In the first printed edition of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623) we find a brief eulogy by his fellow dramatist John Ford, praising it as a ‘masterpiece’. Ford makes no mention of having seen the play in performance, nor does he imply any personal relationship with Webster – no account of the dramatists’ meeting survives. Yet their professional careers and, perhaps less advantageously, their critical reputations would thereafter be intertwined.
In 1624 Webster and Ford worked on a play with Thomas Dekker and William Rowley, entitled The Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother, or Keep the Widow Waking. Perhaps they collaborated in person, though they may equally have written their parts of the manuscript alone. A curious hybrid of comedy and tragedy, the play (now lost) exemplifies both Webster’s and Ford’s interest in making sensational drama out of real events – here, the abduction and forced marriage of sixty-two-year-old widow Anne Elsdon, and the matricide committed by Nathaniel Tindall, both of which occurred just a few months before the play was performed. So painfully recent was the memory, that Anne’s son-in-law tried to prosecute the dramatists for libel.1 In the following year, Webster and Ford worked together again on John Fletcher’s tragicomedy The Fair Maid of the Inn – another lost (though less controversial) play. But a subtler kind of collaboration, about which we have more detail, is the influence on Ford’s dramatic work of Webster’s two great single-authored tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice opens with the same shocked response to banishment as The White Devil; Orgilus in Ford’s The Broken Heart dies quoting Webster’s Flaminio: ‘A mist hangs o’er mine eyes’ (5.2); and there may be an allusion to The Duchess of Malfi in Giovanni’s presentation of a dagger to his sister in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. As one critic has observed, ‘in both contexts the giving of an unsheathed weapon signals the dangerous and unhealthy implications of a sexual relation between siblings and ironically foreshadows the violent cruelty to come’.2 But if there are intriguing verbal and thematic links between Webster and Ford, perhaps their most enduring association has been created by their detractors.
Since the early nineteenth century both dramatists have been accused of the same crimes, most notably plagiarism, amorality and technical incompetence. Webster and Ford wrote for the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, at a time when its most celebrated playwright was either reducing his theatrical output or dead (see The Duchess of Malfi and The Broken Heart respectively), but Shakespeare remained a tyrannical presence, compelling his successors to remember and revisit his works. Hence, The White Devil borrows from Antony and Cleopatra, with additional scenes from Hamlet and King Lear, and ’Tis Pity rewrites Romeo and Juliet. For subsequent critics, this created the impression that Webster and Ford were decadent (i.e., operating after the great age of tragedy) and imaginatively defunct. More damaging than the charge of plagiarism has been that of amorality. In 1856 the novelist Charles Kingsley complained of all Jacobean tragedians (excluding only Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Philip Massinger) that ‘Revenge, hatred, villainy, incest and murder upon murder are their constant themes … and they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that of exciting and amusing the audience.’3 Not only are Webster and Ford frequently blamed for being too sympathetic to their protagonists (‘He draws this hero and heroine as if he loved them’),4 but they also notoriously fail to uphold the illusion of a moral universe or to reach any clear moral conclusions, creating ‘a world in which no set of values is shown to be the “right” one, no attitude as intrinsically better than any other’.5 For an earlier generation of critics, these omissions were not just socially irresponsible, but potentially anarchic.6 Ford’s reputation has suffered particularly through his being made to represent the ‘decadent’ Caroline theatre, whose moral and political disengagement was considered one of the factors that led to the English Civil War (1642–9).7 Finally, both playwrights are found wanting in terms of dramatic structure and characterization. Charles R. Forker observes that The White Devil is ‘crammed with incidents that seem discontinuous, interruptive, tonally inconsistent with each other, even functionally gratuitous’;8 and both playwrights seem to struggle with Act Five, in which the piling-up of corpses after a protagonist’s death in Act Four (see The Duchess of Malfi and The Broken Heart) has felt, to some critics, disappointingly random and chaotic.9 Of a piece with this is the sense that characters are fragmented, inconsistent and unconvincing. When George Bernard Shaw described Webster as the ‘Tussaud laureate’,10 he was not only condemning the dramatist’s amoral sensationalism (typified by the wax figures in The Duchess of Malfi), but also criticizing the lifelessness of his characters. Similarly, Ford’s protagonists have been seen to possess ‘a certain ethereal indistinctness as of figures passing in mist’,11 and the dearth of soliloquies in his plays has been attributed to his lack of interest in psychology.
In the last fifty years the renewed popularity of Webster and Ford in the theatre has been complemented by a critical re-evaluation. Their reworking of Shakespeare is now more often attributed to a creative ingenuity, which challenges audience expectations, rather than to mere slavish devotion. For example, Ford invokes the innocent lovers destroyed by fate from Romeo and Juliet in order to raise questions about the moral guilt or innocence of the incestuous couple in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. The dramatists’ reputations for amorality have also been revised. Having claimed that Webster and Ford ‘do not think on moral issues’, David L. Frost argues in their defence that neither dramatist intended to write ‘moral tragedy’. At the same time, he perceives them as ‘oppressed by the hopeless complication and ambiguity of moral issues’, exploring with visceral terror ‘the impermanence and fluidity of things’.12 The defence of Webster’s and Ford’s bloody and horrifying visual images – such as Annabella’s heart on a dagger or the waxworks in The Duchess of Malfi – has also proved crucial to this re-evaluation. No longer deemed simply gratuitous, they are understood within a moral and philosophical framework, familiar to an early modern audience with a taste for reading emblems. As Richard Madelaine has shown, ‘[Ford’s] stage images are usually carefully prepared for in terms of theme, character and verbal and visual imagery … he is never at heart a mere sensationalist.’13 Finally, ‘flaws’ in structure and characterization tend now to be perceived as deliberate artistic choices. Rather than deplore the absence of a linear plot, Christina Luckyj identifies in Webster’s work a concentric structure, created by patterns of repetition, which de-emphasizes causation and deepens tragic effect: ‘a single idea is turned over and over, gaining in intensity and clarity as it is repeated and expanded.’14 Inconsistencies in characterization reflect the economic and social pressures on the early modern individual (particularly the effects of patriarchy on women), which prevented them from achieving a stable sense of self. As Martin Wiggins observes: ‘[Webster’s] tragedies deal with people who cannot direct their own lives, cannot make their own choices. His theme is, so to speak, the “subjectivity of the subjected”.’15 Hence, the elusiveness of Vittoria in The White Devil – a character who never reveals ‘a “real”, inner self’16 – is partly explained by the hostile, misogynist world in which she lives.
