Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 2002: Lisa Hokins

John Ford. 2002. Love's Sacrifice. Ed. A. T. Moore. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 323 pp. ISBN 0-7190-1557-X. Ł45.

The Revels editions have earned a well-deserved reputation as the best available texts of non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays, and A. T. Moore's edition of Ford's Love's Sacrifice is an admirable recruit to the series (though it is a great pity that, overall, the number of Ford plays available from Revels has actually fallen, since neither R. F. Hill's The Lover's Melancholy nor Peter Ure's Perkin Warbeck is any longer available). It is true that one senses a slight lack of enthusiasm for the subject in Moore's initial dictum that the play is 'no masterpiece'. Love's Sacrifice is certainly an odd and controversial play, which has found far fewer admirers than either of Ford's other two tragedies, or than Perkin Warbeck, and most of the critics whom Moore quotes in the 'Responses' section of his Introduction have little to say in its favour; its first editor, William Gifford, dismissed it as 'one of the least attractive of Ford's pieces' (quoted in Moore, 77). Nevertheless, the play does have strengths. Like so much of Ford's work, Love's Sacrifice is not only a play in its own right but also a sustained comment on the aesthetics and dramaturgy of other Renaissance plays, most notably of Othello, a work on which Ford often reflects, but never so intensely or so thoughtfully as here. It also offers perhaps the most complex exploration of another Ford preoccupation, which is the difficulty of establishing the truth about a situation or a character, coupled with the urge to rush to judgement; indeed this partly accounts for the difficulty of the play, since it so problematizes our own position as audience.
Despite his reservations about the play, Moore does nevertheless proceed to offer a probing analysis of the its dramatic power, structured around the novel and fruitful device of a sustained account of a hypothetical performance. This is supplemented both by accounts of specific moments in the handful of actual performances over the last few years – mostly in Bristol (could one register a plea for these to be more widely publicized among Ford scholars?) – and by a particularly suggestive and illuminating discussion of the possible original players of the rôles. Moore is also laudably circumspect in his navigation of the minefield surrounding the question of the play's date, showing that this cannot be securely pinned down but judiciously establishing the possible parameters.
One of the recurrent themes of Moore's introduction is the extent and effect of Ford's insistent and inventive allusions to previous plays, particularly Webster's two tragedies and Othello. (In passing, he makes the interesting observation that the version of Othello familiar to Ford was clearly the Folio rather than the Quarto.) Again and again a scene of Ford's depends on its effect for the audience's knowledge of the extent to which it rewrites an earlier scenario, as when the opening, centring on Roseilli's banishment, cleverly meshes recollections of both The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, or when the widowed Fiormonda's offering of her wedding ring to Fernando so insistently recalls the ways in which the Duchess does the same to Antonio but produces a very different outcome. Here, as so often in the play, the effect depends on first the arousing and then the frustration of the expectations produced in the audience by their experience of previous plays, and although Moore is clearly sceptical of the overall coherence of Love's Sacrifice, as his dismissal of it as 'no masterpiece' shows, he certainly pays lavish tribute to its sustained theatrical power and surprise value.
Moore has produced a very readable version of the play, with the occasional textual lacunae clearly marked. I must confess to a slight disappointment at his choice of the accurate but, by the same token, conventional 'Bianca' over Ford's idiosyncratic but charming 'Biancha', but this is no doubt a purely personal preference. I found only two actual errors: III.i.46 lacks any closing punctuation, and I cannot see the logic for the second question mark in 'How like you this, Colona? 'Tis too true?' (III.i.52). Perhaps these could be corrected if there is a future Revels Student Edition, for this is a play to which students might well respond very positively, and this edition would certainly help to introduce them to it.

LISA HOPKINS
SHEFFIELD HALLAM UNIVERSITY