The Collected Works of John Ford, Vols Ⅱ and Ⅲ. Ed

摘要

The first pages of Brian Vickers’s Salutary ‘Authorship Introduction’, whichopen the monograph-like and -length study of co-authorship that makes up VolumeⅡ of The Collected Works of John Ford, concern collaborations that we now knowwe have lost. Three collaborations are known from the records of Sir HenryHerbert, Master of the Revels. The Fairy Knight, A Late Murther of the Sonn uponthe Mother, and The Bristowe Merchant, licensed respectively in June, September,and October 1624, would have made for a busy year’s writing for Ford and his maincollaborator, Thomas Dekker, with their partner John Webster for A Late Murther.Other plays from later years are more sketchily recorded: Beauty in a Trance isknown from a performance record in 1630, and then from the awkward transitionit may have made to print, first in the Lord Chamberlain’s forbidding the Stationer’sCompany to print it in 1641, and then in an entry to Humphrey Moseley in 1653which seems not to have resulted in publication. A later Stationers’ Register entryfrom 1660 attributes three plays to ‘Iohn fforde’-‘The Royal Combate. A Comedy.| An ill beginning has a good end, & a bad beginning may have a good end. AComedy. | The London Merchant. A Comedy’-about which little more is knownthan their titles, save that, as Vickers notes from a suggestion made by MartinWiggins, the record of a performance of A Bad Beginning makes a Good End in 1613suggests ‘that it is highly unlikely that Ford wrote it’. In the middle of what, nowexpanded, will be a five-volume Collected Works, with Ford’s sole-authored playsnow to follow, what kind of beginning is this, one might wonder, and what end doesit keep in store?