''The Laws of Candy'' is a
Jacobean stage play, a
tragicomedy
Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or a seriou ...
that is significant principally because of the question of its authorship.
Date
The play received its initial publication in the
first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of
1647
Events
January–March
* January 2 – Chinese bandit leader Zhang Xianzhong, who has ruled the Sichuan province since 1644, is killed at Xichong by a Qing archer after having been betrayed one of his officers, Liu Jinzhong.
...
. Scholars judge it to have been written most likely in the 1619–23 period. The play was clearly performed by the
King's Men; the cast list for the original production, added to the play in the second Beaumont/Fletcher folio of
1679, includes
Joseph Taylor,
John Lowin
John Lowin (baptized 9 December 1576 – buried – 24 August 1653) was an English actor.
Early life
Born in St Giles-without-Cripplegate, London, Lowin was the son of a tanner. Like Robert Armin, he was apprenticed to a goldsmith. Whil ...
,
William Ecclestone
William Ecclestone or EgglestoneDNB ( fl. 1610 – 1623) was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a member of Shakespeare's company the King's Men.
Life
Nothing is known with certainty about Ecclestone's early life. There was an Eccles ...
,
John Underwood,
Nicholas Tooley
Nicholas Tooley (c. 1583 – June 1623) was a Renaissance actor in the King's Men, the acting company of William Shakespeare.
Recent research has shown that Tooley was born in late 1582 or early 1583; his birth name was not Tooley but Wilkin ...
,
George Birch,
Richard Sharpe, and
Thomas Pollard, all members of that company. With that roster of personnel, the play could have premiered anytime between the spring of 1619, when Taylor joined the troupe, and June 1623, when Tooley died.
Authorship
Early scholars were frustrated at their inability to find any evidence of the styles of
John Fletcher, or
Philip Massinger
Philip Massinger (1583 – 17 March 1640) was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including '' A New Way to Pay Old Debts'', ''The City Madam'', and ''The Roman Actor'', are noted for their satire and realism, and their polit ...
, or Fletcher's other usual collaborators, in the play. The reason for this began to become clear when William Wells and E. H. C. Oliphant identified the hand of
John Ford
John Martin Feeney (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973), known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director and naval officer. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation. He ...
in the work.
Cyrus Hoy
Cyrus Henry Hoy (February 26, 1926 – April 27, 2010) was an American literary scholar of the English Renaissance stage who taught at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, and was the John B. Trevor Professor of English (emerit ...
, in his wide-ranging and detailed treatment of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, also confirmed the judgment in favor of Ford's authorship; and while this judgment was controversial for a time,
Brian Vickers
Brian Lee Vickers (born October 24, 1983) is an American professional stock car and sports car racing driver. He last drove the No. 14 Chevrolet SS for Stewart-Haas Racing as an interim driver in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series for the injured ...
, writing in 2005, called the attribution to Ford "certain".
[Brian Vickers, ''"Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's "Funeral Elegy"'', Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; p. 494.]
Ford's canon is so limited in extent, compared to those of other major playwrights of
English Renaissance theatre
English Renaissance theatre, also known as Renaissance English theatre and Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1558 and 1642.
This is the style of the plays of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson ...
, that an addition to his canon of a full solo play is an important development. Critics are unanimous in their verdicts on the low quality of ''The Laws of Candy''; "tiresome" is one of the kinder epithets that have been attached to the work. Three of Ford's plays—''
The Lover's Melancholy,'' ''
The Broken Heart
''The Broken Heart'' is a Caroline era tragedy written by John Ford, and first published in 1633. "The play has long vied with Tis Pity She's a Whore'' as Ford's greatest work...the supreme reach of his genius...." The date of the play's authorshi ...
,'' and the lost ''Beauty in a Trance'' (licensed 28 November
1630
Events
January–March
* January 2 – A shoemaker in Turin is found to have the first case of bubonic plague there as the plague of 1630 begins spreading through Italy.
