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This chapter reviews some of the methods currently used, focusing on the canon of two dramatists who frequently took part in collaborations, John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton. Their work is especially relevant since they both collaborated with Shakespeare. It also includes John Ford, because some interesting work has been done on his co-authored plays. However, it occasionally cites some evidence for his authorship of the Funerall Elegye for William Peter. It begins with the techniques used for identifying co-authors with the oldest method, which takes its origin from when a reader familiar with the verse styles used in Elizabethan drama recognizes two or more different styles in a play. The second approach to authorship studies that is discussed derives from the familiar experience of reading or seeing a play and being reminded of some other work. While verbal parallels, including rare words or words used in special senses, remain a valid tool in authorship studies, much help can he derived from large-scale studies of a writer's vocabulary.

This chapter explores the ways in which the discourse of Platonic love and erotic melancholy advance different ideas about sexuality within amorous relationships and promote incompatible gender power hierarchies. It begins with a discussion of the construction of love according to Neoplatonisms, before turning to an examination of two plays written during the Caroline period, when the cult of Platonic love was at its height. In ᾽Tis Pity She's a Whore, Ford depicts Giovanni's incestuous love for his sister as a type of Platonic mirroring which is also a form of narcissism. Alternatively, in The Platonic Lovers Davenant uses the hazardous physical symptoms of lovesickness to challenge the Neoplatonic construction of love, promoting a notion of heterosexual desire that is physiological and sexual, rather than abstract and spiritual.

This chapter tells the story of the OSS Field Photographic Unit (FPU) and its impact on American cinema and society. Led by the legendary Hollywood film director John Ford, the FPU produced training, reconnaissance and propaganda films for the CIA’s wartime predecessor. In doing so, it is argued here, they made a significant contribution to what theorist Paul Virilio termed “the logistics of perception”, or the ways and means by which war is perceived. By helping to transform the second-hand experience of war from a predominantly textual to a mostly visual experience, the FPU left a profound legacy.

Revengers, as has been frequently observed, are artists who devise intricate tortures both to overreach the crimes that have come before and to invest their acts of violence with specific meanings. But what happens when the revenge does not go to plan? Both John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and John Ford’s The Broken Heart feature victims who take charge of their suffering, seizing theatrical power in a manner that challenges the meaning of their punishment. The shift in focus encountered in these plays – away from the witty plotting of the revenger and towards the courage of the victim – corresponds to a wider shift that Mary Beth Rose has identified in the construction and gendering of heroism in the early modern period, in which there is a move away from the heroics of action towards the heroism of endurance. The chapter maintains, however, that the heroics of endurance are gendered: while in both plays heroic dying functions as a form of self-authorship, nevertheless differences between the portrayal of the Duchess of Malfi and Ithocles suggest that masochistic self-sacrifice is perceived to be natural for women and unnatural for men.

The central myth developed about the SDG meeting was that John Ford stood up to DeMille and stopped his drive to recall Mankiewicz and introduce the loyalty oath. However, Ford’s role before, during, and after the meeting shows that he was basically a conciliator trying to reduce and minimize political friction between DeMille and other sections of the SDG. Beginning with Peter Bogdanovich’s interview of Mankiewicz in 1967, where he embellished and exaggerated Ford’s role, an increasingly flattering version of these events has developed. This has fed into a huge literature that has extolled Ford’s role at the meeting. The constructed incident now strongly influences thinking about Ford’s politics, and this view has influenced film criticism. The chapter also discusses how there was an initially cautious, or sometimes hostile, response to Ford’s cinema by liberal critics partly due to Ford’s conservatism and his support for Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater.

Chapter One uses Aeschylus’ Oresteia as background for understanding John Ford's Western The Searchers. Both works explore the thin line between civilization and barbarism, and portray characters tragically crossing it. Like Aeschylus’ tragic figures (and the Homeric heroes to which they are related), Ford's Ethan Edwards is strong, cruel, and violent. But these are precisely the qualities he needs to defend his community against the threats it faces on the frontier. Like the Greeks and barbarians in ancient literature, the cowboys and Indians in Ford's film are mirror images of each other. Ultimately, Ethan cannot fit into the domestic community he defends, and is left isolated at the end of The Searchers. Greek tragedy and Homeric epic offer the best analogies to Ford's film, with its uncompromising vision of the tension between civilization and barbarism.

This chapter examines the trend in historical filmmaking in the U.S during the period from 1938 to 1941. This period represents a return of the film industry to epic America. Some of the most notable films produced and released during this period include Stagecoach, directed by John and written by Dudley Nichols, Jesse James, directed by Henry King and written by Nunnaly Johnson and Union Pacific, directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

This chapter examines historical films produced in Hollywood about the life and death of American president Abraham Lincoln made during the period from 1930 to 1941. During this period, Lincoln's presence sanctified whatever theme or subject the historian chose and he generously supported whatever period film a studio happened to create. Lincoln lent authenticity to insignificant scripts, healed any divisive tale of the Civil War and he was a prestigious touch added to secure that elusive critical and box-office appeal. Examples of these films include D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln, Darryl Zanuck and Nunnally Johnson's The Prisoner of Shark Island, and John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

John Ford’s 1956 The Searchers has attracted more scholarly attention than any other Western, including that of receptions scholars who have noted its kinship with Homeric epic. This chapter enlarges on the most important of these arguments – Martin Winkler’s study of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards as an Achilles figure and the author’s own analysis of the film as an Odyssean journey – recognizing the psychological identification between protagonist and enemy-as-alter-ego long noted by Western scholars as an important parallel with the dynamic found in ancient epic and expanding on the importance of women’s sexual fidelity to male honor and identity. This chapter then brings the Aeneid into the conversation, demonstrating that like Virgil’s epic, The Searchers is a self-questioning, multi-layered reflection on heroic achievement, offering a problematic hero and extolling the glories of empire while acknowledging the sacrifices inherent in its establishment. Finally, this chapter considers this film as a commentary on racial and Cold War tensions in 1950s America, reflecting on how this fits in with the larger comparison with ancient epic.

