was Ford's collaborator?

Tarlinskaja, Marina

John Ford, a Carolinian playwright, is best known as the author of the macabre tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. His extant list of works is not long, and The Laws of Candy (LC) initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher's folio of 1647 is not considered one of Ford's best plays, though a student of versification like myself should not be judgmental. LC is supposed to have been written in 1619-23: it was performed by the King's Men, and the cast list for the original production added to the play in the second Beaumont-Fletcher folio (1679) includes the names of all members of that company who were active during the original production. Relying on that list of actors the play was suggested to have premiered between the spring of 1619 and summer 1623.

Earlier scholars were frustrated at their inability to find evidence of John Fletcher's style in the play. H. D. Sykes (1920) identified its author as Massinger, while the perceptive E. H. C. Oliphant (1927, p. 478) claimed that the author was John Ford. Cyrus Hoy in his detailed treatment of authorship in Fletcher's canon (1956-62) confirmed Ford's authorship. Brian Vickers (2002) attributed the play mostly to Massinger. It is hard to imagine that LC belongs to the author of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Three of Ford's plays--The Lover's Melancholy, The Broken Heart, and the lost Beauty in a Trance (licensed November 28, 1630) are known to have been acted by the King's Men, so they are all relatively early plays. This may imply that LC is also early, which could help to explain its crudity in versification. If the play was written as early as 1619 or 1620, it could be the earliest of Ford's extant dramatic works. In my versification analysis of LC I discovered, besides Ford, another hand (Tarlinskaja 2014, p. 243 (1)). In this essay I present more material on the difference in versification styles of Ford's text and the portion of a tentative collaborator. On the basis of the versification data we shall try to suggest who Ford's coauthor might have been.

John Ford was born in 1586; he was six years younger than John Webster and Thomas Middleton, three years younger than Philip Massinger, and a year younger than William Rowley. Ford was not a typical Jacobean dramatist, such as Webster and Middleton; his plays represent both Jacobean and Carolinian epochs in their plots, style and versification (Tarlinskaja 2014, 238-44). Before looking at Ford's dramas, I need to present, in a nutshell, my principles of versification analysis.

All analyzed plays are composed mostly as metrical texts: iambic pentameter, a ten- (or eleven-) syllable line where predominantly unstressed and predominantly stressed syllables alternate. The predominantly unstressed syllabic positions are called metrically weak (W) and predominantly stressed positions are metrically strong (S). The scheme of iambic pentameter is WSWSWSWSWS (W), but an actual iambic line does not consist of separate syllables or even of separate words, but of phrases: phonetic and syntactic. Words in speech are connected syntactically. In the analysis of English verse it is convenient to use a concept of "metrical phrase " also called a "metrical word" (Gasparov 1974). Because English has so many monosyllables, we have to add a potentially stressed monosyllable on W to the adjacent word whose stress falls on S. Here are examples of lines segmented into metrical words (stressed syllables on S are emphasized): Too soon | dejected, | and too soon | elate! A thousand | Wings, | by turns, | blow back | the Hair, Ariel himself | shall be the Guard | of Shock (Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 3.102, 136, 2.116), Full ten years | slander'd, | did he | once | reply? (Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 374). Divided into metrical words the fines look like verse, not like prose or beads scattered on a page.

The first two parameters of versification analysis are the placement of word boundaries and of the most frequent syntactic breaks after syllables 2-10 (or 2-11) between adjacent metrical words and adjacent lines. I differentiate three degrees of syntactic cohesion between adjacent words. The closest fink is designated [/]; it occurs, for example, between a modifier and a modified noun (the vivid / stars), a verb and its object (decide / their Doom) and a noun and its complement {the Thirst / of Fame). The medium fink, which is also a medium break, is designated [//]. It occurs, for example, between a subject and a predicate {ere Phoebus // rose), a verb and its prepositional adverbial modifier of time or place (... perch 'd II upon a Matadore), or any two words that have no immediate syntactic fink (Each Band // the number // of the Sacred / Nine; ... reviews / her Force II with care). The weakest fink that is also a strong break is designated [///]. It occurs, for example, between two sentences, or an author's and direct speech, for example, Let Spades / be Trumps! /// she said, /// and Trumps / they were; Belinda // frown 'd, /// Thalestris // call'd her / Prude (the examples come from Pope's The Rape of the Lock). David Lake (1975, 261) distinguishes more degrees of syntactic cohesion: six.

Thus, in the placement of strong and medium breaks in the middle and at the end of the fine, after syllables 2-10 (or 2-11) I rely on syntax, not on punctuation, in contrast with Ants Oras (1960, 1966) and his followers MacDonald P. Jackson (2012, 138-39) and Douglas Bruster (2014), who associated "pauses" with typographic punctuation.

Before 1600, in Elizabethan verse, the most frequent word boundary and the most prominent syntactic break fell after syllabic position 4, dividing the line into two half-lines 4 + 6 syllables, while after 1600, in Jacobean plays the break fell after syllable 6 and even 7, dividing the line into 6 + 4 or even 7 + 3 (7 + 4) syllables, see Fig. 1. (2)

The next parameter of analysis is stressing. I differentiate between the abstract metrical scheme and actual stressed and unstressed syllables in each line of the poetic text. Stressing on each syllabic position, W or S (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ...) of a text is calculated as percent from the total number of lines and conventionally tabulated for S and W separately. The ensuing strings of numbers are called the stress profile of the text. By comparing actual lines with the metrical scheme we establish which syllables or their strings deviate from the abstract scheme. (3) In the line And the pale Ghosts start at the Flash of Day (Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 5.52) syllables 2, 3, 6 and 7 deviate from the meter. A line complying with the scheme might sound something like And ghosts emerge on dark and foggy days.

