John Ford's Strange Truth

HOPKINS, Lisa (2022). John Ford's Strange Truth. Critical Survey, 34 (2), 93-104.

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Abstract

From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore inverts Romeo and Juliet by making its core relationship endogamous rather than exogamous. Perkin Warbeck is a sequel to Richard III, but undoes its original by telling a story fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare’s. The Lover’s Melancholy echoes both Twelfth Night and King Lear, collapsing the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Above all, Ford reworks Othello, which lies behind the plots of four of his plays. The estranging effect produced by these reshapings is underlined by Perkin Warbeck’s subtitle ‘A Strange Truth’ and the word ‘strange’ appears forty-nine times in his plays. Ford uses familiar Shakespearean stories to highlight the strangeness of the stories which he himself tells.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Published date taken from hidden metadata
Uncontrolled Keywords:	2005 Literary Studies
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2022.340208
Page Range:	93-104
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	13 Jul 2021 08:49
Last Modified:	14 Jun 2022 13:51
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/28829

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