John Ford – författare

These four plays, written during the reigns of James I and Charles I, took revenge tragedy in dark and ambiguous new directions. In The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, John Webster explores the role of women and issues of power, sex and corruption in the Italian court, creating two unforgettable anti-heroines. In The Broken Heart, John Ford questions the value of emotional repression as his characters attempt to subdue their desires and hatreds in ancient Greece. Finally, Ford's masterpiece 'Tis Pity She's a Whore explores the taboo themes of incest and forbidden lust in a daring reworking of Romeo and Juliet.Jane Kingsley-Smith has edited the plays from the earliest quartos and added invaluable editorial material, including explanatory glosses and a new introduction that discusses how the playwrights used the theatre to explore issues around women, sex, power and violence.Together with the Penguin volume of Five Revenge Tragedies, edited by Emma Smith, this is the essential sourcebook for drama in the period.'Revenge, hatred, villainy, incest, and murder upon murder are their constant themes ... and they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the audience ... We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or his servants to see such representations' - Charles KingsleyJOHN WEBSTER was born in about 1578 in London. He studied law at the Middle Temple before embarking on a career in the theatre, collaborating on many plays with contemporary dramatists. But it was his two solo-authored tragedies, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) which sealed his reputation. In 1606 he married Sara Peniall, who was seven months pregnant, and they went on to have at least four children. He died in the 1630s.JOHN FORD was born in 1586 in Devon. His early career was wholly concerned with poetry and philosophical works, and it was not until the 1620s that he began collaborating on stage plays. In the late 1620s, he began writing alone, producing the eight plays on which his reputation would be based, including The Broken Heart (1620) and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (c.1630). Nothing more is known of Ford after the performance of his last play in 1638.JANE KINGSLEY-SMITH completed her PhD at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and is the author of two monographs: Shakespeare's Drama of Exile (2003) and Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2010). She is a Reader at Roehampton University, London, and a regular guest speaker at Shakespeare's Globe.

Arden of Faversham * A Woman Killed with Kindness * The Witch of Edmonton * The English TravellerIn about 1590, an unknown dramatist had the idea of writing a tragedy about the lives of ordinary people, instead of the genre's usual complement of kings and queens and politicians. His play, Arden of Faversham, inaugurated a new genre of 'domestic' drama, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage, crime, and property rather than war and power. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover.In Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend, only to find that he takes unusual reprisals. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected and unwelcome changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence.Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts; a critical introduction that outlines the way all four plays raise powerful and complex questions about the English society in which their tragic events unfold; wide-ranging notes; a chronology of the plays from their sources to recent performance; and appendices relating to two of the plays: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Heywood write The English Traveller. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Highly practical and exceptionally clear, Strategic Marketing discusses the essential concepts and tools necessary to understand and implement effective marketing strategies. The fourth edition is packed with new case studies and examples including the rise of Disney +, the use of artificial intelligence in marketing, and small-scale innovators in India. Step into the professional world via the brand-new Practitioner Insights feature through which marketers operating across Africa, Europe, and Asia share the issues they have faced and how they overcame them. This significantly-revised edition also includes the latest research and explorations of socio-political issues, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the global COVID-19 pandemic, underlining the importance of such to marketers.The book's clear four-part structure mirrors the industry's most widely-used strategic marketing framework. Each part tackles one of four questions that organizations need to ask themselves: 'where are we now?', 'where do we want to be?', 'how will we get there?' and finally: 'did we get there?' - all while revealing the techniques marketers use to discover the answers.This illuminating book is the ideal guide to strategic marketing for those studying the topic and for anyone aspiring to become a successful strategic marketer.The e-book offers a mobile experience and convenient access: www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooksThis book is accompanied by the following online resources:For students:Self-test multiple choice questions with answer feedbackCase study guideLinks to additional resources (articles, videos, and other resources)Chapter summariesKey themes and further readingAdditional exercisesFlashcard glossaryFor lecturers:Additional extended case studies with teaching notesLecturer's guide to using the case studies from the book in classPowerPoint presentationsTest bank containing multiple-choice questionsLinks to third-party video content Figures from the text