This edition groups together the four major tragedies of John Webster and John Ford – The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, The Broken Heart and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore – in the belief that, despite being written in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively, when read side by side they illuminate one another. Three out of four of these plays are based on true events in sixteenth-century Italy, although viewed from a distinctly Reformation perspective, hence the casting of cardinals and friars as villains and a morbid fascination with confession.17 They also exploit English assumptions about Italian vices – defined as violent sexual jealousy, ingenuity in murder and political hypocrisy or Machiavellianism18 – although both dramatists also refer satirically to contemporary English politics. Webster’s plays, for example, are fascinated by the moral and fiscal corruption of the court of James I (1603–25) and by the disappointments of a new class of university-educated men, denied the opportunities for social advancement which humanism had promised.19
All four plays are indebted to Elizabethan revenge tragedy, in which a terrible crime must be avenged, despite the fact that the perpetrator is a powerful figure whose punishment will ‘fall on th’inventors’ heads’ (Hamlet, 5.2.328). But while they deploy some revenge tragedy conventions, these later plays also stand sceptically and even mockingly apart from them. We might compare Shakespeare’s Hamlet – a self-conscious but deeply troubled revenger – with Webster’s witty Francisco, who declares: ‘My tragedy must have some idle mirth in’t, / Else it will never pass’ (4.1.116–7). If the revenger here has lost interest in his own dilemma, this is partly because the focus has shifted to the female protagonist. Both Webster and Ford are deeply invested in the tragic potential of women – something that Webster helped to define for Ford – moving away from the spectacle of patient suffering to a more dynamic and morally ambiguous female agency.20
Finally, three out of these four tragedies approach, with fascinated prurience, the possibility of incest between brother and sister. This finds its fullest (and most sympathetic) treatment in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but a sister’s sexual rebellion also drives her brother to insanity in The Duchess of Malfi; and in The Broken Heart the accusation of incest between Penthea and Ithocles, although unfounded, might explain the motive for Ithocles’s disastrous intervention in his sister’s betrothal. While incest is partly an expression of the sexual vice habitually deplored in Jacobean and Caroline tragedy – The Broken Heart’s Bassanes declares that all kinds of incest are fashionable ‘ ’mongst youths of mettle’ (2.2.124) – the brother-sister relationship is viewed as particularly susceptible to abuse, given that, in the absence of the father, a brother may be placed as guardian over his sister’s chastity. Bassanes’s assumption that ‘Brothers and sisters are but flesh and blood’ (2.2.117) emphasizes the bodily possessiveness and the lack of differentiation that defines all of these relationships, not least because the siblings are also twins.
Having identified these areas of shared interest, we need now to consider the individual plays in more detail, for each one raises a particular set of questions and possesses its own unique dramatic power.
The White Devil was first performed by the Queen Anne’s Men in 1612 at the Red Bull Theatre in Clerkenwell. It was the achievement of a long and focused effort. Webster seems not to have written anything else between 1605 and 1612, and he must have been ambitious for its success. However, the tragedy found little favour in performance and was published that same year – often a sign that its theatrical life was thought to be over. In the preface, Webster complains that the ‘uncapable multitude’ simply didn’t understand it, and it may have been ill-suited to the unsophisticated tastes of the Red Bull crowd. Yet The White Devil seems always to have provoked and unsettled its audiences.
The play is based on contemporary accounts of an affair between Paulo Giordano, Duke of Bracciano, and Vittoria Accoramboni, in Rome and Padua in the 1580s, which led to the murder of their spouses and their own deaths through retribution. Yet, as J. R. Mulryne observes, ‘Webster’s restless, mocking intelligence is … continually modifying the great and passionate events his narrative offered him.’21 At first glance, the material obviously lends itself to revenge tragedy: in the first half of Webster’s play two murders are committed; in the second, these are avenged by four more deaths. Yet The White Devil does not allow the audience access to either the moral conviction or sympathetic engagement usually evoked by this genre. For a start, where the initial crime was expected to be of some magnitude in order to generate horror, and to justify the taking of unlawful revenge, Isabella’s death by kissing a picture and Camillo’s by vaulting horse are too ‘quaintly done’ (2.2.38) not to inspire admiration and even amusement. Pathos is deadened by how little we know of the victims and by the distancing effect of dumbshows, accompanied by music and perhaps applause, as Bracciano responds to his wife’s tragedy: ‘Excellent, then she’s dead’ (2.2.24). Other revenge conventions are similarly undermined. ‘It harrows me with fear and wonder,’ says Horatio of the ghost of Hamlet’s father (1.1.42), whereas Francisco finds Isabella’s mournful spirit a hindrance to his revenge and contemptuously banishes it from the stage (4.1.109–10). Moreover, the villains – Bracciano, Vittoria and Flaminio – seem to have displaced the righteous avenger in the audience’s sympathies; Francisco is ‘the ultimate horror – the spirit of carefully nurtured hatred, inhumanly Machiavellian and bloodlessly disengaged’,22 who yet survives them all.
