Ford, John (1586-1640?), was an English playwright. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot ranked Ford as the finest English playwright in the period after the death of William Shakespeare.
Ford wrote in collaboration with other established playwrights, such as Thomas Dekker and John Webster, but created several distinguished plays of his own. The most famous are two sensational tragedies, The Broken Heart (1629) and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1632?); and the historical drama Perkin Warbeck (1633), about a man who claims to be the rightful heir to the English throne.
Ford was strongly influenced by the idea of melancholy, a name given in his time to a disease of the mind. Individuals afflicted with melancholy in modern times might be called severely neurotic. This modern psychological aspect of Ford’s plays has contributed greatly to their success with audiences and readers of the 1900’s. Ford was born in Devonshire.
