The Collected Works of John Ford. Vol. I ed. by Gilles Monsarrat, Brian Vickers and R. J. C. Watt (review)

Editing John Ford, though it has happened only irregularly since 1652, turns out to be a more contentious activity than one might have imagined. Brian Vickers’s ‘Preface’ to this, the first of three volumes that together will make up The Collected Works of John Ford, introduces the larger project with an overview of the editorial tradition, beginning with the single surviving copy of a volume from 1652, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies: & Tragœdies: written By John Ford, and following on the discontinuous history of fallings out and failings through Henry Weber’s edition of 1811, William Gifford’s of 1827, Dyce’s revision of Gifford in 1869, and into the twentieth century. Editor-in-chief of the new edition, and part also of its team of twelve collaborating co-editors, Vickers is well placed to survey, in sorrow if not in anger, what has been well or ill done by his predecessors; and if in the course of that survey of high nineteenth century editorial dudgeon he on occasion revisits old quarrels it is mainly to suggest new attributions in them (was A Letter to J. P. Kemble, Esq., involving Strictures on a Recent Edition of John Ford’s Works (1811), by Gifford?), or to discuss connections between their combatants. ‘One positive effect of bad scholarship is that its appearance can provoke others to do better’, Vickers writes (p. x), and the narrative of editorial ‘improvement’ that his ‘Preface’ outlines is one that squarely leads towards the aims and ambitions of this new edition, the first since A. H. Bullen’s 1895 reprint of Dyce to ‘attempt to collect Ford’s writings’ (p. xiii).

The design of the new Ford sorts his gathered writings into three: the non-dramatic writing, predominantly in verse, in this first volume; the collaborative dramatic writing in the second; and the sole-authored dramatic writing in the third. The texts edited in this volume seem naturally to group themselves into clusters in what Gilles Monsarrat’s introductory biographical account of Ford calls ‘The Early Years’, the period from Ford’s birth in 1586 to 1620. By turns assertive and corrective, Monsarrat’s part-life has little patience with what he takes to be the misjudgements or misreadings of earlier biographers: it ‘is not impossible but it seems very improbable’ that Ford lived at the Middle Temple for the thirty years from 1608–1638 ‘without there being any trace of his presence in the (incomplete but abundant) record’, he writes (p. 27); and even greater certainty obtains for him in the matter of Ford’s religion, where ‘it would seem that he had no sympathy for Catholicism, even though it has been said that he belonged to a “Catholic coterie”’ (p. 33). Lisa Hopkins, whose suggestion Ford’s Catholic sympathies have been, and who with others is more or less courteously roughed up in the footnotes (p. 27, n. 79; p. 33, n. 94) is a text-editor for Volume Three, and might at the least perhaps have expected gentler treatment here: provoking others to do better may, in practice, be scant consolation.

In Ford’s texts, though, this volume does more largely offer consolation, largely Stoic, to, and of, various kinds; it offers, too, ample demonstration of what Vickers glosses as the ‘two related modes of epideictic rhetoric’: ‘laudatio and vituperatio, the praise of virtue and the denunciation of vice’ (p. 3). First come three texts printed in 1606: Honor Triumphant and The Monarches Meeting, which were published together in a single quarto, edited by Monsarrat; and Fames Memoriall, or The Earle of Devonshire Deceased, also printed in quarto but surviving as well in a single manuscript that is used as copy-text by Vickers and R. J. C. Watt, who co-edit the poem. The second cluster of texts falls in...