The White Devil is similarly problematic as love tragedy, for its erotic embraces are not only fatal but repulsive. Thus, Francisco curses Bracciano and Vittoria: ‘Let him cleave to her and both rot together’ (2.1.397), while Bracciano shrugs off Isabella’s kisses: ‘Oh, your breath! / Out upon sweetmeats and continued physic – / The plague is in them!’ (2.1.165–7). Here, her excessive consumption of sweets disguises a voracious sexual appetite or it conceals actual bodily decay, both of which threaten to infect him with venereal disease. And yet The White Devil’s distrust of eros is not simply attributable to man’s terror of mortality, for which woman acts as a scapegoat.23 Rather, the play’s compulsive horror of suffocation – whether it be Flaminio’s account of ‘the fellow was smothered in roses’ (1.2.148), Vittoria’s nightmare of being buried alive (1.2.235) or Bracciano’s strangling by a ‘true-love knot’ (5.3.169) – implies a deeper fear of erotic self-loss that afflicts both men and women. Whereas love tragedy offers a transcendent vision of the couple becoming one through sex and death, The White Devil’s lovers remain stubbornly separate and apart, and it is this, as much as their adulterous, murderous appetites, that inhibits the play’s romantic effect. Not only do Bracciano and Vittoria never have a scene alone together, but Vittoria’s emotional investment in her lover remains uncertain. She fails to mention him in her dying speech and by implication regrets ever having met him: ‘Oh, happy they that never saw the court, / Nor ever knew great man but by report’ (5.6.259–60).
The dangers of intimacy with great men extend beyond Vittoria to her siblings, Flaminio and Marcello, to their mother, Cornelia, and even to the audience. Flaminio is Bracciano’s secretary, a role defined by the production of written correspondence, but also the keeping of secrets. As Angel Day suggests in The English Secretary (1586, repr. 1599), it was often imagined spatially:
The Closet in everie house, as it is a reposement of secrets, so it is onelie … at the owners, and no others commaundement. The Secretorie, as hee is a keeper and conserver of secrets: so is hee by his Lorde or Maister, and by none other to bee directed. To a Closet, there belongeth properlie a doore, a locke, and a key: to a Secretorie, there appertaineth incidentlie, Honestie, Care and Fidelitie.24
Flaminio controls the space of the closet when he has Bracciano hide in one in 1.2, and when he attends secret talks there in 5.1. His fall from power is signalled by his being barred from the new Duke’s presence ‘and all rooms / That owe him reverence’ (5.4.30–31). In fact, Flaminio’s machinations have from the start been inspired by displacement: he explains early on that his father sold all his land in order to finance an extravagant lifestyle, thereby destroying not only the family’s income but the foundation of its gentrified status (1.2.306–8).25 When socially sanctioned methods of advancement fail, Flaminio, Marcello and Vittoria are lured into the morally corrupt world of the court, with its opportunities to become pimp, murderer and whore. Moreover, by becoming the repository or closet for the great man’s secrets, Flaminio exposes himself to corruption from within. This is made particularly clear in The Duchess of Malfi, where the Cardinal warns Julia, his would-be ‘secretary’ (5.2.227), not to seek the cause of his melancholy: ‘ ’Tis a secret / That, like a ling’ring poison, may chance lie / Spread in thy veins, and kill thee seven year hence’ (5.2.260–62). In fact, the Cardinal will not wait nearly so long – the only safe secretary is a dead secretary.
Intimacy with great men may also pose a threat to the audience. As Dena Goldberg has argued, we are cast in the roles of eavesdropper and voyeur: ‘attendants, who lurk in corridors waiting to be summoned, are dismissed when private interviews are to take place and sometimes … find [ourselves], perhaps inadvertently, behind the arras.’26 While the audience experiences no physical danger (unlike Polonius behind the arras), we may find ourselves morally compromised through taking pleasure in the spectacle of murder without being sympathetically engaged with the victim. When the murderer, Flaminio, draws a curtain to watch Cornelia winding his brother’s corpse he finds a ‘tragic entertainment distilled (for his and our aesthetic delectation) from human suffering’.27 The theatre’s potential to arouse moral feeling (‘I have a strange thing in me, to th’which / I cannot give a name, without it be / Compassion’, 5.4.108–10) comes to nothing in the thrilling climax when Flaminio prepares to force his reward from Vittoria with a brace of pistols.
But if The White Devil does little to justify claims by early modern apologists that theatre inculcates virtue and warns against vice, it also comes closest to its own definition of virtue through the role-playing of its protagonists. In ‘The Arraignment of Vittoria’ – a scene so significant that Webster separated it off with this title in his manuscript – Vittoria’s compelling performance in the part of slandered chastity makes us question what we have believed about her guilt, perhaps reinforcing suspicions of the play’s amorality, and questioning the capacity of the stage to present truth.28 Yet it also works to expose the hypocrisy of her accuser, Monticelso, and his pose of moral righteousness. We may well applaud Vittoria’s courage in taking on a corrupt judge and challenging the assumption that female sexual appetite is a more serious crime than murder. Similarly, Flaminio’s performance as tragic hero in the final scene wins our admiration, though such an accolade is almost entirely undeserved. Denied the possibility of redemption by his guilt and despair, Flaminio faces extinction unconsoled. Only the theatrical ability to fashion his own end seems to give him comfort, and when he utters the memorable lines, ‘We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune’s slaves, / Nay, cease to die by dying’ (5.6.250–1) he borrows some of the glamour of the suicidal tragic hero, even though he has done everything he can to avoid death, including faking it. The act of self-assertion alone attains some kind of moral stature, in a nihilistic universe where not only Flaminio but all of Webster’s characters must live and die ‘in a mist’ (5.6.258).