Comparing actual lines to the scheme we can also see which weak syllabic positions contain more than one syllable, and which positions, weak or strong, are filled with a zero syllable. Lines where the first syllable is omitted are sometimes called headless; lines with an omitted syllable 5 are sometimes called "broken-backed". Jacobean playwrights, especially Webster, Middleton and Massinger frequently filled their W positions with two (or rarely, three) syllables, e.g., Such as my free acknowledgement that I am ... (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, 5.1.75): there are two syllables in position 7. A syllable can be omitted both on an even and an odd syllabic position. In the following line there is a missing syllable on position 4, marked in square brackets: Ah, Michael, [4] through this thy negligence (Arden of Faversham, 14.384). Jacobean playwrights particularly often omitted syllables on both odd and even syllabic positions. In The Devil's Law Case by Webster, for example, two (and even three) unstressed syllables filling the same metrical position are especially frequent on positions 1 and 5 (15.2 and 11.1 percent of all lines), and the rare omitted syllables concentrate on positions 1 and 6 (3.7 and 1.4 percent).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Here are, in a nutshell, the conventional principles of stressing iambic texts. If disyllabic words such as defence, divine, affair and condemn occur on positions WS, they are not considered deviations from the meter: in Early Modern English their stressing seemed variable (cf. the divine Desdemona from Othello 2.1.73), and it probably remained so through the nineteenth century (cf. Shelley She replied earnestly ... from The Revolt of Islam, 2.38.1). Stressing of monosyllabic words creates a particular problem. Monosyllables may gain or lose sentence accentuation almost at random--almost at random, but not quite. Some classes of monosyllables in connected speech are stressed more often than others. So, in order to work out a consistent approach to the material, I, following V. M. Zhirmunsky (1925) conventionally divide monosyllables into three categories: predominantly stressed (lexical words, e.g., nouns, verbs, such as talk, ride, swell, and adjectives), predominantly unstressed (grammatical words, such as articles, prepositions and conjunctions) and ambivalent, sometimes stressed and at other times unstressed (e.g., personal, demonstrative and indefinite pronouns). Personal pronouns, for example, are considered always unstressed on W positions, while on S positions they are considered unstressed if they are adjacent to their syntactic partner, and stressed if they are separated from the syntactic partner by a phrase. Compare the two examples: My glass shall not persuade me I am old vs. That / in thy abundance am sufficed (Son. 22.11 and 37.11). In the fist line the pronoun I is considered unstressed (I, the subject, is adjacent to its predicate am old) and in the second--stressed: the subject I is separated from its predicate am sufficed by a phrase in thy abundance. Emphasis is taken into consideration only if it is overtly expressed in the text, for example, by obvious contrast (as in Donne's Makes me her medal, and makes her love mee rather than ... and makes her love me), otherwise stressing might become too subjective, and the results of analyses by different scholars might be hard to compare (for detail see Tarlinskaja 2014, Chapter 1). If variants of oral rendition of a verse line are possible, I select the one that is closer to the meter (see Tarlinskaja 2004, cf. Groves 2006).

It is important to see in what way the playwrights omitted the metrical stress on the final, tenth syllabic position. The omitted stress can be created by an unstressed syllable of a polysyllabic word ("poly") or by an unstressed or weakly stressed monosyllable ("mono"). The latter are particularly typical of later Shakespeare. Here are examples of characteristic lines from earlier and later Shakespeare: Madam, good hope: his grace speaks cheerfully (Richard III, 1.3.4) and And Cydnus swelled above the banks, or for (The press of boats ...) (Cymbeline, 2.4.71). Compare stressing on position 10 in All's Well That Ends Well (1604-5) and Shakespeare's portion in The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613-14). The proportion of polysyllables on position 10 in All's Well is 4.4 percent of all lines, and of monosyllables 0.4 percent, while in The Kinsmen the numbers are 7.8 and 8.9: the total number of missing stresses on position 10 has increased, and the percent of unstressed monosyllables grew more than twenty times.

In pre-1600 plays he midline "dip" in stressing fell on the sixth syllabic position, but after 1600 it shifted to position eight (Fig. 2) and the contrast between more frequently stressed and less frequently stressed S had decreased.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

A "dip" on 6 often co-occurred with symmetrical grammatical and rhythmic structures of lines with a word boundary or even a syntactic break after position 5: The caterpillars of the commonwealth To dim the glory, and to stain the track The heavy accent of thy moving tongue In London streets that ceremonial day (Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.3.105, 3.3.66, 5.1.47, 5.5.77)

The "dip" on 8 accompanied the asymmetrical grammatical structure of Jacobean plays. Here is an example of a Jacobean stress profile: You have been long in France, and you return A very formal Frenchen in your habit. How do you like the French court?--I admire it. Pure silver drops in general, but if 't chance (Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 1.1.2-4, 13)

Another parameter of versification analysis involves phrasal accentuation in word combinations where the stressed syllable of one word occupies an S metrical position while a potentially stressed monosyllable on W adjacent to S either precedes or follows the stress on S. In the first instance the phrase is called proclitic; the phrase leans, as it were, to the right, as in thy own bright EYES, and in the second case the phrase is called enclitic, it leans to the left, as in Within thy OWN bud ... (Shakespeare, Son. 1, lines 5, 11) (see Tarlinskaja 1987, chap. 6).

Why do I say "potentially" stressed? Because in declamation the lexical word on W may be fully stressed, have a weakened stress, or no stress at all.

