similar travesty of the dance has occurred earlier, in V.ii, when
'Bassanes joins Orgilus in a danse macabre, a ritual celebration of death that is basically opposed to the primitive worship of life'.73
Where words break down, symbolic gesture might have assumed the role of bearer of meaning, but in The Broken Heart it has been tried and found wanting.
FORD AND HIS DEDICATEES
Of the nineteen persons known to have received dedications from John Ford,1 one was his cousin and namesake John Ford of Gray's Inn (co- dedicatee of The Lover's Melancholy, printed in 1629, and sole
dedicatee of Love's Sacrifice, printed in 1633). Five more appear to have been personal friends, namely John and Mary Wyrley, the dedicatees of The Lady's Trial (1639), and Nathaniel Finch, Henry Blount and Robert Ellice, the other three dedicatees of The Lover's Melancholy. Robert Ellice was the brother of that Thomas Ellice
who was later to join John Ford of Gray's Inn in providing
commendatory verses for Perkm Warbeck,2 and it had been Nathaniel
Finch who on 3rd February 1625 had signed the 'Answer' of Dekker when he had been summoned to the Star Chamber on charges arising from the production of the now lost play Keep the Widow Waking,by Dekker, Rowley, Webster and Ford.3 Ellice, Finch, Blount and John Wyrley were all, like the author's cousin John Ford, members of Gray's Inn; and they were also, as Ford himself seems likely to have been,4
all Oxford men. Indeed Robert Ellice and John Wyrley had matriculated at Magdalen within a few months of each other, on 31s t January 1622-3 and 17th May 1622 respectively, and this made them close contemporaries of another, more exalted Ford dedicatee, William Lord Craven, Baron of Hampstead-Marshall (recipient of the dedication of The Broken Heart in I633). Craven matriculated at Trinity on the 11th of July, 1623, when he was 13, and the following year entered the Inner Temple. During this period he could well have been part of this group of Oxford- educated Inns of Court men of good but not great family (his parents had been a Lord Mayor of London and an alderman's daughter). After 1627! however, when he was knighted by Charles I, his standing advarced rapidly: in 1631 he commanded English troops fighting for Gustavus Adolphus, he was raised to the peerage, and from 1632 onwards he was famous principally for his wholehearted devotion to Charles I's
sister, the widowed Elizabeth of Bohemia, to whom he was rumoured (without much probability) to be secretly married, and whom he assisted out of his enormous fortune.5 The dedication to Craven, therefore, may well have combined Ford's two tendencies to dedicate to personal friends, and to dedicate to members of the nobility.
Craven and his Winter Queen thus aptly lead us on to the second, and larger group of Ford's dedicatees - that of members of the aristocracy, listed below:
Penelope Devereux Fame's Memorial (1606)
The Earl of Pembroke Honour Triumphant (1606)6 The Earl of Montgomery " "
The Earl of Arundel " " The Duke of Lennox " " The Countess of Pembroke " " The Countess of Montgomery " "
The Earl of Northumberland The Golden Mean (1613) Viscount Doncaster A Line of Life (l62l)
The Earl of Peterborough 'Tis Pity She's A Whore (1633) The Earl of Newcastle Perkin Warbeck (l634)
The Earl of Antrim The Fancies Chaste and Noble (1638)
The group is a large, and, at first sight, an apparently heterogeneous one - it does, after all, embrace a period of over thirty years - and any discussion of it as a whole is further complicated by the fact that we cannot always be certain of the extent to which Ford's choice of dedicatees was in fact determined by necessity. Did Ford dedicate Honour Triumphant to Pembroke, Montgomery, Arundel and Lennox simply because they had taken part in the challenge on which his pamphlet
was based, or did he base his pamphlet on the challenge in order to be able to dedicate it to Pembroke, Montgomery, Arundel and Lennox?7 But although the answer to this will probably never be known, it can nevertheless be accepted that a dedication of any sort implies a clear wish on the part of the author to have his name associated with that of the dedicatee; and the dedicatees with whom Ford has chosen to have his name linked do, in fact, form a surprisingly coherent and close-knit group. They were bound together not only by a common
interest in literature but also by close kinship ties, shared political interests and allegiances, and, in many cases, by their common
religious background.