Webster’s next tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi (1614), may have overlapped with his composition of The White Devil or it might represent a revisiting of that play, for there are obvious similarities in terms of plotting and characterization. Once again we encounter two brothers in conflict with their sexually adventurous sister, and an ambitious malcontent who murders in the hope of a preferment that never comes. Only with The Duchess of Malfi, however, did Webster find immediate admiration and acclaim. The play was first acted at the Blackfriars, an indoor theatre whose intimate atmosphere may have been more suited to Webster’s style, and by Shakespeare’s celebrated company, the King’s Men. That they did justice to Webster’s most haunting protagonist is attested to by Thomas Middleton, who claims that not just this play, but this one character, has secured the playwright’s immortality: ‘Thy epitaph only the title be, / Write “Duchess” – that will fetch a tear for thee’ (Quarto 1623).
The real-life tragedy of the Duchess Giovanna d’Ancona (d. 1512) had been retold in a number of Italian novelle and translated into English by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure, vol. 2 (1567), before Webster turned to it as a source for his play. As its title suggests – ‘The Infortunate mariage of a Gentleman, called Antonie Bologna, with the Duchesse of Malfi, and the pitifull death of them both’ – the focus is on Antonio, who ‘ought to have contented himself with that degree and honor that hee had acquired by his deedes and glory of his vertues’.29 Webster rewrites the narrative from a female perspective, building upon the heroic agency with which he had imbued Vittoria in The White Devil. But where the latter’s claim to luminosity – ‘Through darkness diamonds spread their richest light’ (3.2.292) – finds few supporters, the Duchess’s virtue does indeed shine brightly, to such an extent that Ferdinand cannot bear to look upon her corpse: ‘Mine eyes dazzle’ (4.2.252). This moral investment in the female protagonist results in a tragedy of sharper ethical distinctions, without compromising the complexity of the Duchess’s character or the tensions she creates.
The Duchess ‘is caught between classes, between sexes, between tenses; as a young widow, she has a past and seeks a future; as an aristocrat who is also royal, she is independent, politically central, a ruler; but as a woman she is marginal, subordinate, dependent’.30 Critics disagree over the extent to which Webster intended audiences to blame the widowed Duchess for her secret marriage to a social inferior. Though widely practised, the remarriage of widows was much criticized in Jacobean England. Not only did it represent a slight to the memory of the first husband (if the wife could be unfaithful after his death she might have been unfaithful before it – see Hamlet), it was also viewed as having a deleterious effect on her children, who might lose or be forced to share their inheritance (again, see Hamlet). Given these disadvantages, the widow’s motivation could only be sexual desire; as Ferdinand states: ‘They are most luxurious / Will wed twice’ (1.2.209–10). What makes the Duchess’s situation worse is that her choice of second husband will impact upon her noble family and her kingdom. The fact that she marries a steward represents an assault on the class distinctions which define her own social status (her only given name is ‘Duchess of Malfi’); and suggests a more visceral contamination, not only through the mingling of bloods associated with intercourse, but through the mixed-class, ‘bastard’ children conceived outside Church-sanctified wedlock.31 Though she confines Antonio’s rule to the bedchamber, the Duchess is also guilty of a dereliction of political duty in raising such a man to power – the play’s tentative arguments in favour of meritocracy fail to convince: ‘The clandestine marriage is too brief, marked by adulterous shame, fertile but socially and affectively undeveloped, politically unregenerative, and always exploitative of Antonio, the alienated nocturnal sex worker who furtively exits before morning.’32 As this latter description implies, the Duchess is often perceived as an excessively sensual woman whose greedy devouring of apricots, nurtured in dung, indicates her selfish and base desires.
But although these attitudes are all represented in the play – by Bosola, the Cardinal, Ferdinand and the Duchess’s gentlewoman, Cariola – we also find powerful counter-arguments. Despite recycling much of The White Devil’s misogynist invective, the play invests both the Duchess’s pregnancy and the sexuality it manifests with transcendent value. For all the queasiness it provokes in Bosola, the Duchess’s pregnant body is a positive symbol of authority: ‘Her wholeness, equanimity and fecundity in contrast to her brothers’ mental and physical dysfunction suggests that she is the most able ruler among her siblings.’33 The fact that her son with Antonio will be raised to the throne ‘In’s mother’s right’ (5.5.116) implies the triumph of matrilineal succession. At the same time, the play supports the Duchess’s commitment to private, domestic life, casting a roseate glow around the marital bedchamber and deepening the pathos of her death scene through the promptings of maternal love: ‘look thou giv’st my little boy / Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl / Say her prayers ere she sleep’ (4.2.193–5). Perhaps most remarkable is the play’s validation of the Duchess’s declared right to sexual fulfilment, and her refusal to be rendered cold, chaste (and effectively dead) by the tyranny of her brothers: ‘This is flesh and blood, sir; / ’Tis not the figure, cut in alabaster, / Kneels at my husband’s tomb’ (1.2.362–4). She becomes a ‘hero of desire’,34 making political sacrifices and even risking her life for the sake of private pleasure.
Fundamental to the Duchess’s inscription as a heroine are the villains who seek to destroy her, namely her brother Ferdinand and her servant Bosola. Although Ferdinand justifies his fascination with his sister’s chastity in moral and political terms, it is disturbingly intrusive – he does not merely wish to know the secrets of her bedchamber, he physically appears there, having procured his own key. While this prurience exposes patriarchal assumptions about the need to supervise and control women’s bodies, it also hints at Ferdinand’s incestuous desire. Showing her their father’s dagger as a warning against sexual transgression, he invites the Duchess to die upon its point (3.2.292), ‘die’ being a common term for orgasm. He later offers her a hand and a ring to kiss, pretending that these are his own ‘love-token[s]’ (4.1.46), before ‘revealing’ them to be the possessions of her husband, Antonio, in whose place he compulsively imagines himself. Finally, his affliction with lycanthropy, a disease brought on by lovesickness, sees him once again in darkness, digging up graves to discover not just the buried secret of his sister’s murder but his own shocking motives for that murder. As the Duchess’s twin, Ferdinand is her dark double. His violent erotic fantasies contrast with the Duchess’s innocent marital flirtations; his Grand Guignol deceptions cast into relief her petty lies.
