The politics of love: The Broken Heart in the Caroline context

Critical attention to John Ford’s The Broken Heart has tended to minimise the relevance of a Caroline context of production. In this essay, I reposition the play within a Caroline context, as engaging with issues of law and prerogative under debate in the late 1620s and 1630s. Through a politicised reading of its representations of love and death, and dramatic rendering of literary tropes of courtly love on stage, I argue that Ford employs ideas of neo-Platonism and the Caroline court’s chaste self-representation in an image of monarchy within marriage to advocate temperate monarchy, bound by the reason of law.