Standing at the end of a long line of John Ford Westerns and at the twilight of the genre’s Golden Age, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a self-reflective work, as much about the Western genre as a product of it. Thus, while this film, like other Westerns examined in this book, demonstrates important connections to Homer’s epics, it finds its most pervasive parallels with the post-Homeric tradition. As in Virgil’s Aeneid, John Wayne’s Tom Doniphan sacrifices his personal desires in the interest of national progress, exhibiting a Western version of Aeneas’ pietas, while Liberty Valance fills the role of Turnus, demonstrating Achillean traits, but in a negative light. Yet the film also has a close kinship with Greek tragedy: in particular, through its preoccupation with generational tensions along with issues of knowledge and identity intertwined with themes of murder, marriage, and reputation, it recalls Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, with James Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard functioning as a decidedly un-epic Oedipus figure forced to confront his own failures. Like both Virgil and Sophocles before him, Ford offers a complex commentary on nation-building, simultaneously sentimental and critical, holding America’s glorious civic identity up for scrutiny and encouraging self-knowledge over blind mythologizing.

This chapter locates John Ford’s 1939 movie, Young Mr Lincoln, in relation to his contemporary involvement with the Hollywood Popular Front collaboration of liberals and communists in support of social justice at home and anti-fascism abroad. Like many of the director’s film, it can be viewed at different levels in its exploration of history and myth, but Popular Front sentiments are fundamental to its holistic understanding. Its fictional representation of a youthful Abraham Lincoln’s successful defence of two brothers wrongly placed on a murder charge in 1837 Illinois is an allegory for current concerns. Ford’s presentation of him as a common man capable of greatness, concerned to ensure social justice for the oppressed, identifying emotionally with ordinary people without losing sight of their shortcomings, and possessing a strong sense of right and wrong resonated with the cause of American progressivism at home and abroad in this troubled era.

Hawks speaks his admiration for John Ford and his work and talks about their friendship. He discusses the similarities and differences in their directing styles, and recounts their last visit before Ford’s death.

This chapter deals with the steady pounding that the by-then virtually undefended German cities were being subjected to by the American and British air forces. It notes that the civilian casualties from these air raids could not help but be substantial. It cites an article titled “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing”, published by John C. Ford, a New England Jesuit. It provides that Father Ford did not, in this article, speak as a pacifist as he was willing to consider the war against Nazi Germany a just war. It notes however, that Ford condemned as unlawful the systematic killing of noncombatants necessarily resulting from the air raids to which German cities were being subjected. It further notes that obliteration (or area) bombing was distinguishable for him from the precision bombing consistent with the long-accepted rules of war.

This chapter analyzes the connection of homoerotic desires and practices with social markers, as represented in John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy and Perkin Warbeck. Ford’s plays emphasize the sodomitical potential of all early modern male homosocial relations and interpret sex as a practice indexed by speech, claiming that status-based prohibitions on expressions of desire between men helped to arrange and distinguish between authorized and unauthorized homoeroticism in the early modern period. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Ford’s perception of a modern sexual identity who seeks to gain control of unauthorized expressions of sexual desires.

This chapter explores Giovanni’s pursuit of Annabella’s heart in John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore, suggesting that it is the Courtly lover’s necessary abject position in relation to the beloved which explains the play’s ambivalent representation of Anabella’s sincerity, her honesty, and the reason Giovanni casts her murder as revenge. Ford’s depiction of Annabella’s rhetoric, her stage positions, her unfathomability, even her death, is consistent with the representation of a courtly love lady, the seemingly chaste, silent, and obedient actor, either a virgin or a whore, appearing regularly in early modern literature and theatre. Revenge, however, is part of courtly love’s ideology, according to Slavoj Žižek’s seminal essay, ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing’, and Giovanni’s expectations for Annabella’s behaviour exposes the contradictions inherent in the courtly love rhetoric found in the play. Rather than being sadistic towards his sister, luring her into incest and then killing her, Giovanni has all the marks of an abject masochist, as does Annabella.

This chapter proposes a revised theory of allegory in baroque tragic drama. It rejects Walter Benjamin's contention in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) that the Trauerspiel or “tragic drama” is a demonstration of mourning and melancholy distinctly different from “tragedy” that triggers a response of mourning. Instead, it argues that “tragic drama” employs allegorical modes together with dramatic mimesis to create an experience of mourning. In challenging and expanding Benjamin's notions of the genre, the chapter examines John Ford's The Broken Heart (1629–1633), a tragedy that is replete with the accoutrements of death consistent with Benjamin's description of the Trauerspiel. Through a detailed reading of Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1684–1689), however, it also illustrates how the trappings of mourning are not essential to the form. Thus, the experience of tragic drama is aligned with seventeenth-century expectations about the pleasure of mourning.

This chapter explores Hawks’ working relationship with John Wayne, who the director describes as an immensely talented actor and strong personality. He discusses Wayne’s acting habits, his ability to direct himself on set, and work that Wayne did with other directors. Hawks also explores the challenges that an aging star faces, especially in the genre of the western, explaining that age negates old story lines but also creates new ones.

This chapter utilizes the work of Sergei Eisenstein to demonstrate that John Ford’s classic film Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) presents Lincoln as the quintessential Great Commoner. The film is a brilliant example of mimetic structure, wherein the form of the film complements its content. In this case, the film presents its audience with an endless series of false dilemmas, which collectively support the validity of its characterization of Lincoln as simultaneously common and great.