Where Ferdinand acts as an inverted image of the Duchess and must remain so, Bosola is profoundly altered by her death. Like Flaminio, Bosola is an intelligent man, disappointed in hopes to use his skills as a university graduate and soldier in the service of a worthy administration. Instead, he becomes a spy and assassin for not one but two corrupt princes. Too late he discovers that his quest for someone deserving of his loyalty should have been directed to the Duchess – the spectacle of her dead body being ‘As direful to my soul as is the sword / Unto a wretch hath slain his father’ (4.2.354–5). His ill-starred attempt to rescue Antonio expresses his desire to fulfil the Duchess’s wishes posthumously. Yet the spectacle of her death also has a powerful emotional and spiritual effect. She becomes an object of rapturous and implicitly erotic adoration when he offers to add colour to her pale lips with his heart’s blood. She is also a saintly, intercessionary figure when she briefly comes to life: ‘Her eye opes / And heaven in it seems to ope, that late was shut, / To take me up to mercy’ (4.2.334–6). Bosola’s sense of being haunted by the Duchess prompts a range of emotions to which he had appeared invulnerable: pity, compassion, love and penitence.35 It is this capacity to feel which qualifies him to deliver the play’s final maxim – so conspicuously missing from The White Devil. Thus, he urges: ‘Let worthy minds ne’er stagger in distrust/To suffer death or shame for what is just’ (5.5.106–8), even as he acknowledges that for him the revelation comes too late.
To read Ford’s The Broken Heart after Websterian tragedy is to experience the shock of virtue. As T. J. B. Spencer has observed: ‘There are no villains in The Broken Heart.’36 Rather, we find characters trying to resist the promptings of desire, hatred and revenge, in an effort which ironically proves as destructive as no resistance at all.
The play, first performed c. 1629 by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars, might be considered Ford’s most sophisticated and stylized work. The action centres on King Amyclas’s court, where the courtiers speak a measured, ceremonial language (the play is entirely in verse, unusual for Ford). They also perform carefully choreographed gestures, often accompanied by music or elaborated into dance, suggesting the influence of the court masque. The mood is sombre – Amyclas twice observes that there should be more vivacity in his court – and the sense of action unfolding in ‘slow motion’,37 not least through the use of onstage tableaux, expresses the ‘ideas of freezing, of immobility and of lifelessness’,38 which lie at the heart of this tragedy.
Ford pointedly locates the action in ancient Sparta, a culture much admired in the seventeenth century not only for the valour of its warriors but for its Stoic values, which included implacability in the face of misfortune and a repudiation of affectionate ties.39 Self-control was highly valued, as was heroic constancy to a particular ideal of the self. In a situation in which one might be forced to act in contradiction of this self or in which control over the emotions was no longer possible, suicide was not only a noble but a necessary choice.40 Thus, Ford has fashioned an intensely repressive world, in which outbursts of passionate feeling and violence are ideologically shocking. But this is also the setting for a kind of ‘problem play’41 that questions the value of subduing passion.
The crime which impels this revenge tragedy has no political ramifications, but is a private matter of the heart: the forced separation of the betrothed couple, Penthea and Orgilus, and the former’s marriage to a man she cannot love. The prologue hints at a historical source: ‘What may be here thought a fiction, when Time’s youth / Wanted some riper years was known A Truth’ – perhaps the enforced marriage between Lady Penelope Devereux (most famous as Sir Philip Sidney’s Stella) and Lord Rich in 1581.42 But where Penelope subsequently defied convention by conducting an adulterous relationship with Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy,43 by whom she had at least four children, The Broken Heart’s Penthea is ruinously faithful to her vows, both to her husband, Bassanes, and to her previously contracted lord, Orgilus, provoking a catastrophic self-division: ‘For she that’s wife to Orgilus, and lives / In known adultery with Bassanes, / Is at the best a whore’ (3.2.74–6). Vying with Calantha to be the broken heart of the title, Penthea descends into madness and starves herself to death. And yet, despite being ‘in appearance the most pathetic of seventeenth-century stage women, Penthea is simultaneously the most ruthless’.44 She punishes Bassanes by withholding her affection and aggressively performing the role of chaste and passive wife; she angrily spurns Orgilus, misrepresenting their entire romantic history as lust when he presses his claim; and she takes a sadistic pleasure in Ithocles’s frustrated love, urging heaven not to let his heart break until ‘some wild fires’ have ‘Scorch[ed], not consume[d], it’ (3.2.48–9). Orgilus’s abject cry: ‘I tell ’ee you grow wanton in my sufferance’ (2.3.108) identifies the only kind of wantonness in which Penthea will take any pleasure.
Much of the play is spent in denial of revenge. Orgilus repeatedly insists that he has no violent or passionate impulses when eyed with suspicion by the older generation, despite the fact that his name means ‘Angry’. What looks like the beginning of a revenge plot, when he puts on the disguise of a scholar/malcontent, comes to nothing. It is only the spectacle of Penthea’s madness and the revelation of her own vengefulness (‘[Pointing again at ITHOCLES] That’s he, and still ’tis he’. 4.2.122),45 that finally releases Orgilus from stasis. But even then, his plotting of revenge is curiously silent and subdued. Brian Morris has observed: ‘I know no other Jacobean play46 in which the figure of the revenger is presented with this degree of self-sufficiency. The audience is never permitted to share Orgilus’ reasons; his thoughts are always his own.’47 Perhaps Ford was too keenly aware of his belatedness: it was nearly fifty years since Hieronimo had appeared on stage debating the ethics of revenge in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the play which had inaugurated the fashion for revenge tragedy and defined all of Shakespeare’s works in this genre. It may be that Ford, even more than Webster, felt that the ‘will he, won’t he?’ tension of revenge tragedy had been finally exhausted. But it is also true that The Broken Heart’s interests lie more with the dull attrition of despair than with the adrenaline rush of bloody revenge. It is more concerned with the morality of a self-denial that causes suffering, than with the ethics of a revenge which claims to end it.