Among some other parameter discussed here are the types of line endings: syllabic, accentual and syntactic. Syllabic types classify line endings into masculine, feminine, dactylic and, rarely, longer. As pointed out above, masculine line endings can be stressed and unstressed, and the unstressed syllable on position 10 may be created by a polysyllabic word or by a weakly stressed or unstressed monosyllable, such as a preposition or a conjunction. Feminine and dactylic endings can be simple (4) and compound, and compound endings can contain unstressed monosyllables on position 11, or a stress on 11. Here is an example of a "light" (unstressed) compound feminine ending: The same, the same. Meat's cast away upON him, (5) and here is a "heavy" (stressed) compound feminine ending: Why, thou unthankful villain, dar'st thou TALK thus? (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, 1.1.43, 23). Here is an example of a compound heavy dactylic ending: Never a green silk quilt is there I'th' HOUSE, Mother (Middleton, Women, Beware Women, 3.1.27)

Syntactically, line endings can be end-stopped or run-on. Run-on lines (enjambments) are connected to the following line by a medium or strong link.

I also calculated the ratio of syllabic suffixes -ed and -eth, of pleonastic verbs do, of the disyllabic form of the suffix -ion, e.g., Whoever misses in his func-ti-on (Massinger, An Old Way to Pay Old Debts, 1.2.4), of grammatical inversions, and cases when "deviations from the meter" emphasize the meaning of a micro-situation, as in Swills your warm blood like wash (.Richard III, 5.2.37), instead of something more "iambic" like He swills your blood like wash. "Deviations from the meter" that emphasize the meaning of a micro-situation are called rhythmical italics. Rhythmical italics contain verbs of action several times more frequently than the same poetic text outside rhythmical italics. Rhythmical italics work not unlike onomatopoeia. Verbs of action and words with an emotive stylistic connotation serve as an indication of italics: Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur! (Othello, 5.2.282). In the last five tests the ratio of the cases is calculated per 1000 lines.

From Shakespeare to Shirley: a general panorama

The Jacobean period in dramaturgy began several years before the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603: it started in 1600. In Shakespeare's oeuvre the change was signaled by Hamlet: its verse structure foreshadows Shakespeare's later plays. Shakespeare's versification style changed with the time, though he found a way to the new mode with his own stylistic features that were adapted by later poets, e.g., Shirley.

Where does Ford stand in the Jacobean-Carolinian periods? To get a better idea of the panorama and dynamics of the Jacobean-Carolinian epochs we will briefly overview eight representative works of eight poets, from 1610 to 1641: Jonson, The Alchemist (1610), Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610-11), Fletcher, Bonduca (1612-13), Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1614), Middleton, Women Beware Women (1621-22), Massinger, The Maid of Honour (1622-23), Ford, The Broken Heart (1629-33) and Shirley, The Cardinal (1641). After the overview we shall look in more detail at Ford's versification and see how his dramatic style evolved from The Queen to Perkin Warbeck, and whether he wrote LC alone or with a coauthor.

Jacobean plays create problems for versification analysis because they were so obviously meant for a quick tempo in recitation, so the poets recorded in written texts how the lines were supposed to be recited on stage. This explains the confusing syllabic composition of lines, where unstressed syllables were expected to slur or blend together, and not necessarily in elisions. Moreover, Jacobean playwrights left out an occasional syllable. Below are examples that show how two or even three syllables fill the same W positions, and how a syllable is missing in a syllabic slot. Syllables filling the same position are emphasized, and missing syllables are in brackets. Nay she is a fool, captain; you must pardon her. Your Spanish jennet is the best horse; [7] your Spanish Stoop is the best garb; [5] your Spanish beard Is the best cut; your Spanish ruffs are the best ... (Jonson, The Alchemist, 4.4.6, 9-11)

The highest number of feminine endings marks two decades, from 1610 to 1630. They roughly fall on the Jacobean epoch. The authors with the highest numbers are Fletcher (the most), Middleton and later Ford. High numbers of heavy feminine endings do not directly correlate with total feminine endings: Middleton here is the winner. Ford is far behind; he marks a new tendency that flourishes in Shirley's verse. Shirley was reluctant to disrupt iambic rhythm with enclitic syncopations, like Shakespeare 25 years previously.

The perceptive E. H. C. Oliphant was the first to notice the similarities between Fletcher and Middleton's versification styles (Oliphant 1927, p. 32). Oliphant also pointed out that Fletcher often "emphasized" (that is, stressed) "the extra (11th) syllable of a verse" (p. 33), placing there monosyllables such as still, else, too, or sir. These are heavy feminine endings. The adverbs still, else, too and appellatives (sir, boy, wench) on position 11 probably required a reduced stress. Middleton is recognizable even in short excerpts in plays written in collaboration by several poets. In Middleton's Women Beware Women heavy feminine and dactylic endings occur in 12 percent of all lines; e.g.: You must keep council Mother, I am unDONE else. Made shift withal, to pass away her LOVE in! Or some fair Cut-work pin'd up in my Bed-chamber. A silver and gilt-casting-Bottle HONG by't? Never a green silk quilt is there i'th'HOUSE Mother Promised to be at home, would he were COME once (Middleton, Women Beware, 1.1.46; 3.1.18-21, 27, 74)

In Fletcher's Bonduca, written ten years before Middleton's Women Beware heavy feminine endings occur in 9 percent of all lines, e.g.: He blushes, do not load him.--Where's your LOVE now? More wounds, more honour.--Lose no time.--AWAY then And stand this shock, ye have stood the world.--We'll GROW to't All, my good cilde.--No Romans, Uncle?--NO, boy Come hither: 'tis for those the gods love, GOOD men The boy speaks sword and buckler. Prethee YEELD, boy When come ye up?--If he should beat me.--WHEN, Sir? I have outbrav'd hunger.--That's my boy, my SWEET boy (Fletcher, Bonduca, 3.5.88, 121-22; 4.2.10, 13, 58, 61, 78)

