Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/150

130 grim didactic; and Middleton's two gaily befooled and converted usurers become an inhuman monster, devouring men's lands and prepared to prostitute his daughter's honour for social advancement.

The tendency so obvious in Fletcher and Massinger to diverge from the simple and natural in feeling in search of piquant and morally trying situations and morbid emotions, reaches its extreme in the most characteristic plays of John Ford, whose life coincided in time pretty closely with that of Massinger. His first published work appeared in 1607. He collaborated with various playwrights in plays most of which are lost. His extant plays were produced between 1628 and 1638.

Ford was not a professed playwright. He was a lawyer, and apparently had business of some kind. He was thus possibly more free than the average dramatist to follow the bent of his own taste; but there is not, as a fact, any striking difference between his plays and the ordinary fare provided by them. They are highly artificial tragedies of crime and revenge, comedies, and one history, Perkin Warbeck. The last is the most natural of his plays, and by no means unpleasing or undignified historic drama. But Ford's reputation, like Webster's, rests on his tragedies about which the most diverse opinions are entertained. The subjects of them are of an intensely painful character