Upon FORD's two Tragedies, Love's Sacrifice and The Broken Heart. THOU cheat'st us, Ford; mak'st one seem two by art: What is Love's Sacrifice, but The Broken Heart? TO JOHN FORD the Poet. THE verse must needs be current, at a word, THOMAS BANCROFT †. * From his Delights of the Muses, first printed in 1646. + From his "Two Books of Epigrammes and Epitaphs," &c. London, 1639, 4. Epigram 192. 1 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE. THIS tragedy, in the dedication to the Earl of Peterborough, is styled, by the author, "the first fruits of his leisure in the action;" ;" and must therefore precede the Lover's Melancholy, although the latter was published four years before, perhaps on account of its superior popularity. The quarto edition bears the following title: " 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; acted by the Queenes Majesties seruants, at the Phœnix, in Drury-Lane. London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, for Richard Collins, and are to be sold at his shop, in Paul's Church-yard, at the signe of the Three Kings, 1633.” Like the other dramas of this author, we have only one old edition; but it had the good fortune to be received into Mr Dodsley's collection, and, in the second edition of that work, obtained some able illustrations from Mr Reed *. It must have been produced before March 1623-4; as at that time Ford and Decker jointly wrote the Masque of the Sun's Darling. With some other plays of our author's, it was appropriated, by the Lord Chamberlain, to the Cockpit or Phoenix Theatre, in 1639.-See Reed's edition of Shakespeare, Vol. III. p. 169. * It is much to be regretted, that Mr Reed, in his very valuable republication, left the regulation of the scenes as he found them, and paid no regard to this, perhaps most necessary, part of theatrical editorship, to which the writing of notes is not to be compared, in point of utility. In the projected republication of Dodsley's old plays, it is to be hoped that this point will be attended to. |