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The Language of Process in Ford's The Broken Heart
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
The language of Ford's The Broken Heart, unlike that of his other plays, mainly explains the inevitable operation of the processes that the play dramatizes, delineating cause and effect in feelings and actions. The indicative names signify what their bearers have become within the chain of causality. The beginning of the play is heavily explanatory and characters continue throughout to explain what they and others do and have become. Many of these speeches are imprecise: groping, periphrastic, ambiguous syntactically, and metaphorically unstable. The words, furthermore, describe experience rather than become a part of it. Short, direct statements bring the longer passages to rest, the two styles forming a rhythmical unit yet balancing each other and providing a sense of things unsaid. Especially distinctive are verb forms that concretize interaction among abstract nouns to explain how and why things happen. Some are reiterated as key words indicative of the pattern of the whole. The language of ceremonies, violated and reshaped into antithetical ceremonies, particularly those of propitiation and sacrifice, gives form and significance to the pattern of causation and intensifies as the play moves to its conclusion. Through his language, Ford controls any tendency to melodrama and harmonizes surprise with inevitability, narrowness with range, and explicitness with implication.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972
References
1 John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 193.
2 One thinks of an early example in Richard Crashaw's reproachful epigram to the effect that Love's Sacrifice is nothing but The Broken Heart. The Poems English, Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 181.
3 Robert Davril, Le Drame de John Ford (Paris: Didier, 1954), M. Joan Sargeaunt, John Ford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1935), Stavig, H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne Univ. Press, 1955), and among earlier critics, Lamb, Hazlitt, Swinburne, Lowell. Hazlitt and Lowell disliked Ford's style intensely for some of these very reasons but Saintsbury, who also disliked Ford, still praised his poetical faculty and his verse as a “noble medium.”
4 Eliot found Ford's blank verse unique in its movement and tone. Essays in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Har-court, 1960 [c. 1932]), p. 140. Of late, in fact, the considerable 20th-century attention to Ford's ideas, apart from his techniques as a poet, has begun to be balanced by a few examinations of his language. I have already mentioned Davril's long section on the subject. Frederick M. Burel-bach, Jr., has published an article on “John Ford's Style: The Apprentice Years,” The McNeese Review, 17 (1966), 58–73. Donald K. Anderson, Jr., in “The Heart and the Banquet: Imagery in Ford's ‘Tis Pity and The Broken Heart” SEL, 2 (1962), 209–17, defies the much remarked-on paucity of images in Ford and uses imagery as a key to meanings in Ford's greatest plays. Charles O. McDonald, “The Design of John Ford's The Broken Heart: A Study in the Development of Caroline Sensibility,” SP, 59 (1962), 141–61, finds in The Broken Heart oppositional key words or “antilogies” which develop contrasting moral sequences that lie at the heart of the play's meaning. A most sensitive treatment of John Ford's verse appears in Brian Morris’ introduction to the New Mermaids The Broken Heart (New York: Hill, 1966) where, although no particular effort is made to distinguish the poetic technique of The Broken Heart from that of any other of the Ford plays, most of the observations aim at that one work.
5 Algernon Swinburne, Essays and Studies (London : Chatto and Windus, 1875), p. 280; Morris, p. xxviii. Further references to the Morris introduction will be given parenthetically in the text.
6 Quotations from The Broken Heart are taken from Robert Ornstein and Hazelton Spencer, Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy (Boston: Heath, 1964).
7 Even the most verbose of Shakespeare's characters speak self-consciously, with tightly structured circularity : “Madam, I swear I use no art at all. / That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity; / And pity 'tis 'tis true. A foolish figure! / But farewell it, for 1 will use no art. / Mad let us grant him then.”
8 Ford's fondness for such a phrase is attested to by his use of the same pattern in The Locefs Melancholy v.i: “Here's prince, and prince, and prince; / Prince upon prince!” where again the effect is something like irritably relegating momentous news to a fly's insistent buzzing.