* January 5 – A team of Portuguese military advisers ...
)—are known to have been acted by the King's Men, and they are all relatively early Ford plays; this may imply that ''The Laws of Candy'' is early as well, which could help to explain its relative crudity. If the play was written as early as 1619 or 1620, it could be the earliest of Ford's extant dramatic works.
Synopsis
The play is set in
Crete
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, ...
—"Candy" and "Candia" being archaic names for the island. In Ford's fictional Candy, two
unusual laws are in the statute books. One is a (highly impracticable) law against ingratitude: a citizen who is accused of ingratitude by another, and fails to make amends, can be sentenced to death. The second law holds that after a military victory, the soldiers will select the one of their number who has done the most to achieve the success.
The second law is the cause of the play's conflict. The forces of Candy have just won a great victory over the invading
Venetians. (Historically, Venice conquered Crete in the early thirteenth century
209–17and ruled the island until 1669, though with many rebellions by the local populace.) The commander of the army, Cassilanes, the leading soldier of his generation, expects to receive the acclaim of the troops, and is incensed to find that he has a rival in his own son, Antinous, who has distinguished himself in his first battle. The father's concern is real: Antinous wins the approval of the soldiers. Paradoxically, Cassilanes is even more outraged when Antinous claims his reward from the state—and names a bronze statue of his father. To Cassilanes, this is only one more assertion of the son's assumed power.
Cassilanes is certainly an irascible old man—but he has an additional grievance. He has mortgaged his estates to pay the troops, who otherwise would not have fought; and the state is in no hurry to rectify the matter. The owner of the mortgage is Gonzalo, an ambitious Venetian lord. Gonzalo is the play's Machiavellian villain; he plots and manipulates with the goal of becoming both the king of Candy and the duke of Venice. Gonzalo, however, makes two mistakes. One is that he takes a young Venetian prisoner of war, Fernando, into his confidence, relying on their shared nationality. When Cassilanes retreats to a poverty-stricken retirement, Gonzalo arranges for Fernando to live in the general's little household to further his machinations. Fernando is a noble young man, in mind as well as in birth; and once he falls in love with Cassilanes' daughter Annophel, he reveals Gonzalo's plots.
Gonzalo's second mistake is to fall in love himself, with the princess Erota. The play's list of ''dramatis personae'' describes her as "a Princess, imperious, and of an overweaning Beauty." Royal, rich, witty, and beautiful, she is also extravagantly vain; she is loved by many men, including a prince of
Cyprus
Cyprus ; tr, Kıbrıs (), officially the Republic of Cyprus,, , lit: Republic of Cyprus is an island country located south of the Anatolian Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Its continental position is disputed; while it is ge ...
named Philander, but scorns them all. Until, that is, she meets Antinous, and falls in love with him. Motivated by that love, she manipulates the vain Gonzalo into selling her Cassilanes' mortgage, and also into committing his plots and plans to writing.
In the play's final climactic scene, the other odd law of Candy comes into play. Cassilanes comes before the Senate with a complaint of ingratitude against his son; and Antinous, resigned to death, refuses to defend himself. But Erota makes a similar complaint of ingratitude against Cassilanes—which provokes Antinous to make the same complaint against her, in a sort of round-robin festival of egomania. The solution to this tangle comes when Annophel enters and makes her own complaint of ingratitude...against the Senate of Candy, for its treatment of her father.
The befuddled Senate turns the matter over to the Cypriot prince Philander for judgment. Philander prevails on Cassilanes to repent and withdraw his complaint against Antinous, which allows all the subsequent difficulties to be resolved. Almost as an afterthought, the Cretans and Venetians unite in condemning Gonzalo to punishment. Erota's pride is humbled (we know this, since she tells us so herself), and she accepts her most constant (and noble) suitor, Prince Philander, as her spouse.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Laws of Candy, The
Plays by John Ford (dramatist)
1610s plays
1620s plays
English Renaissance plays
Plays set in Greece