FORD, JOHN (1586-c. 1640), English dramatist, was baptized on the 17th of April 1586 at Ilsington in north Devon. He came of a good family; his father was in the commission of the peace and his mother was a sister of Sir John Popham, successively attorney-general and lord chief justice. The name of John Ford appears in the university register of Oxford as matriculating at Exeter College in 1601. Like a cousin and namesake (to whom, with other members of the society of Gray's Inn, he dedicated his play of _The Lover's Melancholy_), the future dramatist entered the profession of the law, being admitted of the Middle Temple in 1602; but he seems never to have been called to the bar. Four years afterwards he made his first appearance as an author with an elegy called _Fame's Memorial, or the Earl of Devonshire deceased_, and dedicated to the widow of the earl (Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, "coronized," to use Ford's expression, by King James in 1603 for his services in Ireland)--a lady who would have been no unfitting heroine for one of his own tragedies of lawless passion, the famous Penelope, formerly Lady Rich. This panegyric, which is accompanied by a series of epitaphs and is composed in a strain of fearless extravagance, was, as the author declares, written "unfee'd"; it shows that Ford sympathized, as Shakespeare himself is supposed to have done, with the "awkward fate" of the countess's brother, the earl of Essex. Who the "flint-hearted Lycia" may be, to whom the poet seems to allude as his own disdainful mistress, is unknown; indeed, the record of Ford's private life is little better than a blank. To judge, however, from the dedications, prologues and epilogues of his various plays, he seems to have enjoyed the patronage of the earl, afterwards duke, of Newcastle, "himself a muse" after a fashion, and Lord Craven, the supposed husband of the ex-queen of Bohemia. Ford's tract of _Honor Triumphant, or the Peeres Challenge_ (printed 1606 and reprinted by the Shakespeare Society with the _Line of Life_, in 1843), and the simultaneously published verses _The Monarches Meeting, or the King of Denmarkes Welcome into England_, exhibit him as occasionally meeting the festive demands of court and nobility; and a kind of moral essay by him, entitled _A Line of Life_ (printed 1620), which contains references to Raleigh, ends with a climax of fulsome praise to the address of King James I. Yet at least one of Ford's plays (_The Broken Heart_, iii. 4) contains an implied protest against the absolute system of government generally accepted by the dramatists of the early Stuart reigns. Of his relations with his brother-authors little is known; it was natural that he should exchange complimentary verses with James Shirley, and that he should join in the chorus of laments over the death of Ben Jonson. It is more interesting to notice an epigram in honour of Ford by Richard Crashaw, morbidly passionate in one direction as Ford was in another. The lines run: