"Thou cheat'st us, Ford; mak'st one seem two by art: What is Love's Sacrifice but the Broken Heart?"
It has been concluded that in the latter part of his life he gratified the tendency to seclusion for which he was ridiculed in _The Time Poets_ (_Choice Drollery_, 1656) by withdrawing from business and from literary life in London, to his native place; but nothing is known as to the date of his death. His career as a dramatist very probably began by collaboration with other authors. With Thomas Dekker he wrote _The Fairy Knight_ and _The Bristowe Merchant_ (licensed in 1624, but both unpublished), with John Webster _A late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother_ (licensed in 1624). A play entitled _An ill Beginning has a good End_, brought on the stage as early as 1613 and attributed to Ford, was (if his) his earliest acted play; whether _Sir Thomas Overbury's Life and untimely Death_ (1615) was a play is extremely doubtful; some lines of indignant regret by Ford on the same subject are still preserved. He is also said to have written, at dates unknown, _The London Merchant_ (which, however, was an earlier name for Beaumont and Fletcher's _Knight of the Burning Pestle_) and _The Royal Combat_; a tragedy by him, _Beauty in a Trance_, was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1653, but never printed. These three (or four) plays were among those destroyed by Warburton's cook. _The Queen, or the Excellency of the Sea_, a play of inverted passion, containing some fine sensuous lines, printed in 1653 by Alexander Singhe for private performance, has been recently edited by W. Bang (_Materialien zur Kunde d. älteren engl. Dramas_, 13, Louvain, 1906), and is by him on internal evidence confidently claimed as Ford's. Of the plays by Ford preserved to us the dates span little more than a decade--the earliest, _The Lover's Melancholy_, having been acted in 1628 and printed in 1629, the latest, _The Lady's Trial_, acted in 1638 and printed in 1639.
When writing _The Lover's Melancholy_, it would seem that Ford had not yet become fully aware of the bent of his own dramatic genius, although he was already master of his powers of poetic expression. He was attracted towards domestic tragedy by an irresistible desire to sound the depths of abnormal conflicts between passion and circumstances, to romantic comedy by a strong though not widely varied imaginative faculty, and by a delusion that he was possessed of abundant comic humour. In his next two works, undoubtedly those most characteristically expressive of his peculiar strength, _'Tis Pity she's a Whore_ (acted c. 1626) and _The Broken Heart_ (acted c. 1629), both printed in 1633 with the anagram of his name _Fide Honor_, he had found horrible situations which required dramatic explanation by intensely powerful motives. Ford by no means stood alone among English dramatists in his love of abnormal subjects; but few were so capable of treating them sympathetically, and yet without that reckless grossness or extravagance of expression which renders the morally repulsive aesthetically intolerable, or converts the horrible into the grotesque. For in Ford's genius there was real refinement, except when the "supra-sensually sensual" impulse or the humbler self-delusion referred to came into play. In a third tragedy, _Love's Sacrifice_ (acted c. 1630; printed in 1633), he again worked on similar materials; but this time he unfortunately essayed to base the interest of his plot upon an unendurably unnatural possibility--doing homage to virtue after a fashion which is in itself an insult. In _Perkin Warbeck_ (printed 1634; probably acted a year later) he chose an historical subject of great dramatic promise and psychological interest, and sought to emulate the glory of the great series of Shakespeare's national histories. The effort is one of the most laudable, as it was by no means one of the least successful, in the dramatic literature of this period. _The Fancies Chaste and Noble_ (acted before 1636, printed 1638), though it includes scenes of real force and feeling, is dramatically a failure, of which the main idea is almost provokingly slight and feeble; and _The Lady's Trial_ (acted 1638, printed 1639) is only redeemed from utter wearisomeness by an unusually even pleasingness of form. There remain two other dramatic works, of very different kinds, in which Ford co-operated with other writers, the mask of _The Sun's Darling_ (acted 1624, printed 1657), hardly to be placed in the first rank of early compositions, and _The Witch of Edmonton_ (printed 1658, but probably acted about 1621), in which we see Ford as a joint writer with Dekker and Rowley of one of the most powerful domestic dramas of the English or any other stage.