In general, the play praises those who control their emotions or at least hide them behind masks of implacability. Bassanes redeems himself under the influence of Stoic philosophy, changing from a ludicrously jealous husband to a more sober figure, worthy to be Sparta’s marshal. Calantha’s extraordinary repression of grief in the dance scene, where she continues as though unaffected after each tragic announcement, is also commended as admirably masculine behaviour and what is required of a monarch. Yet these characters are arguably diminished by their inhuman self-control. Indeed, Penthea’s and Calantha’s inability to keep up these poses without sustaining fatal internal injuries may be something of a relief to the audience, otherwise denied the extreme emotion which is one of tragedy’s chief pleasures.
Perhaps the most fascinating instance of The Broken Heart’s ambivalence about passion is the way in which it shapes the play’s four major death scenes. Ford imitates Webster in viewing death as a theatrical opportunity for characters to achieve the idealized and stable identities which have eluded them in life: they strike poses and utter speeches, often in elaborate settings they have designed themselves, with accompanying music.48 But if dying in The Broken Heart demonstrates the characters’ Stoic heroism and consistency, it also acknowledges their victimization by and submission to passionate feeling. For example, Orgilus’s decision to bleed to death, standing on the stage and grasping two posts (unlike his enemy who dies sitting down), expresses his commitment to Stoic values. Yet his bloodletting is also purgative: ‘opening a vein too full, too lively’ (5.2.123) was a recommended cure for those oppressed by excessive anger or lust. Similarly, having placed a ring on his corpse’s finger, Calantha manifests Stoic consistency in wishing to follow her husband, Ithocles, into death, but also a kind of emotional incontinence in being unable to live after he is gone. This is perfectly expressed through the ambiguity of her suicide in which she wills her heart to break. The cry of ‘Crack, crack’ as uttered by Olivia Williams in the 1994 RSC production was described by Peter Holland as ‘one of the most extraordinary and appalling sounds I have ever heard in the theatre’.49 To what extent this appallingness lies in the self-destructive will of the heroine or in the repression which brought it about remains for the audience to decide.
With ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore – performed c. 1630 by Queen Henrietta’s Men at the Cockpit Theatre – Ford develops further his interest in romantic ‘misalliance’ and the denial of the heart’s desires for the sake of social convention.50 Yet here he is much more daring, urging audiences to care for a brother and sister who give themselves up to incestuous lust.
Ford appears to have had no single source for his play, but to have drawn upon a number of incest narratives,51 perhaps inspired by a theatrical fascination which is hinted at in The Duchess of Malfi, but brought out into the open by Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King (1611), Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1621) and Richard Brome’s The Lovesick Court (1638). The incest theme has often been thought to exemplify the worst excesses of Jacobean and Caroline sensationalism. Yet it could produce a variety of effects, dependent on a basic division between innocent and knowing lovers, and between those who consummate the union and those who resist it. As Lois E. Bueler observes:
Unwitting incest plays tend to be plays about virtue, in which the triumph of good or at least good luck is actually aided by the aborted threat of incest. Witting incest plays, on the other hand, are about evil, the evil of an aggravated selfishness which takes that portion of one’s own which is intended for others and reserves it for oneself.52
Part of the fascination of Ford’s treatment of incest in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is the way in which it confuses these categories, with the lovers fully cognizant of their blood relationship and the sinfulness of incest as they consummate their union, yet maintaining an appearance of romantic heroism and even virtue. Although Giovanni’s final appearance – soaked in blood, with the heart of Annabella on a dagger – is that of a ‘frantic madman’ (5.6.40), Ford’s representation of incest at other points is surprisingly non-judgemental.
While incest was condemned from the early modern pulpit as a monstrous sin, it may also have been comparatively common. In a sermon given in 1628 Arthur Lake, Bishop of Bath and Wells, pointed out that if God had not created sexual aversion between close relatives, incest would be hard to avoid for ‘the necessarie cohabitation of Parents and Children, Brethren and Sisters would yeeld too much opportunitie, and be too strong an incentive unto this unlawfull coniunction’.53 Equally, the fact that brothers and sisters were often raised and educated apart (Giovanni has been at university; Annabella remained at home) created the conditions for what we might now identify as Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA), where family members long separated, perhaps by the process of adoption, find themselves sexually compelled to one another when reunited. Not only was incest probably more common, it was leniently punished. Until 1650, along with fornication, adultery and drunkenness, incest was prosecuted by the ecclesiastical rather than the secular courts. The offender would be made to stand in the parish church, dressed in penitential white, with a placard bearing the words ‘FOR INCEST’, before confessing their sin and asking for forgiveness.54 Though humiliating, this was far preferable to the physical punishments given out by the secular justice system, which included whipping and branding for prostitutes, and death by hanging for thieves. In fact, there were very few prosecutions for incest in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England. This may be because it occurred only rarely or because it remained secret or because it was a crime that did not unduly trouble local authorities.
In ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore incest repeatedly disappears from view, either reinvented as an ennobling passion or displaced by the crime of adultery. For example, the fact that Annabella’s suitors are so flawed throws into relief the virtues of Giovanni,55 whose love is free from any financial motive and is expressed in the play’s most lyrical language. He invokes Petrarchan and Neoplatonic terms to praise Annabella’s beauty: ‘View well her face, and in that little round, / You may observe a world of variety: / For colour, lips; for sweet perfumes, her breath …’ (2.5.49–51), thereby casting incestuous love in an irresistibly romantic mould. This perverse idealization is reinforced by the play’s allusions to Romeo and Juliet.56 By providing Giovanni with the Friar as confidant, and Annabella with the Nurse-like Puttana, Ford establishes the couple as a pair of vulnerable, star-crossed lovers. Moreover, Annabella’s infatuation begins as she unknowingly glimpses her brother from the balcony. Her dismay on discovering his identity is rendered more acceptable through its echoes of Shakespeare’s Juliet: ‘My only love sprung from my only hate! / Too early seen unknown, and known too late!’ (1.5.135–6). We might afford Ford’s lovers more pity, given that their tragedy is not enmity between their families, but too great an affinity because they are one family.