The two members most on the fringes of the group are William Craven (The Broken Heart)and Randal MacDonnell, Earl of Antrim (The Fancies Chaste and Noble). Even they, however, had links with Ford's other dedicatees. The Earl of Northumberland (The Golden Mean)had borrowed money from Craven's parents,8 and the Earl of Arundel (Honour
Triumphant) was, like Craven, a close friend of Elizabeth of Bohemia. He and his wife escorted her to her new home the Palatinate after her marriage in 1613; after she had settled there 'the affectionate
confidence of the letters she addressed to them, now grave now gay, tells its own story';9 and when she was widowed in 1632 it was Arundel who was sent by Charles I to invite her to return to England. Viscount Doncaster, too (A Line of Life), was a frequent correspondent of the Winter Queen, and one with whom she must have felt very much at ease, since in the l62Os she addressed a letter to him from the Hague which began 'thou ugly, filthy, camel's face'.10 Moreover, both Craven and MacDonnell, like others of Ford's dedicatees, appear in the list of aristocrats in Mary Fage's Fames Roule (1637). But connections such as these are slight, beside the extensive and intricate ties which link together Penelope Devereux, Pembroke, Montgomery, Arundel,
Lennox, Northumberland, Doncaster, Peterborough and Newcastle.
From the phrase 'my willing pains, hitherto confined to the Inns- of-Court studies' in the dedication to Fame's Memorial it seems
probable that this was the earlier of his two 1606 works, and that his first published piece was, therefore, addressed to Penelope Devereux. This lady was the daughter of Walter Devereux, Viscount Hereford and first Earl of Essex, and of Lettice Knollys, a cousin of Elizabeth I on the Boleyn side, whose second husband was
Elizabeth's favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester - a marriage for which the Queen to her dying day never forgave her cousin. Penelope was the eldest child of Lettice and Essex, and she was followed by three others: her beloved brother Robert, who was later to succeed his father as Earl of Essex and his stepfather Leicester as the favourite of Elizabeth, and who was to be executed for treason in 16OI in the aftermath of the ill-fated Essex conspiracy; Walter, who was killed at the siege of Rouen; and Dorothy, who eloped with the poverty-stricken Sir John Perrot, and after his death went on to marry Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland (dedicatee of The Golden Mean). Penelope's father Essex
was descended from all the great houses of mediaeval England. The Earl of Huntingdon, the Marquis of Dorset, the Lord Ferrers - Bohuns, Bourchiers, Rivers, Plantagenets - they crowded into his pedigree. One of his ancestresses, Eleanor de Bohun, was the sister of Mary, wife of Henry IV; another, Anne Woodville, was the sister of Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV; through Thomas Woodville, Duke of Gloucester, the family traced its descent through Edward III.11
The earldom of Essex was originally a Bourchier title, and had come to Walter Devereux through his grandmother, the sister of the last Bourchier earl. The name of Bourchier is one which will be mentioned again in the next chapter.
Elizabeth's commander in Ireland. Elizabethan Ireland was not at the best of times a pleasant place; for the Earl of Essex, however,
matters were made worse by the bad feeling between himself and his deputy, Henry Sidney,whose wife Mary Dudley was Leicester's sister.12
It was partly in an effort to heal this breach, and partly out of genuine liking for the child of his enemy, that Essex suggested a marriage between Henry Sidney's eldest son Philip and his own eldest daughter Penelope, and on his deathbed - brought prematurely to the grave by the troubles and rigours of Ireland - he expressed a strong hope that this marriage should take place. Philip, however, seems not to have been particularly enthusiastic, and Penelope's guardians the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon (the latter another sister of Leicester), together with her brother the new Earl of Essex, soon married her off to Robert Rich, greatly against her will. Rich was the grandson of that Sir Richard Rich, 'of whom no one has ever said a good word',13 who founded the family fortunes by his perjury at the trial of Sir Thomas More. Penelope seems never to have regarded Lord Rich with anything but detestation - she had little time for 'a husband who expected her to conform to the puritan ideals of obedience and submission'14 - but she nevertheless refused to embark on an
affair with Philip Sidney, who had by now come to realise the value of what he had let slip through his fingers, and who immortalized their relationship in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella.