Feminine endings, and in particular, numerous heavy feminine endings preclude run-on lines, while fewer feminine endings and numerous unstressed grammatical words on position 10 create and accompany run-on lines. Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen were at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Shirley, 30 years after Shakespeare, returned to Shakespeare's versification traits: few heavy feminine endings and many run-on lines. Massinger however manages to have both: numerous heavy feminine endings (not as many as Middleton) and many unstressed grammatical words on position 10 that create run-on lines (not as numerous as in later Shakespeare). His versification struck readers as lacking harmony; Oliphant and Oras criticized Massinger's prose-like style (see Oras 1960, 26). The problem of Massinger's style, among other features, was his numerous syntactic breaks after syllables 8 and 9 followed by run-on lines. This versification style erased line boundaries and reminded readers of prose.

Why did Shirley imitate the mellifluous Shakespeare? It was a change of tastes, after the roughness of the Jacobean Baroque. Shakespeare in his last dramas placed many unstressed grammatical words on position 10 that contributed to his run-on lines. Shakespeare's younger colleagues and immediate chronological followers Fletcher and Middleton did not follow him; rather, they chose heavy feminine endings, few run-on lines, and the syncopated rhythm of enclitic phrases. Shirley, who was a poet of the following poetic generation returned to the Shakespearean mode.

Stressing on S. Percent of stresses was calculated from all lines, and the ratio of enclitic phrases per 1000 lines (Table 2). We see that all Jacobean plays have a stressing "dip" on position 8, and in some plays the percent of stresses on position 4 is lower than on 6, particularly in Ford's The Broken Heart: this is Ford's idiosyncratic line profile. In Elizabethan plays, as we remember, the "peak" on position 4 was high and the "dip" fell on position 6. There is a huge difference between Shakespeare's early plays, e.g., Romeo and Juliet and his own later plays, e.g., The Tempest: Romeo and Juliet has a stressing peak on position 4 and a "dip" on 6, while The Tempest reminds us of Jacobean-Carolinian plays with its smoothed over peak on position 4 and a "dip" on 8. The eight texts in Table 2 illustrate a remarkable evolution of versification style. The first distinctive feature of post-1600 Jacobean verse was a "dip" on syllabic position 8; it gets lower towards the end of the epoch, from 75.5 in Bonduca to 68.4 in The Duchess of Malfi to 63.9 in Massinger's The Maid of Honour. While the stressing on syllable 4 keeps falling, its frequency keeps rising on syllable 6, so that stressing on syllables 6 approaches or begins to equal stressing on 4. The Duchess of Malfi is the first text where the stressing on position 4 falls below 80 percent. Ford's The Broken Heart becomes Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet turned inside out. Below are typical Elizabethan lines: And bind your soul, /4/ that at some certain day ... I cut my arm, /4/ and with my proper blood Assure my soul /4/ to be great Lucifer's ... My blood congeals, /4/ and lean write no more. Why streams it not /4/ that I may write afresh? (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 1.5.50, 54-55, 61, 65)

And here are examples from Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; the first three lines contain unstressed or weakly stressed syllables on positions 4 and 8 (a more frequent rhythmical line variant), and on positions 2, 4 and 8 in the last two. Unstressed or weakly stressed syllables are emphasized: The misery of us that are bom great Is only to be pitied, and not feared I never may have knowledge of thy name That I must be committed on pretense When thou wast with thy husband, thou wast watched (Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 1.2.380, 408; 3.2.97; 2.3.73; 2.4.31)

The alternating rhythm when stressing on syllables 4 and 8 is lower than on 6 becomes Ford's signature style, e.g.: I tell 'e, you grow wanton in my sufferance I laugh at my own confidence; my sorrows To live so, that our reckoning may fall even Stars fall but in the grossness of our sight (Ford, The Broken Heart, 2.3.108, 119, 150, 156)

Ford's younger contemporary James Shirley follows the same pattern; e.g.: My servant has prepared me to receive it So much of your Alvarez in a breath Opinion of your virtue that can walk But know not how to use it in a service To think I am a traitor, I forgive it (Shirley, The Cardinal, 4.2.119, 121, 124, 142, 151)

We see how one versification mode replaced another and became its reverse.

Phrasal stressing on W: enclitic phrases, including heavy feminine endings, prevail in Fletcher and Middleton's texts, e.g. The WHOLE days of your life in heat and labour. What would you SAY now to a creature found ... And shalt not spend a CARE for't, stir a thought (Middleton, Women, Beware Women, 3.2.295-96, 305)

The ratio of enclitic phrases (calculated per 1000 lines) fell from the Jacobean to Carolinian epochs: Middleton (The Witch) 274.8--Massinger 141.6--Ford 95.8--Shirley 58.1 per 1000 of lines. Shirley's index of enclitics exactly repeats Shakespeare's: 55 per 1000 lines.

Strong syntactic breaks after positions 2-9. In Table 3 below the peaks of strong breaks are emphasized. Most plays have a maximum after position 6, but in Fletcher's Bonduca, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Massinger The Maid of Honour and, to a lesser extent, in Shirley's The Cardinal the peaks occur after syllable 7. In The Alchemist we find an almost equal percent of breaks after all even syllabic positions. This is because utterances in a comedy are short, and a line may contain two or more changes of speakers. The predominant syntactic break after position 7 (in almost 30 percent of Bonduca 's lines) is a striking change from early Elizabethan plays where maximum fell after position four: 31.2 in Kinwelmarshe's portion of Jocasta and 33.9 in Hughes The Misfortunes of Arthur composed only 25 years before Shakespeare's The Tempest. Syntactic breaks keep moving closer to the end of the line and increase in number after odd syllables. Shirley's percents of breaks after positions 6, 7 and 8 are close: his line is syntactically flexible.