A further distraction from incest is the limelight-stealing role given to adultery. Where the former is quietly domestic, contained within Florio’s household and not named as such until 3.6, adultery repeatedly breaks out into scenes of violence and confusion. Hippolita, the spurned mistress, attempts to poison Soranzo at his wedding feast, while her husband bungles a revenge plot to dispatch his rival, thereby causing the death of Bergetto. Soranzo and Giovanni are partly motivated to kill Annabella through their self-identification as the cuckolded husband (Ford had a career-long fascination with Othello), rather than any moral outrage relating to incestuous love.57 Finally, the Cardinal apparently overlooks incest in favour of adultery when he delivers his famous summation of the tragedy: ‘ ’Tis pity she’s a whore,’ (5.6.156) with ‘whore’ being a term to describe female infidelity. This shifting of blame on to the unchaste and adulterous Annabella may have been a feature of the play’s reception. In his commendatory poem, Thomas Ellice refers to Giovanni as ‘unblamed’ and focuses on Annabella: ‘With admiration I beheld this whore …’58
By comparison with its overt condemnation of adultery, the play’s interrogation of incest is both marginal – pushed to the edges of the play in the dialogues between Giovanni and the Friar (1.1, 2.5 and 5.3) – and surprisingly complex. Giovanni’s scholarly defence is blasphemous: the biblical prohibition carries no weight with him, and rather prompts him to deny divine providence and the existence of heaven and hell. Like Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, he is arguably directed by ‘a fatal intellectual pride’, both men ‘provid[ing] spectacular examples of the catastrophe attendant upon the misuse of the divinely given powers of reason’.59 And yet, both of these rebellious thinkers have also inspired sympathy as they challenge old orthodoxies, responding to the new spirit of intellectual and personal ambition which defined the Renaissance world.60 More specifically, Giovanni’s rejection of the incest taboo as ‘a peevish sound, / A customary form’ (1.1.24–5) may have gained credibility through its echoes of the nominalist philosophy of Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) – like Giovanni, an alumnus of the University of Bologna – which questioned the existence of universal laws, and re-examined what was natural and unnatural.61 Remarkably, even the Friar admits that if one ignores divine law, the prohibition on incest will not hold (2.5.29–32).
Giovanni’s shocking appearance in 5.6, drenched in his sister’s blood and wielding her heart upon his dagger, represents a final judgement which seems to brook no further argument. It destroys the romantic illusions/allusions which have built up around the relationship by casting Giovanni as a sadistic Cupid, torturing the beloved. Moreover, the martyrological significance of the pierced heart finds Giovanni guilty of blasphemy and of idolatry,62 without the desire for self-immolation that partly redeems Romeo and Juliet’s erotic passion (it is not clear whether Giovanni would commit suicide after Annabella’s death, if given the chance to live). At the same time, this scene offers the clearest condemnation of incest as socially (and therefore psychologically) damaging. Giovanni’s claustrophobic image of Annabella’s heart as one ‘in which mine is entombed’ (5.6.25) echoes the anthropological basis for the taboo on incest, the latter defined as ‘A refusal of social obligations, a withdrawal from “the formation and maintenance of suprafamilial bonds on which major economic, political and religious functions of the society are dependent” ’.63 Giovanni is physically isolated for most of the play, usually in private dialogue with the Friar or Annabella, and he is awkwardly integrated into larger social gatherings. Incest exacerbates his withdrawal far more than it does in the case of Annabella, who remains ‘half in her brother’s world of sexual self-indulgence but also, crucially, half out of it, placed in a wider social world and subject to the moderating demands of its conventional sexual morality’.64 Thus, Giovanni’s presentation of her heart on a dagger emblematizes a dangerously introverted, claustrophobic desire. But, equally, what started as a heavily romanticized passion, defined against the lovelessness of the play’s other marriage arrangements, has been bled dry. R. J. Kaufmann argues that ‘Giovanni’s tragedy … rests on the most terrible sacrifice of love – not of the object of love only, but of one’s ability to give and receive love.’65
It is this act of self-mutilation that we find resonating throughout the tragedies of Webster and Ford. Where The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi explore a new susceptibility to emotion experienced by the ruthless Flaminio and Bosola, Ford’s tragedies dramatize this process in reverse, examining the consequences of a love that hardens into unfeeling (although in The Broken Heart this is only ever an illusion and the heart literally cracks under the strain). By reading all four plays together in this way, we may be further inclined to reject the notion of Webster and Ford as amoral sensationalists, committed to horror. Rather, they appear deeply engaged not only with the destruction of virtuous, life-giving characters, such as the Duchess and Annabella, but with villains whose capacity for love, compassion and remorse is awoken just at the moment when their lives must end. In these tragedies of wasted potential, Webster and Ford show a keen moral awareness, and a desire to extend the pity and compassion, not just of their protagonists, but of the audience as well.
1. For further discussion, see Charles J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936, reprint 1970), pp. 80–110.
2. Charles R. Forker, The Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (Cardondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 496. On other possible echoes, see pp. 493–6.
3. Charles Kingsley, ‘Plays and Puritans’ (1856), reprinted in Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays (London, 1873), pp. 1–80, 18.