Connections between the Devereux and Sidney families remained close, however. When Penelope's brother Walter was killed at the siege of Rouen his widow married Philip Sidney's youngest brother Thomas, and when Philip in turn died a hero at Zutphen his widow, Frances Walsingham, married Penelope's other brother Robert, Earl of Essex. Furthermore, Penelope seems to have been throughout her adult life a close friend of the middle Sidney brother, Robert, and
his wife Barbara Gamage (the couple celebrated in Ben Jonson's'To Penshurst') and was godmother to their eldest son. At the time of the christening, Rowland Whyte wrote to Sir Robert Sidney that 'my Lady Rich's desires are obeyed as commandments by my Lady'.15 This child was later to marry Penelope's niece, Dorothy Percy, whose sister Lucy was the wife of Viscount Doncaster, dedicatee of A Line of Life, and whose father Northumberland was the dedicatee of The Golden Mean.
Although Philip Sidney apparently could not persuade Penelope to adultery, there was someone who could: Charles Blount. Blount, who began his career at court with a duel with Essex and immediately afterwards became the Earl's closest friend, seems to have become Penelope's lover in the 1590s. The story that they were precontracted before her marriage to Rich seems unlikely to be true: it may well have been put about by William Laud, the chaplain who married them and who was later to become famous as Charles I's Archbishop of
Canterbury, in an attempt to clear himself of the blame which James I attached to his part in the affair.16 Penelope bore Blount several children, and once the fall of Essex had made her no longer an asset but rather a liability to her husband, he divorced her and she and Blount married. Uproar ensued. The status of divorce in England at the time was hopelessly unclear, but it was generally assumed that a divorced person could not remarry during the lifetime of their first spouse, and James I, happy to tolerate the adultery of Penelope and Blount, banished them from court for their marriage. Even the recent triumph of Blount (now Lord Mountjoy and Earl of Devonshire) in
succeeding where the Earl of Essex had failed and achieving victory in Ireland did not prevent them from being forced to retire to the country. The next year, broken-hearted, Blount died. Penelope lived barely long enough to read Ford's Fame's Memorial, Samuel Daniel's
'Funerall Poeme' and Giovanni Coperario's 'Funerall Teares' before she followed him to the grave.
It will immediately be seen that for a young man embarking on a literary career, Penelope Devereux in 1606 would have been a far from obvious choice for a first dedication. A decade or even five years earlier, as the sister of Essex or as the mistress of the conqueror of Ireland, she was indeed in a position to dispense patronage; but now she was widowed, disgraced, and perhaps already visibly ill. It is noticeable that Daniel, in his elegy on Blount, is careful to avoid reference to her, and Schelling has said of Ford's dedication to her that 'a more inauspicious beginning for an aspirant to literary fame could hardly be imagined; for Devonshire had died in disgrace for this very marriage and Ford had nothing to gain'.17 An examination of
Ford's dedicatees as a group, however, makes this dedication to Penelope Devereux look rather less surprising. It has been mentioned above that she was the sister-in-law of the Earl of Northumberland, who in 1613 was to be the dedicatee of The Golden Mean. It has also been mentioned that she was the Stella of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, the close friend of his brother Robert, and briefly the sister-in-law of his youngest brother Thomas, who married the widow of her brother Walter. Such a close network of connections would certainly have
brought Penelope into contact with 'Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother' - Mary, Countess of Pembroke, for whom the Arcadia was written, who was the beloved patroness of many of the leading literary men of the day, and who was, furthermore, the mother of the Earl of Montgomery (co- dedicatee of Honour Triumphant)and of the Earl of Pembroke (co- dedicatee of Honour Triumphant and sole dedicatee of Christ's Bloody Sweat). Certainly we know that the two women had many friends and protégés in common. It has been remarked above that Samuel Daniel was one of only three people who published tributes to Charles Blount.