Finally, rhythmical italics. Rhythmical italics in later Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry became a sign of versification skill. Shakespeare increased the number from his earlier to later plays. Fletcher and Middleton already knew how to use rhythmical italics to emphasize meaning, e.g., Bonduca 199.8 per 1000 lines, and Women, Beware Women 147.0. The number of rhythmical italics seems on the whole to decrease from Jacobean to Caroline verse: Ford, The Broken Heart 101.8, Shirley, The Cardinal 75.3 per 1000 lines: rhythmical italics were probably becoming less of an innovation. The random examples below from Elizabethan, Jacobean and Carolinian verse illustrate how skillful the poets had become. Struck with the voice of thundering Jupiter; Wrapt in the bowels of a freezing cloud, Fighting for passage, makes the welkin crack, Raves in Egyptia, and annoyeth us (Marlowe 1 Tamburlaine, 4.2.25, 44, 45; 4.3.10) Claps her pale cheeks, till clapping makes it red; Clapping their proud tail to the ground below, (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 469, 924) How! All my body's blood mounts to my face Every nail pricks it.--This may prick yours too (Middleton, A Game at Chess, 3.1.40,117) Thus I throw off the marble, to discover; Strange and too mighty joy crush it to nothing; (Shirley, The Cardinal, 2.2.41, 47)

The panorama of the Jacobean and Caroline poetry shows an evolution of Jacobean versification to a more moderate style and a revival of Shakespearean tendencies. We can now look more closely at John Ford.

John Ford (1586-1639)

Ford, six years younger than Middleton, begins to show the signs of a changed epoch. He was the leading playwright during the reign of Charles I, and his versification is closer to Shirley's than to Middleton's. Prior to the start of his career as a playwright Ford wrote non-dramatic literary works, the long religious poem Christ's Bloody Sweat (1613), two prose essays published as pamphlets, and two elegies, Fame's Memorial, and the controversial Funeral Elegy. After 1620 he began writing for the stage, first as a collaborator with more experienced authors, primarily Dekker, but also Webster and Rowley. By the later 1620s we find Ford writing solo.

Ford is best known for the tragicomedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633?), a family drama about incestuous love between brother and sister, Annabella and Giovanni. It is still widely regarded as a classic piece of English drama. Ford's plays often deal with conflicts between a person's passion and conscience, and between individuals' emotions and the laws and morals of society. The conflicts create a basis for 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and The Broken Heart discussed below. Ford had an interest in abnormal psychology, particularly in melancholy, a ubiquitous Jacobean malady, at that time considered responsible not just for depression, but also for wild passions and despairs of lovers and the agonies and ecstasies of religious devotees. Ford's plays show the influence of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. While nothing is known of Ford's personal life, one reference suggests that his interest in melancholy and Burton's work may have been personal. The volume Choyce drollery: songs & sonnets (1656) asserts: Deep in a dump alone John Ford was gat, With folded arms and melancholy hat ...

We shall first look at six plays by Ford: The Queen, The Laws of Candy, A Lover's Melancholy, The Broken Heart, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Perkin Warbeck. As we get a better understanding of Ford's versification style, we shall have a clearer idea of his possible collaboration with another author in The Laws of Candy.

John Ford's versification

In contrast with earlier Jacobean playwrights, Ford did not seem to expect a fast tempo of actors' declamation, particularly in his later plays: he, as a rule, avoided packing two or more unstressed syllables on the same weak metrical position; he seems to have demanded the articulation of all syllables of polysyllabic words without contractions or elisions. One of the few exceptions, as we shall see, is his early play The Laws of Candy. Moreover, Ford regularly divided the group of vowels ea between two syllables, as in pe-arl, e-arl, ve-al, the-a-ter, even de-ath; e.g., Spangled with pe-arls of transparent dew, Had his sincerity been re-al once, Of what becomes the grace of re^l honour (Ford, The Broken Heart, 2.1.69, 2.2.36, 3.1.50) His deeds, his re-al, nay his royal worth (Ford, The Laws of Candy, 1.1.379) And justly too; then de-ath doth but heap (Ford, The Queen: 3327)

Other playwrights also occasionally used -ea- as two syllables, but nobody as consistently as Ford. He also sometimes used the suffix -ion as two syllables (iaf-fec-ti-on) and the word marriage as three.

Line endings

Syllabic structure and stressing. The highest number of feminine and dactylic endings, above 50 percent of the lines, occurs in Ford's two later plays, The Broken Heart and Perkin Warbeck, and the lowest number--in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore: only 15.8 percent. This is unexpected: a play of 1633, supposedly between The Broken Heart and Perkin Warbeck, should have more feminine endings. The Broken Heart stands out with its 60 percent of feminine endings. The Queen has fewer feminine endings than LC and The Lover's Melancholy; The Queen must be an early play.

