John Ford: 'Tis A Pity She's a Whore and Other Plays.

An edition of a literary work attempts to canonize and institutionalize an author. For those of us who work on and teach Renaissance dramatists, a semi-collected edition of John Ford's plays, containing The Lover's Melancholy, The Broken Heart, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Perkin Warbeck, should be a very welcome edition that would allow us to convince our colleagues and students that Ford at long last deserves canonization and institutionalization.

However, this edition, part of the Oxford Drama Library series, is much too stingy in presenting Ford as a working dramatist. Its editor, Marion Lomax, and its general and associate editors must share the blame for the penury with which they present Ford and these four extraordinary plays. In the extremely brief introduction to Ford's career (presented in less than two pages), Lomax advises us that "[h]e is not Shakespeare; we are under no pressure to idolize him or be in awe of the range of his achievements" (viii). This edition sadly exerts no pressure to idolize or be in awe of Ford; surely it could have tried to exert that pressure. Ford, so little known even to Renaissance drama specialists, needs much more discussion of his contributions to the theatre of the time and his methods as a working dramatist than this edition offers in five paragraphs. The brief introductions to each play (contained in the general introduction, and less than five pages each), tantalize the reader with allusions to issues such as gender and class without developing them. Many of us know 'Tis Pity; most of us do not know the other three plays and need substantial introductions to them to establish them as important dramatic and literary works and to place them within the contexts of current critical movements. Lomax's slight discussion of cross-dressing in The Lover's Melancholy especially misses opportunities to bring theoretical issues so prominent in Renaissance drama studies in the last decade to the study of Ford.

Although Lomax presents clean, readable copies of the plays, set from first quartos, her almost non-existent discussion of the texts' provenance and her lack of textual apparatus are troubling. Her "Note on the Texts" states that "lack of space does not allow a complete textual history, and emendations proposed by previous editors, but not adopted here, have not all been listed" (xxv). Discussion of one or two paragraphs on each text not only would require little space but would fulfill the expectations of readers who pick up an "edition" of a play. Textual discussions are no longer the private realm of textual scholars; now that so many theorists are crossing over to textual study and using these theories to create literary theory, textual histories are more vital than ever.

N.W. Bawcutt's note on the text of 'Tis Pity in his 1966 Regents Renaissance Drama Series edition manages in a very short printed space to make the following important points about the text's provenance: "Ford's dedication shows that he authorized the publication, and the general cleanness of the text suggests that he supplied a fair copy to the printer. The compositor was careless at times and perhaps inexperienced, and made a number of minor errors: he misattributes speeches, duplicates words and phrases, and occasionally omits words."

Because such discussions are lacking in Lomax's edition, Ford is still a stranger when we use these texts, especially as we do not know how they were created by the author or later derived by the current editor. How did Ford write? Did he display the same patterns of composition or revision in all four of these plays? Did he supply fair copies of his other plays to the printers? Did he appear to authorize the publication of all four quarto texts (all printed within his lifetime)? Are there signs that theatre personnel and/or compositors altered Ford's original texts? The answers to these types of questions require some detective work, but they must appear in any volume that announces itself as an edition. Texts can still be "reading" texts even when substantial textual work is performed on and recorded about them.

Lomax's textual notes, when they do appear, are part of the general notes, including glosses, inconveniently located at the end of the volume. In this way, textual notes, even when recording substantive variants or emendations, are easily ignored and dismissed. My own collation of these notes and those of previous editors in their editions of these plays (and my cursory collation of Lomax's texts with the four original quartos) suggest that Lomax is haphazard about listing substantive variants and emendations; she also adopts emendations of recent previous editors without recording the source of these emendations in the notes. The printer's original blurb at the end of the first quarto of 'Tis Pity pleads, "The general commendation deserved by the actors in their presentment of this tragedy may easily excuse such few faults as are escaped in the printing. A common charity may allow him the ability of spelling whom a secure confidence assures that he cannot ignorantly err in the application of sense." Nonsensically, Lomax's edition refuses to reprint this blurb and makes no mention of it in the notes.

Many of the problems outlined in this review can be seen as arising from the editorial procedures of Oxford University Press and of the general and associate editors of the series and not solely from Lomax's printed representation of her work as editor of this volume. The volume's reasonable price in paperback suggests that it is aimed at the textbook market, and many of us would like to have a single, multi-play volume of Ford to use in our undergraduate and graduate classes (the only other alternative is Cambridge University Press's three play edition, not currently available in paperback). But the stinginess of this edition and its penurious attempt to offer a Ford not worthy of critical and textual research keep the volume from being useful to students or their instructors.

GRACE IOPPOLO American University