John Ford (dramatist)

John Ford (1586 – c. 1639) was an English playwright and poet of the Jacobean and Caroline eras born in Ilsington in Devon, England.

(It is unknown whether Ford ever actually studied law while a resident of the Middle Temple, or whether he was strictly a gentleman boarder, which was a common arrangement at the time).

Both works are clear bids for patronage: Fame's Memorial is an elegy of 1169 lines on the recently deceased Charles Blount, 1st Earl of Devonshire,[10][11] while Honour Triumphant is a prose pamphlet, a verbal fantasia written in connection with the jousts planned for the summer 1606 visit of King Christian IV of Denmark.

Prior to the start of his career as a playwright, Ford wrote other non-dramatic literary works—the long religious poem Christ's Bloody Sweat (1613), and two prose essays published as pamphlets, The Golden Mean (1613) and A Line of Life (1620).

[13] After 1620 he began active dramatic writing, first as a collaborator with more experienced playwrights—primarily Thomas Dekker, but also John Webster and William Rowley—and by the later 1620s as a solo artist.

His plays deal with conflicts between individual passion and conscience and the laws and morals of society at large;[15] Ford had a strong interest in abnormal psychology that is expressed through his dramas.

The volume Choice Drollery (1656) asserts that Ford began his dramatic career in a way common in the period, by contributing to plays co-authored with more established dramatists.