Daniel had also previously spoken well of Essex:18 indeed in 1603 his tragedy Philotas was thought to contain complimentary references
to Essex, and this got him into serious trouble for 'allegorical malpractice'.19 In this crisis, it had been Blount to whom he had
turned for help. Blount, however, was not his only patron, for around 1591 the Countess of Pembroke had engaged him as tutor to her elder son William, and from then on he was closely associated with the Pembroke family. Daniel was, furthermore, the brother-in-law of John Florio, who dedicated the second book of his translation of the Essays of Montaigne jointly to Penelope Devereux and to Philip Sidney's daughter Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland (Penelope's step-niece by the marriage of Sidney's widow to Essex). Perhaps Ford too - he who was said to be 'a Friend and Acquaintance of most of the Poets of his Time'20 - knew Daniel; at all events, he must have known of him, and
Sherman21 and R.F. Hill22 both detect echoes of Daniel's Hymen's Triumph in The Lover's Melancholy.
Daniel was not the only member of his circle who may have exerted an influence on Ford's later writing. Davril thinks that there are sufficient resemblances between The Queen and The Dumb Knight, by Lewis Machin and Gervase Markham, to justify the conclusion that 'il est possible que Ford ait puisé dans la pièce de Markham',23 and Austin Warren remarks that a poem attributed to Markham and entitled Mary Magdalene's Tears is an example of that 'literature of tears' to
which Southwell, Crashaw and Ford himself all contributed.24 Markham
had previously offered dedications to Sir Philip Sidney's daughter Elizabeth ('Poem of Poems'), to Charles Blount (The Most Honorable Tragédie of Sir Richard Grinvile, Knight) and to Penelope Devereux herself, in conjunction with her sister Dorothy (Devoreux, or Vertues Tears, a panegyric on their brother Walter, killed at the siege of Rouen). He was also acquainted with Sir Robert Sidney, who mentions
him in a letter;25 and Markham's brother Francis was brought up in the household of the Earl of Pembroke, and later held a captaincy under the Earl of Essex. The Markhams' father, furthermore, was a first cousin of Sir John Harington, to whose wife and daughter Florio dedicated the first book of his translation of Montaigne. We have already seen that the second book was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney's daughter and to Penelope Devereux, and indeed a recent biographer of Penelope declares that Florio, like his brother-in-law Samuel Daniel, was a member of 'the Essex party'.26 The same
biographer adds that Gervase Markham 'clearly saw the Essex circle as the foremost source of literary patronage'.27
John Davies of Hereford was another link between the two circles. He dedicated sonnets to Penelope Devereux and Charles Blount, and to the Countess of Pembroke and her son; indeed he addressed to Pembroke a series of poems on the Overbury murder, and we know that Ford aïs o wrote a work, now lost, on the same subject. Nicholas Breton, another protege of the Countess of Pembroke, dedicated his Honour of Valour to Charles Blount, and his A Mad World, My Masters to Florio. John Donne, whose patron the Countess of Bedford was the Lucy Harington who had been the co-dedicatee of the first book of Florio's Montaigne, wrote verse letters to Penelope Devereux' daughters Lettice and Essex; John Dowland, who ale.o dedicated to Lucy Harington, dedicated a
galliard to Penelope, applied to the Earl of Essex for permission to travel abroad, and chose Philip Sidney's younger brother Robert as godfather to his eldest son. William Byrd similarly counted both Penelope Devereux and the Sidney circle among his patrons.28 A final, and in some ways the most interesting name that can be linked with this circle is that of Barnabe Barnes. Barnes, who had served in France with Essex in 1391, published his Parthenophil and Parthenophe in 1393 (it will be remembered that Parthenophil is the name adopted