John Ford’s Strange Truth
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21309550 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lisa Hopkins (0000-0001-9512-0926, Professor and Head of Research Degrees, Sheffield Hallam University, UK [email protected], corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 93-104 |
| Publication date | 2022-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Survey (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-1570 • E-ISSN: 1752-2293 |
| Publisher | Berghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3167/cs.2022.340208 |
| OpenAlex | W3179331393 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 1 |
From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore inverts Romeo and Juliet by making its core relationship endogamous rather than exogamous. Perkin Warbeck is a sequel to Richard III , but undoes its original by telling a story fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare’s. The Lover’s Melancholy echoes both Twelfth Night and King Lear , collapsing the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Above all, Ford reworks Othello , which lies behind the plots of four of his plays. The estranging effect produced by these reshapings is underlined by Perkin Warbeck ’s subtitle ‘A Strange Truth’ and the word ‘strange’ appears forty-nine times in his plays. Ford uses familiar Shakespearean stories to highlight the strangeness of the stories which he himself tells
Art · Comedy · Literature · Pity · Tragedy (event) · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Highly cited | No |
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