Penguins on Parade: Ford and Webster!

Some Penguin Classics seem like classroom-ready compromises, as in the case of Jane Kingsley-Smith’s new paperback combining the two most prominent plays by John Ford with the two most prominent plays by John Webster. Why, you can almost hear being asked in some Penguin editorial meeting, should we force students to buy “complete plays” editions of both Ford and Webster when it’s only at most these four plays – “The White Devil” and “The Duchess of Malfi” by Webster and “The Broken Heart” and “ ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” by Ford – that those students will be studying in the limited time they have?

And Kingsley-Smith, bless her loyal heart, is fully aware of the criticisms that have been leveled against these two over the centuries, and she’s quick to defend them, not only by invoking that most useful of all literary shibboleths, the anxiety of influence:

Since the early nineteenth century both dramatists have been accused of the same crimes, most notably plagiarism, amorality and technical incompetence. Webster and Ford wrote for the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, at a time when its most celebrated playwright was either reducing his theatrical output or dead (see The Duchess of Malfi and The Broken Heart respectively), but Shakespeare remained a tyrannical presence, compelling his successors to remember and revisit his works.

… but also by hauling in modern critics who can be relied upon to work up nearly pyrotechnical grades of bullshit:

In the last fifty years the renewed popularity of Webster and Ford in the theatre has been complemented by a critical re-evaluation. Their reworking of Shakespeare is now more often attributed to creative ingenuity, which challenges audience expectations, rather than to mere slavish devotion.

“The ‘flaws’ in structure and characterization,” Kingsley-Smith tells us, “tend now to be perceived as deliberate artistic choices.”

Well, they at least tend to be claimed as deliberate artistic choices (and such claims are always dangerous, because they prefer what rhetorical can do over what they should do – this is exactly the kind of self-consciously disingenuous doubletalk that gets the movies of Michael Bay into allegedly serious film criticism courses). Newcomers to Ford and Webster, reading their works for the first time in this handy volume, will see plenty of deliberate artistic choices in these plays, and perhaps they’ll keep in mind that artistic choices that are deliberate can also be plagiaristic, amoral, and incompetent. Penguin once upon a time printed a selection of critical essays by George Bernard Shaw, who knew a thing or two about both Ford and Webster and would have had a few choice words to say about their “creative ingenuity.” Maybe Penguin Classics will revive and expand that grand old Shaw volume one of these days; the aforementioned students, among others, might find it interesting.