Ford in his two later plays is not unlike Middleton in the total number of feminine and longer endings. However, if we differentiate simple and compound endings, we see a world of difference. In Ford's The Broken Heart and Perkin Warbeck, plays with the highest number of feminine endings, simple endings, such as the LESson, much BETter, predominate; they are four to six times more frequent than compound endings, such as adMIRE him or shall FIND us. Most of Ford's feminine endings are formed by polysyllabic words. In contrast, most of Middleton's feminine and dactylic ending are compound: The Witch, for example, has 21 percent of simple feminine and longer endings and 28.7 percent compound endings. Compound heavy endings in The Witch are as frequent as simple: 21.4 and 21 percent, while Ford's The Broken Heart, with its 60 percent of feminine endings, contains only 3.4 percent of compound heavy endings, and Perkin Warbeck even less, only 2.6 percent. A few examples follow: Even now, the earl your father ...--A means ME, sure Encourage? I encourage ye? D'e HEAR, sir? A subtle trick, a quaint one! Will you HEAR, man? This piece of frailty off?--You shall; he's SENT for (Ford, Perkin Warbeck, 1.2.85, 90, 91, 2.2.54)

'Tis Pity She Is a Whore, a play of 1633, contains a meager 0.5 percent heavy feminine endings.

One more play that deviates from the Ford canon is The Laws of Candy. LC is not a homogeneous text. The portion that seems different from Ford's style comprises 443 iambic pentameter lines. It begins in act 2, following the stage remark Enter Erota, Philander, Annophill, Hyparcha, Mochingo, Attendants (lines 499-830, the end of act 2) and continues in act 3, following the stage remark Enter Hyparcha, (placing two chairs) Antinous, and Erota (lines 1120-1291, the end of act 3). These parts of the play do not deal with warriors, their deeds and rivalry, but with Princess Erota. A hundred years ago Schelling suggested multiple authorship of LC, but in his opinion, the authors were Fletcher and Beaumont (Schelling [1908] 1910, Vol. 2, p. 226-27). Compared to Ford, "Author X's" syllable count is either sloppy, or helpless, or deliberately loose, which is not Ford's normal manner. The whole play, however, has looser versification pattern than is typical of Ford, it does bring to mind Massinger, but all other versification features of the play point away from Massinger. Lines strongly deviating from iambic pentameter were omitted from analysis; they are more numerous in "Author X's" text. "Ford's" portion contains 42.8 percent of feminine endings, "Author X's"--only 34.5 percent. And yet compound feminine endings barely reach 9 percent in Ford's text, and almost 11 percent in "author X's" portion. "Ford's" compound endings constitute only one-fifth of his feminine endings, while "Author X's"--a third of the total.

Syntax: run-on lines. Of all Elizabethan and Jacobean poets analyzed so far, Shakespeare's portion of The Two Noble Kinsmen has the highest ratio of run-on lines: 52.8 percent. Many of these are caused by unstressed grammatical words on position 10. Fletcher's Bonduca, a solo play, has only 17.1 percent enjambments. How does Ford compare with these poets? Here are some data: The Queen 33.5, The Lover's Melancholy 36.4, The Broken Heart 36.2, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore 25.0, Perkin Warbeck 44.0 percent of all lines are run-on. Three plays have a close range of run-on lines: 33-36 percent, the final play, Perkin Warbeck, has a higher number, and this, as we shall see, is a new tendency (cf. Massinger's Maid of Honour, Shirley, The Cardinal). Though 'Tis Pity She's a Whore contains many masculine endings, it has fewer run-on lines than Ford's other plays. This is strange: masculine endings should stimulate run-on lines.

The two portions of LC differ. "Ford's" portion stays within the same range as three other plays: 38.1 percent, while "Author X's" portion has only half the number: 19.2 percent. Below we shall summarize all features of "Author X's" portion and hypothesize his identity.

Stressing on S positions is one of Ford's most idiosyncratic features. In Ford's dramas the correlation between positions 4 and 6 is the reverse of Elizabethan: in all plays following The Queen position 6 is stressed more often than 4 and 8, forming "a peak" on 6. In "Author X's" portion of LC position 4 is stressed slightly more often than 6, and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is an even more striking exception: position 4 not only bears more stresses than 6, it is stressed in over 80 percent of the lines, quite unexpected in a Ford play, particularly in a drama of 1633. More frequently than other Jacobean poets, Ford omits stresses on positions 4 and 8 simultaneously in consecutive lines, e.g.: But look upon my steadiness, and scorn not The sickness of my fortune, which since Bassanes Was husband to Penthea, had lain bed-rid I tremble at the sight. Would I were loose. To conquer in extremities. This pastime Hereafter shall deliver to posterity My sovereign, as his liegeman; on my mistress (Ford, The Broken Heart, 5.2.118-20, 124, 131, 133, 137)

When we encounter clusters of such lines, we can make an almost certain guess that their author was Ford. Consecutive lines with omitted stresses on syllables 4 and 8, among other features, identify Ford's hand in the collaborated play The Spanish Gypsie. Losses of stress on position 10 in Ford's plays are rare and almost exclusively caused by a polysyllable.

Stressing on W; phrasal accentuation. The mean percent of stresses on W in Ford's plays lies within a narrow range: 10.8-13.3. These are lower indices than in earlier Jacobean plays, particularly in Middleton's. The range of enclitic prases in Ford's later plays is 92.9-95.8 per 1000 lines (The Broken Heart--Perkin Warbeck), e.g.: You TAKE off from the roughness of a father By SO much more I am engaged to tender; To live and DIE so. that you may not blush ... Cousin of York, thus ONCE more we embrace thee. (Ford, Perkin Warbeck, 1.2.132-33, 138)

In LC ("Ford's" portion), The Queen and particularly 'Tis Pity She's a Whore the index is lower: 67.4, 77.3, and 53.2. This is another argument for an earlier dating of 'Tis Pity. "Author X's" text in LC stands out: the ratio of enclitics is too high for Ford, 121.6 per 1000 of lines. Below are examples of Ford's enclitic phrases from LC: Which SAD thoughts bring aLONG with? Receive some SMALL share of your thankes with them O Madam, pour not (TOO fast) joyes on me The happiness of THIS life, food and rest O either use thy OWNE eyes, or take mine (The Laws of Candy, 3.1157, 1170, 1176, 1213, 1270)

In the last line, there are four adjacent deviating syllables on positions 6-7 and arguably on 8-9 divided by a syntactic break; they do not seem to be semantically justified. "Author X's" text sounds stumbling, though it has fewer enclitic phrases than did Fletcher or Middleton's.

