SYNOPSIS

Along feud between two noble Spartan families was ended with the loving engagement of their children, Penthea and Orgilus.  Penthea’s father Thrasus, however, died before the wedding could take place, and her twin brother Ithocles forced her into a more socially advantageous match with the older Bassanes, who proved a violently jealous husband.  When the play begins, Ithocles has gone to fight in Sparta’s war against Messene, Penthea languishes in misery, and Orgilus begs his father Crotolon’s permission to leave for Athens, to nurse his wounds and spare Penthea and Bassanes’s emotions.  Before leaving, Orgilus extracts a promise from his sister Euphrania not to marry without his permission.

Orgilus does not go to Athens but stays in Sparta disguised as a scholar under the teacher-prophet Tecnicus.  So disguised, he overhears a love scene between Euphrania and Ithocles’s friend Prophilus, who employ him to pass secret letters between them.  Meanwhile Ithocles has returned to Sparta a war hero and been crowned with a wreath made personally by the princess Calantha, with whom he falls in love.  Orgilus reveals himself to the abject Penthea and expresses his enduring love, but she tells him she feels so defiled by her marriage that she would not take him back even if she were widowed.  Ithocles speaks to Penthea about his love for Calantha, asking her to plead his case.  She agrees, despite bitterly reminding him that he now longs for precisely the joy he cruelly deprived her of.  A deranged Bassanes rushes in on their discussion, accuses them of incest, and is told that Penthea will be taken from him until he regains self-control.

Without explanation, Orgilus “returns” in his own person, blesses the engagement of Euphrania and Prophilus, and accepts the now rueful Ithocles’s apology and friendship.  Yet other signs are still ominous.  Tecnicus delivers a grim interpretation of a Delphic oracle concerning Sparta’s future and quickly leaves the city.  Penthea has begun starving herself.  And Nearchus, the Prince of Argos, has arrived seeking Calantha’s hand, with King Amyclas’s encouragement.  Penthea tells Calantha of Ithocles’s love, and though she receives no direct response, Calantha evidently favors Ithocles and privately promises herself to him.

Amyclas, feeling his health failing and his life ebbing, issues an order that Prophilus and Euphrania’s wedding be immediately celebrated.  He does not live through the day, however, nor does Penthea.  Orgilus, reacting to her death, traps Ithocles in a trick chair and murders him.  At the wedding party, Calantha learns of the three deaths while dancing yet stoically finishes her dance before reacting.  Now queen, she allows Orgilus to choose his means of death and he opens his veins, helped by a now reformed and reasonable Bassanes.  Calantha reveals her secret betrothal to Ithocles, declares Nearchus King of Sparta, and dies of a broken heart.

PERSPECTIVES

“A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”

—Psalm 51

“The fortitude of the Spartan boy who let a beast gnaw out his bowels til he died without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit and exenteration of the inmost mind which Calantha with a holy violence against her nature keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and queen are fulfilled…. The expression of this transcendent scene almost bears me in imagination to Calvary and the Cross.”

—Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets

“Penthea’s…denial of the passion she feels for Orgilus is the essential expression of the Spartan ethos…. This is a Grecian Urn of a world, in which the major characters are named for abstractions ‘fitted to their qualities,’ the dialogue muted and formal, the death scenes carefully orchestrated. The play is constantly being compared to other, more stylized forms of art—classical sculpture, the opera, the masque, the emblem book. The values are Apollonian: reason, decorum, eloquence—the ‘sweet music’ of ‘morality, applied to timely practice.’ Its inhabitants are masters at remaining decorously silent while the fox gnaws out their vitals. Yet Dionysian passion lurks beneath this eerily calm surface.”

—Sharon Hamilton, “Language Suited to a Divided Mind”

“The Broken Heart… [presents] exalted human beings whose actions never come within the scope of censure. Suffering, not action, is the dominant strain in their world, the suffering of melancholy or of deprivation. It is a suffering that comes to life through the experience of a fugitive happiness…[the] characters have an aristocratic code of endurance, remembering always in their anguish that they are courtiers and princes…. Ford’s poetry is the poetry of an ideal court, a court dignified above that of James or Charles.”

