John Ford Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lisa Hopkins

Critical Essay by Lisa Hopkins

SOURCE: Hopkins, Lisa. “Touching Touchets: Perkin Warbeck and the Buggery Statute.” Renaissance Quarterly, 52, No. 2 (Summer, 1999): 384-401.

In the following essay, Hopkins maintains that Ford's Perkin Warbeck encodes a form of sexual deviancy that may be subtle to modern readers and spectators but would not have been lost upon Ford's audience and patrons.

At first sight, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck seems to be the only one of John Ford's plays that is not pointedly and openly concerned with sexual deviation. Both 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and The Broken Heart feature either actual incest or the fear of it. The Lover's Melancholy is structured around the concept of a passion that verges on the pathological, an erotomania. The Fancies Chaste and Noble has at the heart of its plot an allegedly impotent marquis who is believed to keep a harem. Love's Sacrifice probes the boundaries of...
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