SOURCE: "Ford's Tragic Perspective," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. I, Winter, 1960, pp. 522-37.

In the essay below, Kaufmann identifies jealousy as a tragic motif in The Queene, Love's Sacrifice, and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, commenting on how this theme manifests itself through the devices of misalliance, the "psychology of vows, " and counterfeiting.

I

Ford has not been altogether fortunate in his critics. They have been attentive, but perhaps Ford, like children, would have fared the better for a little healthy neglect. His reputation has been refracted into a grotesque pattern of distorted and partial images, largely, one supposes, because there is much distracting foreign matter in his canon, many invitations to irrelevancy in his historical position. As the last of the great Elizabethan tragic writers on the one hand and as the somewhat bookish exploiter of these great predecessors' visions on the other, he...