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Speaking Sweat: Emblems in the Plays of John Ford Lisa Hopkins 'Emblematic' is a term very often employed by critics of the dramatist John Ford, whose birthdate of 1586 coincided so neatly with the publication of the first English emblem book, Geffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblèmes. Sometimes the term is used loosely to denote little more than a preference for symbolism in the plays; but other commentators have deployed it more judiciously to point to a genuine interrelationship in Ford's works of support and tension between the visual and the verbal, as with Mark Stavig's comment that "Ford, in The Broken Heart, seems to have been consciously trying to make fuller use of what we can call emblematic methods as a means of defining the nature and significance of the suffering that is the play's main theme."1 Obviously this technique is most noticeable in his plays, where it applies to the relationship between stage picture and dialogue, and it is in connection with his staging techniques that critics have most frequently termed him an emblematic writer; but in fact the root of this practice can be clearly traced to Ford's earliest , non-dramatic experiments with writing, which, dating to the first decade of the seventeenth century, precede his independent plays by about fifteen years. In this paper I shall attempt to explore both the more loosely emblematic practices of Ford's staging techniques and also the more literal employment of emblems and of emblem-derived imagery, and I propose to base this exploration in a consideration of Ford's works as a whole rather than merely the more commonly-studied plays. Ford's earliest, non-dramatic works contain numerous examples of images which are common in emblem books or which work along the same principle of mutually reinforcing image and sententia. In Fame's Memorial (1606), an elegy on the death of Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire, Fear and Fame are both personified as part of a scene that would sit well in an emblem book: 133 134Emblems in the Plays ofJohn Ford Base Fear—the only monument of slaves. Progenitor to shame, scorn to gentility, Herald to usher peasants to their graves— Becomes abjected thoughts of faint servility; While haughty Fame adorns nobility, Planting her gorgeous throne upon the crest Of honour casqu'd in a royal breast.2 On the first page of A Line of Life (1621), we hear that "in this respect hath death—being the parting of a precious guest from a ruinous inn, the soul from the body—been by the ancients styled a haven of safety, a finishing of pilgrimages, a resting from travail, a passage to glory."3 The same accumulation of images leads the second page of the work to feature mortality as a ship "to be virtuously employed, and not to continue" as "like a swift runner for a prize, who can with ease gain it from others, but slothfully sitteth down in the middle way," while "to persevere in well-doing without a sense of a duty, only with hope of reward, is like an Indian dromedary, that gallops to his common inn, pricked onwards with the desire of provender" (Works, III, 388). The Line of Life becomes a monument to be leveled and squared (p. 389), rotten posts are gilded and sepulchers painted (p. 394), and emblematic techniques are even more directly invoked when we are told that "if any one will only relish words of down and honey, as if we loved to speak nothing but pure roses, as the proverb is, let such a one learn from the skilful artists of nature that the bees do anoint their hives with the juice of the bitterest weeds, against the greediness of other beasts" (p. 410). In particular, Ford's long religious poem Christ's Bloody Sweat, written in 1613, and other works from the same period such as The Golden Mean and A Line ofLife employ image clusters centered around the repetitive use of the words "blood," "heart," "sweat," and "tears," and many of the attributes and functions of these bodily parts can be directly paralleled with the operations...
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