In Ford the results of servile imitation and original genius were curiously combined. The first dramatist to feel the overshadowing effect of Shakespeare's tragedies, he borrowed freely from "Lear," "Othello," and "Romeo and Juliet," and he was hardly less indebted to Beaumont and Fletcher and the school of Webster. As a playwright he was, in fact, usually imitative and often unskillful. As a poet his consciousness of the greatness of earlier dramatists now chilled him to bald copying and now incited him to a unique development of some of the old tragic motives. With Dekker and Rowley he collaborated on "The Witch of Edmonton," a tragicomedy dealing with a contemporary crime and linking itself with the domestic tragedies. "Perkin Warbeck," a revival of the chronicle history, is without battles or pageants, and is less concerned with the scenic presentation of history than with the delineation of the character of the claimant. His other tragedies, "Love's Sacrifice," "The Broken Heart," and "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," are at once both more in accord with prevailing modes in the drama and more characteristic of Ford's imaginative temperament. In spite of their worthless comic scenes, their conventional material, and their melodramatic situations, they present tragic passion with an intensity and truth possible only to dramatic genius. Love is the theme, and an excess of sentiment and passion in conflict with friendship, right, or natural law, is the particular province that Ford makes his own. A favorite in love with the wife of his lord, a brother in love with a sister, are the situations over which his genius casts an oppressive melancholy that lasts until the final heart-breaks. The monarch, his favorite, a buffoon or two, and lords and ladies, love-sick or passion-inflamed, play with the casuistry of love and mingle dances and revels with bloodshed and horror. Villany and revenge appear but are not very essential. The seeds of fatal passions have been already sown when the play begins; it is the stifling hothouse in which they luxuriate. The end is inevitable, though it may be long held in suspense and attained through some surprise in the final act.