Ford wrote darkly about sexual and political passion, despair, thwarted ambition, and incest. This selection also shows his ability to portray the poignancy of love as well as write entertaining comedy and create convincing roles for women. His Annabella, Hippolita, Penthea, Calantha, and Katherine Gordon rank among the most dramatically powerful female characters on the post-Shakespearean stage. Setting Ford's earliest surviving independently-written play, The Lover's Melancholy, alongside his three best known works, this edition includes an introduction with sections on each play addressing gender issues, modern relevance, and staging possibilities. Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation, supplemented by detailed annotation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Published in 1985: The main plot portrays the bachelor Octavio, Marquis of Siena, and his establishment of his "Bower of Fancies," something like a Platonic academy for those he calls the "fancies" — Clarella, Silvia, and Floria, three young women who are, or are said to be,"young, wise, noble, fair, and chaste.

Published in 1985: The main plot portrays the bachelor Octavio, Marquis of Siena, and his establishment of his "Bower of Fancies," something like a Platonic academy for those he calls the "fancies" — Clarella, Silvia, and Floria, three young women who are, or are said to be,"young, wise, noble, fair, and chaste.

The last decade has seen a revival of interest in John Ford and especially 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, his tragedy of religious scepticism, incestuous love, and revenge. This text in particular has provided a focus for scholarship as well as being the subject of a number of major theatrical productions.Simon Barker guides the reader through the full range of previous interpretations of the play; moving from an overview of traditional readings he goes on to enlarge upon new questions that have arisen as a consequence of critical and cultural theory.

This selection contains the three finest plays of the Stuart dramatist John Ford. The Broken Heart is a classical tragedy of suffering; 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Ford's best-known play and one still frequently performed, is a tragic story of limitless ambition and social rivalry expressed in sexual terms; Perkin Warbeck is the last great successor to the history plays of Shakespeare. Together they exemplify the unique tone of Ford's drama, in which passion and gravity are united by a playwright with a poetic sense of theatre. This is the only one-volume selection of Ford's plays now available. The texts are modernised and equipped with notes explaining unfamiliar language and historical references. A general introduction gives a brief biography and bibliography; individual introductions deal with the sources and stage history of each play. Longer notes at the back of the book discuss points of staging and interpretation, and there is a full textual apparatus which makes this edition useful for the scholar as well as the student.

It is a historical phenomenon that while thousands of women were being burnt as witches in early modern Europe, the English - although there were a few celebrated trials and executions, one of which the play dramatises - were not widely infected by the witch-craze. The stage seems to have provided an outlet for anxieties about witchcraft, as well as an opportunity for public analysis. The Witch of Edmonton (1621) manifests this fundamentally reasonable attitude, with Dekker insisting on justice for the poor and oppressed, Ford providing psychological character studies, and Rowley the clowning. The village community of Edmonton feels threatened by two misfits, Old Mother Sawyer, who has turned to the devil to aid her against her unfeeling neighbours, and Frank, who refuses to marry the woman of his father's choice and ends up murdering her. This edition shows how the play generates sympathy for both and how contemporaries would have responded to its presentation of village life and witchcraft.

Like Shakespeare's Juliet, Annabella, accompanied by her down-to-earth nurse, is introduced to a series of suitors to her hand. Like Juliet, she finds all of them unsatisfactory - and rightly so, for the audience know that the nastiest of them is having an affair with her domineering aunt. Like Juliet, Annabella is wooed by a sensitive and passionate young man whose love she returns - but this young man happens to be her own brother, Giovanni. When they consummate their love and she, to avoid the scandal of extramarital pregnancy, agrees to marry her aunt's lover, the tragic outcome is inevitable. John Ford, writing his psychologically powerful and intellectually challenging tragedies in the early years of King Charles I's reign, is a playwright of the first rank, as 20th-century directors have shown both in the theatre and on film.

The central situation of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is an incestuous love between brother and sister, and it is hardly surprising that critics have differed widely in their interpretation of the exact meaning and significance of the play. . . . All the love affairs in the play end in disaster . . . it would even be possible to read the play as a series of warnings against the destructive effects of passion."-from the introduction by N. W. Bawcutt