Strong syntactic breaks. Renaissance poets changed from the Elizabethan 4 + 6 hemistich pattern to Jacobean 6 + 4 and later to 7 + 3 (or 7 + 4). Flere is a list of texts with a major syntactic break after syllabic positions 4-7:

After 4: The Changeling (cf. Wilson in Pericles Acts 1-2 After 4 and 6: Jonson, The Alchemist, Ford, 'Tis Pity She Is a Whore; Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier; Rowley, All's Lost by Lust.

After 4 and 6: "Author X" in LC.

After 6: Fletcher, The False One, Middleton, Women Beware Women, Ford, Lover's Melancholy, The Queen, LC (main text).

After 6 and 7: Shakespeare, Henry VIII; Middleton, The Witch, The Changeling; Ford, The Broken Heart, Perkin Warbeck.

After 7: Fletcher, Bonduca, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen; Webster, The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, The Devil's Law-Case; Massinger, The Maid of Honour, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and The False One.

'Tis Pity again behaves like an early play: it contains breaks after positions 4 and 6 in almost equal number. "Author X's" portion in LC has more breaks after position 4 and fewer breaks after 6 and than the rest of the play. Dekker in The Noble Spanish Soldier divides his line in a conservative way, with breaks after 4 and 6; but the most conservative of all turned out to be, surprisingly, Rowley: his most numerous breaks are located after positions 4 and 6 in All's Lost to Lust and only after syllable 4 in his scenes of The Changeling (cf. Wilson in The Misfortunes of Enforced Marriage and Pericles acts 1-2).

Disyllabic -ion, -ious, syllabic -ed. Jacobean poets used few syllabic -ed, and disyllabic suffix -ion vacillates: some poets use it more than others. Shakespeare on the whole had few, though there was a short period when he tended to use many, 1595-99, and Middleton had relatively many, but also not uniformly. Middleton's texts with the highest numbers of disyllabic -ion are Phoenix and his portion of The Changeling (16.0 and 13.8 per 1000 lines). Webster began with a higher number in The White Devil (14.8) and reduced it in the later The Devil's Law-Case (7.0). Many instances of disyllabic -ion and syllabic -ed occur in Rowley's texts. Disyllabic -ion in All's Lost by Lust is 12.1 per 1000 lines and in Rowley's portion of The Changeling--13.8. Ford has few disyllabic -ion: 1.7-2.9 per 1000 lines. An exception is 'Tis Pity She's a Whore: 5.5. "Author X's" in his portion of LC has as few disyllabic -ion as "Ford's" text, but an important difference is the frequency of syllabic -ed and -eth: 13.5 per 1000 lines in the "Author X's" text, and only 5.7 in the main text.

Grammatical inversions. The highest ratio occurs in Dekker's Noble Spanish Soldier (45.6 per 1000 lines), next comes Rowley's All's Lost by Lust: 29.2. In Rowley's scenes of The Changeling the number is lower: only 12.9 per 1000 lines, the same as in Middleton's scenes. In "Author X's" text of Candy there are 18 inversions per 1000 lines, and in Ford's portion only 5.7, less than one-third. Similar or lower numbers occur in Ford's other plays. Pleonastic do can be a sign of several factors, alone or in combination. These are: (1) versification problems; (2) an older generation poet; (3) a stylization to make the text sound archaic; (4) rhymed verse, because rhyming increases versification challenges. An example of a possible stylization is Peek's David and Bethsabe: 56.6 pleonastic do per 1000 lines, while the earlier Battle of Alcazar has only 26.5. The stylized David and Bethabe also contains many syllabic suffixes -ed and -eth. Ford's dramas show the range 19.8-9.3 of pleonastic do {The Lover's Melancholy vs. Ford's portion of LC and The Broken Heart). "Author X's" text has a very high index: 63.1 pleonastic do per 1000 lines, eight times more frequent than in Ford's portion. An example of a weaker poet's frequent use of pleonastic do is Davies of Hereford (Tarlinskaja 2014).

Rhythmical italics. Most Renaissance authors had learned how to use rhythmical deviations from the metrical scheme to support meaning. Verbs fall, shake and tremble keep recurring. In Ford's verse the most numerous cases occur in Perkin Warbeck: 162 cases per 1000 lines. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, arguably Ford's best tragedy widely regarded as a classic piece of English drama, surprisingly, contains only 86.4 per 1000 lines. The discrepancies, most of them quite striking (emphasized), argue for double authorship of LC. Who was "Author X"? The closest candidate in the group of poets analyzed so far is, tentatively, Rowley. For example, the number of Rowley's run-on lines in The Changeling is 18.3 percent, the ratio of enclitics 119.7 per 1000 lines, the number of syllabic -ed 15.5 per 1000 lines. These numbers are very close to "Author X's." We know that Ford and Rowley often worked together. However, not all parameters point in Rowley's direction. One more candidate has been Massinger, but most versification features of "Author X's" portion point away from this Massinger: the place of major syntactic breaks is after positions 4 and 6 in "Author X's" text, after position 6 in the Ford portion, and after position 7 in Massinger's plays; the ratio of pleonastic do is 63.1 per 1000 lines in "Author X's" texts and 7.6 in Massinger's Maid of Honour; grammatical inversions number 18 per 1000 lines in "Author X's" portion of LC and 1.8 in Massinger's The Maid of Honour; run-on lines constitute 19.2 percent of all lines in "Author X's" text and 47.3 percent in The Maid of Honour. The only feature in "Author X's" text that reminds us of Massinger is the high ratio of enclitic phrases: 121.6 per 1000 lines in "Author X's" text and 141.6 in Massinger's The Maid of Honour, 174 in A New Way to Pay Old Debts. But numerous enclitic phrases are also characteristic of other Jacobean playwrights. Massinger seems an unlikely "Author X".

