The Lover's Melancholy

The Lover's Melancholy is an early Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Ford. While the dating of the works in Ford's canon is very uncertain, this play has sometimes been regarded as "Ford's first unaided drama," an anticipation of what would follow through the remainder of his playwriting career. It is certainly the earliest of his works to appear in print.

The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 24 November 1628. It was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars and Globe theatres. The play was first published in 1629 by the bookseller Henry Seile. The quarto bears a dedication from Ford to four friends at Gray's Inn, one of whom is a cousin, also named John Ford. This second John Ford contributed commendatory verse to a couple of the dramatist's plays, including The Lover's Melancholy. The first edition also supplies an unusually full cast list, specifying the 17 King's Men's actors who took part in the original production.

Charles Macklin revived the play at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1748, though the revival was not a success. Macklin was responsible for a story that Ford had stolen the play from Shakespeare's papers, which Edmund Malone rejected in his 1790 edition of Shakespeare's works.

The Lover's Melancholy is based on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy; Ford draws on Burton most heavily in the play's masque of the mad (Act III, scene iii). The play also features a competition between a musician and a nightingale that draws upon the Academic Prolusions of Famiano Strada (1617). The same poetic trope was also exploited by Richard Crashaw, Ambrose Philips, and other poets. Charles Lamb praised Ford's version as superior in his anthology Specimens of the Dramatic Poets (1808).

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