When writing _The Lover's Melancholy_, it would seem that Ford had not yet become fully aware of the bent of his own dramatic genius, although he was already master of his powers of poetic expression. He was attracted towards domestic tragedy by an irresistible desire to sound the depths of abnormal conflicts between passion and circumstances, to romantic comedy by a strong though not widely varied imaginative faculty, and by a delusion that he was possessed of abundant comic humour. In his next two works, undoubtedly those most characteristically expressive of his peculiar strength, _'Tis Pity she's a Whore_ (acted c. 1626) and _The Broken Heart_ (acted c. 1629), both printed in 1633 with the anagram of his name _Fide Honor_, he had found horrible situations which required dramatic explanation by intensely powerful motives. Ford by no means stood alone among English dramatists in his love of abnormal subjects; but few were so capable of treating them sympathetically, and yet without that reckless grossness or extravagance of expression which renders the morally repulsive aesthetically intolerable, or converts the horrible into the grotesque. For in Ford's genius there was real refinement, except when the "supra-sensually sensual" impulse or the humbler self-delusion referred to came into play. In a third tragedy, _Love's Sacrifice_ (acted c. 1630; printed in 1633), he again worked on similar materials; but this time he unfortunately essayed to base the interest of his plot upon an unendurably unnatural possibility--doing homage to virtue after a fashion which is in itself an insult. In _Perkin Warbeck_ (printed 1634; probably acted a year later) he chose an historical subject of great dramatic promise and psychological interest, and sought to emulate the glory of the great series of Shakespeare's national histories. The effort is one of the most laudable, as it was by no means one of the least successful, in the dramatic literature of this period. _The Fancies Chaste and Noble_ (acted before 1636, printed 1638), though it includes scenes of real force and feeling, is dramatically a failure, of which the main idea is almost provokingly slight and feeble; and _The Lady's Trial_ (acted 1638, printed 1639) is only redeemed from utter wearisomeness by an unusually even pleasingness of form. There remain two other dramatic works, of very different kinds, in which Ford co-operated with other writers, the mask of _The Sun's Darling_ (acted 1624, printed 1657), hardly to be placed in the first rank of early compositions, and _The Witch of Edmonton_ (printed 1658, but probably acted about 1621), in which we see Ford as a joint writer with Dekker and Rowley of one of the most powerful domestic dramas of the English or any other stage.