—Clifford Leech, John Ford and Drama of His Time

“I think Ford sees love’s irrationality as both desirable and dangerous—as its best feature, in fact. Love and death are clearly the compelling absolutes of Ford’s world. They are mysteries of ecstasy and irrationality that are to be venerated, not lampooned; they are earthly problems that cannot be solved in earthly terms, but must be transmuted through a faith that surpasses understanding. Because of their extreme passions and difficulties, Ford’s lovers become saintlike in their devotions and martyrs in their deaths.”

—Rick Bowers, “John Ford and the Sleep of Death”

“…the revenger Orgilus is clearly the most important character as far as action is concerned.”

—Richard Madelaine, “’Sensationalism’ and ‘Melodrama’ in Ford’s Plays”

“Penthea dies rather late in the play… [she] does not die any sooner because she is Ford’s central character.”

—Donald Anderson, John Ford

“If Penthea has claim to dying of a broken heart, an even stronger claim is Calantha’s, as is her claim to the role of the play’s heroine, its central tragic figure.”

—Charles O. McDonald, “The Design of John Ford’s The Broken Heart”

“’Love only reigns in death; though art/Can find no comfort for a broken heart.’ …that final [song] couplet retains an enigmatic ambivalence: read with a slightly different stress, it becomes a declaration of the artist’s power; despite the inability of art to restore a broken heart, love nevertheless reigns in death…. The mannered artifice of Ford’s Sparta, with all its terrible human deficiencies, is a form created in face of the dissolution of forms, conjuring a meaning out of lack of meaning, substituting the heroism of performance for the unattainable morality of reason. Apollo, the wittily ambiguous voice of destiny, the enjoiner of impossible self-knowledge, is finally enthroned as the god of poetry, the patron of an order that transcends the confusions and divisions of time, the general disease of being.”

—Michael Neill, “The Moral Design of The Broken Heart”

“The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.”

—Sylvia Plath, “Edge”

JOHN FORD

Frustratingly little is known of John Ford’s life. He was born in 1586 in Islington, Devonshire, to an old established family, was admitted in 1602 to Middle Temple (one of the Inns of Court, or British law societies), expelled three years later for failure to pay his “buttery bill” (board fee), reinstated in 1608, and reprimanded in 1617 along with 40 others for wearing hats instead of lawyers’ caps. He apparently never qualified for the bar, though he may have worked in some other legal capacity. From 1606 on, he published poetry and moralistic essays. His wealthy father’s will perhaps expressed some disapproval: in 1610 Ford inherited a mere ten pounds while both his younger brothers received annuities. Historical evidence of Ford ceases in 1639, when he is presumed to have either died or left London.

The record of his theatrical career begins in the 1620s, when he collaborated with several seasoned professional playwrights—among them Thomas Dekker, William Rowley and John Webster, with whom he wrote the remarkable domestic tragedy The Witch of Edmonton. Ford began writing independent dramas only in his forties. Eight of them survive, all but one licensed for performance between 1628 and 1638: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Lover’s Melancholy, Love’s Sacrifice, The Broken Heart, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, The Fancies Chaste and Noble, The Ladies’ Trial and The Queen, or The Excellency of Her Sex. The Broken Heart was performed by The King’s Men, Shakespeare’s former company.

Based principally on ’Tis Pity, The Broken Heart and Perkin Warbeck, Ford is today considered the signal dramatic talent of the Caroline stage (theatre during the reign of Charles I, 1625-49) and the last great dramatist of the English Renaissance. He wrote during an era far less exuberant and confident than the preceding Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, a time hurtling toward civil war and marked by growing Puritan mistrust of both the autocratic royal court and the putatively decadent theatrical entertainments it enjoyed. Shakespeare had written primarily for the diverse and unruly audiences of the outdoor public theaters, but playwrights in Ford’s day wrote mostly for the relatively sophisticated audiences of the indoor private and court theaters, who harbored nostalgia for the Elizabethan past—including its fondly remembered dramas—but also demanded subtler theatrical effects and more refined subject matter. The popular brother-sister incest drama ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a lurid revenge play squarely in the sensationalistic Jacobean mold, is in many ways uncharacteristic of Ford. The Broken Heart, with its emphasis on decorum, propriety, solemn courtly behavior and impossibly high ideals is a better index of his usual style and tone. The modern Ford revival dates from Maurice Maeterlinck’s adaptation of ’Tis Pity and William Poel’s production of The Broken Heart in the 1890s. Laurence Olivier directed The Broken Heart (and played Bassanes) in 1962, and Michael Boyd directed it with the RSC in 1995.