The most striking features of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore summarized

(1) Syllable 4, stressing: 82.2 percent, higher than on syllable 6. (2) Many breaks after position 4, almost as many as after 6. (3) Few enclitic phrases, almost half of Ford's other plays. (4) Very few feminine endings. (5) Practically no heavy feminine endings. (6) Few run-on lines.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore is officially dated 1633. However, its versification style suggests a much earlier date, otherwise its particulars are hard to explain.

Thus, the main riddle of the present essay has been solved, but only in part: LC is Ford's play written in collaboration with another playwright. And one more riddle emerges: when was 'This Pity She's a Whore composed?

Notes

(1.) All the statistical data in this essay comes from Tarlinskaja 2014, Appendix B.

(2.) The type of diagrams used in this essay follows the tradition of the so-called "Russian method" applied to Russian and English verse. See also Oras 1960.

(3.) Theoretically, an iambic metrical scheme prescribes one hundred percent of stresses on all even syllabic positions, and zero percent on all odd positions. In actual texts the theoretical scheme is never realized, but some periods approach it closer than other periods, and some authors closer than others.

(4.) The number of simple feminine endings depended on the interpretation of such words as heaven, spirit, power and higher. Their syllabic interpretation depended on the use of such words in midline. In earlier, Elizabethan verse, e.g., Marlowe's, they are frequently used as monosyllables in midline, so they were not assumed to create feminine endings at the end of the line, while in later verse, these words are frequently disyllabic in mid-line, and so they were assumed to form feminine endings at the end of the line. I disregarded iambic tetrameter lines, and these tend to have more frequent feminine endings.

(5.) Here and later the stressed syllable on the metrically strong position 10 is capitalized and in bold, and the stress on position 11 is bold and underlined. The same notation is used in proclitic and enclitic phrases, as in my SWEET love ...

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Zhirmunsky, V.M. 1925. Vvedenie v metriku [An introduction to metrics]. Leningrad: Academia. TABLE 1 Percent of line endings: feminine (total; compound heavy), masculine with an unstressed grammatical monosyllable on position 10; run-on lines Total Heavy Author Play feminine feminine Jonson The Alchemist 41.7 6.4 Shakespeare The Tempest 35.6 0.7 Fletcher Bonduca 66.9 9.0 Webster The Duchess of Malfi 35.1 2.0 Middleton Women Beware 52.0 11.5 Massinger The Maid of Honour 47.4 5.1 Ford The Broken Heart 59.1 3.2 Shirley The Cardinal 33.3 1.2 Run-on Monosyll. Author lines on 10 Jonson 22.7 0.8 Shakespeare 42.0 7.6 Fletcher 17.1 0.02 Webster 30.0 0.7 Middleton 19.7 0.3 Massinger 47.3 7.0 Ford 35.2 0.8 Shirley 44.6 8.8 TABLE 2 Percent of stresses on S and the ratio of enclitic phrases per 1000 lines Poet and play 2 4 6 8 10 Enclitics Jonson, Alchemist 66.1 86.7 74.9 72.4 94.0 180.6 Shakespeare, Tempest 67.9 80.1 77.7 70.4 87.6 92.0 Fletcher, Bonduca 67.8 85.2 82.3 75.5 94.1 268.7 Webster, Malfi 70.7 79.8 80.7 68.4 90.9 127.6 Middleton, Women 66.6 83.6 79.2 68.3 96.2 250.5 Massinger, Maid 73.8 75.9 76.4 63.9 90.1 141.6 Ford, Broken Heart 71.8 73.8 78.1 64.4 96.0 95.8 Shirley, Cardinal 72.0 74.3 75.1 67.5 86.2 58.1 TABLE 3 Strong syntactic breaks after positions 2-9 Plays Breaks after syllabic positions 2-9 (in percent from all lines) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Jonson, Alchemist 10.6 5.7 20.4 18.7 20.0 19.1 15.0 8.6 Shakesp., Tempest 7.2 2.7 17.0 15.8 30.0 17.7 13.2 8.1 Fletcher, Bonduca 8.6 5.1 18.0 15.5 23.9 29.3 18.0 8.0 Webster, Duchess 7.0 5.2 12.8 17.2 19.7 22.2 7.0 2.9 Middleton, Women 7.1 5.1 12.8 14.6 25.4 18.2 5.6 2.6 Massinger, Maid 6.2 5.3 13.6 17.8 20.9 25.2 13.8 5.2 Ford, Broken Heart 7.5 6.7 13.8 12.0 22.9 20.1 13.3 5.1 Shirley, Cardinal 9.5 6.9 15.9 10.3 15.6 16.2 15.1 4.4 TABLE 4 The most striking points of differences between Ford's text and the portion of "Author X" Ford "Author X" In percent from the total lines Syntactic breaks after position 6 25.3 19.2 Run-on lines 38.1 19.2 Feminine and longer endings 42.8 34.5 The ratio per 1000 lines Enclitic phrases 67.4 121.6 Pleonastic do 9.3 63.1 Syllabic suffixes -ed, -eth 5.7 13.5 Grammatical inversions 5.7 18.0