The Laws of Candy - Authorship

Authorship

Early scholars were frustrated at their inability to find any evidence of the styles of John Fletcher, or Philip Massinger, 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 in the work. Cyrus Hoy, 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, writing in 2005, called the attribution to Ford "certain."

Ford's canon is so limited in extent, compared to those of other major playwrights of English Renaissance theatre, that an addition to his canon of a full solo play is an important development. Sadly, 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, and the lost Beauty in a Trance (licensed 28 November 1630) — 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.