The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VI. The Drama to 1642, Part Two.
§ 6. His lost Plays
Several of Ford’s productions have perished. Four of these, An Ill Beginning has a Good End (1613), The London Merchant, The Royal Combat and Beauty in a Trance, though entered in the Stationers’ register, were not printed, and the manuscripts are said to have been among those destroyed by Warburton’s cook. In the last of these, as in the masque entitled The Fairy Knight and in The Bristowe Merchant (both licensed 1624), Ford collaborated with Dekker, and, in A Late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother (licensed 1624), with Webster. These bring the total of the plays in which Ford had a share to sixteen; and it must be remembered in summing up his achievement and his characteristics that we must base our judgment upon little more than half of his work.