John Ford (dramatist) (1586 – 1640)
One of the last English playwrights in the great Jacobean school that produced Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Jonson.
A bachelor
May thrive by observation, on a little.
A single life's no burden: but to draw
In yokes is chargeable, and will require
A double maintenance.
There's not a hair
Sticks on my head but, like a leaden plummet,
It sinks me to the grave: I must creep thither;
The journey is not long.
Fly hence, shadows, that do keep,
Watchful sorrows, charmed in sleep.
Melancholy
Is not, as you conceive, indisposition
Of body, but the mind's disease.
Philosophers dwell in the moon.
Revenge proves its own executioner.
Brother, even by my mother's dust, I charge you,
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.
Why, I hold fate
Clasped in my fist, and could command the course
Of time's eternal motion, hadst thou been
One thought more steady than an ebbing sea.
Green indiscretion, flattery of greatness,
Rawness of judgement, wilfulness in folly,
Thoughts vagrant as the wind, and as uncertain.
Sister, look ye,
How, by a new creation of my tailor's
I've shook off old mortality.
Glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams,
And shadows soon decaying.
Tempt not the stars, young man, thou canst not play
With the severity of fate.
He hath shook hands with time.
Tell us, pray, what devil
This melancholy is, which can transform
Men into monsters.
Love is dead; let lovers' eyes
Locked in endless dreams
Th' extreme of all extremes
Ope no more, for now Love dies.
Let them fear bondage who are slaves to fear;
The sweetest freedom is an honest heart.
Physicians are the cobblers, rather the botchers, of men's bodies; as the one patches our tattered clothes, so the other solders our diseased flesh.
Her words are trusty heralds to her mind.
I am, gay creature,
With pardon of your deities, a mushroom
On whom the dew of heaven drops now and then.