4. S. P. Sherman, discussing ’Tis Pity’s Giovanni and Annabella, in ‘Forde’s Contribution to the Decadence of the Drama’ in John Fordes Dramatische Werke, ed. W. Bang (Louvain and London: David Nutt, 1908), pp. vii–xix, xii.
5. J. R. Mulryne on Webster in ‘The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi’, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 1 (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), pp. 201–25, 204.
6. Kingsley concludes that ‘We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or his servants to see such representations,’ ‘Plays and Puritans’, pp. 25–6.
7. See Sherman’s discussion of ’ Tis Pity in ‘Forde’s Contribution’, pp. xii–xiii. For a thorough rebuttal of this argument, see Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Julie Sanders, Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999).
8. Forker, The Skull Beneath the Skin, p. 288.
9. George Saintsbury remarked of the fifth act in The Duchess of Malfi: ‘[it] is a kind of gratuitous appendix of horrors stuck on without art or reason’, A History of Elizabethan Literature (London: Macmillan, 1887), p. 278.
10. George Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vols, (London: Constable, 1932), vol. 3, p. 317.
11. Sherman, ‘Forde’s Contribution’, p. xviii.
12. David L. Frost, The School of Shakespeare: The Influence of Shakespeare on English Drama 1600–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 122–3, 120, 131.
13. Richard Madelaine, ‘Sensationalism and Melodrama in Ford’s Plays’ in John Ford: Critical Re-Visions, ed. Michael Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 29–54, 47, 51.
14. Christina Luckyj, A Winter’s Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 150.
15. Martin Wiggins, Journeymen in Murder: The Assassin in English Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 165.
16. See Christina Luckyj (ed.), The White Devil (London: A & C Black, 1996, rev. 2008), p. xx.
17. On the tradition of anti-Catholicism in revenge tragedy see Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 23–55. On Ford’s greater sympathy with Catholicism, see Lisa Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), and Gillian Woods, ‘The Confessional Identities of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: A Critical Guide, ed. Lisa Hopkins (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 114–35.
18. On ideas of Italy in early modern England, see Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
19. On Webster and Ford as court satirists, see Albert H. Tricomi, Anti-Court Drama in England, 1603–1642 (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1989), pp. 110–20.
20. See Lisa Hopkins, The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 2, and Naomi Conn Liebler (ed.), The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2002).
21. Mulryne, ‘The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi’, p. 211.
22. Forker, The Skull Beneath the Skin, p. 264.
23. See Laure A. Finke, ‘Painting Women: Images of Femininity in Jacobean Tragedy’, Theatre Journal 35 (1984), pp. 357–70, 357.
24. Angel Day, The English Secretary; or, Methode of writing epistles and letters (London: C. Burbie, 1599), Part 2, p. 103. For further discussion of the eroticism of the closet and the secretary role, see Alan Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations 50 (Spring 1995), pp. 76–100.
25. On the way in which Flaminio’s experience of disinheritance and disappointment echoes that of many young Jacobeans, see Tricomi, Anti-Court Drama, pp. 110–20.
26. Dena Goldberg, ‘ “By Report”: The Spectator as Voyeur in Webster’s The White Devil’, English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987), pp. 67–84, 71.
27. Ibid., p. 75.
28. See Christina Luckyj, ‘Gender, Rhetoric and Performance in John Webster’s The White Devil’ in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 218–32, 226.
29. William Painter, The second tome of the Palace of Pleasure (London: Henry Bynneman and Nicholas England, 1567).
30. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 159–60.
31. The de praesenti marriage that the Duchess performs in Act one would have constituted a legal union, indissoluble once the couple had consummated it. However, it still needed to be performed in church to be fully legitimate.
32. Barbara Correll here summarizes the position of, for example, Frank Whigham and Theodora A. Jankowski, in ‘Malvolio at Malfi: Managing Desire in Shakespeare and Webster’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007), pp. 65–92, 72.
33. Sid Ray, ‘ “So Troubled with the Mother”: The Politics of Pregnancy in The Duchess of Malfi’ in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 17–28, 22.
34. See Linda Woodbridge, ‘Queen of Apricots: The Duchess of Malfi, Hero of Desire’ in The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, pp. 161–84, 162.
35. This haunting extends to the play itself. Not only is the Duchess reanimated through the ‘ECHO from the Duchess’s grave’ and the ‘face folded in sorrow’ experienced by Antonio in 5.3, but in some productions she reappears on stage as a ghostly figure to oversee her own revenge. Moreover, in Lewis Theobald’s 1733 adaptation, The Fatal Secret: A Tragedy (pub. 1735), the Duchess is not actually dead, but lives on to be reconciled with Antonio.
36. T. J. B. Spencer (ed.), The Broken Heart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 36.
37. Marion Lomax, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xiii.
38. Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre, p. 162.
39. Ford’s interest in Neo-Stoic ideas is evident in his two early prose works, The Golden Mean (1613) and A Line of Life (1620).
40. For further discussion, see Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris: Didier Erudition, 1984).
41. This term is used by Sherman in ‘Forde’s Contribution’, p. xi. For further discussion of the play’s moral ambiguity, see Harriet Hawkins, ‘Mortality, Morality and Modernity in The Broken Heart: Some Dramatic and Critical Counter-Arguments’ in John Ford: Critical Re-Visions, pp. 129–52.
42. See S. P. Sherman, ‘Stella and the Broken Heart’, PMLA 24 (1909), pp. 274–85, and Giovanni M. Carsaniga, ‘ “The Truth” in John Ford’s The Broken Heart’, Comparative Literature 10 (Autumn, 1958), pp. 344–8. A further allegorical level may be the identification of Calantha and Ithocles with Elizabeth and Essex, and of Nearchus’s peaceful succession to the throne with that of James I. See Verna Ann Foster and Stephen Foster, ‘Structure and History in The Broken Heart: Sparta, England and the “Truth” ’, English Literary Renaissance 18.2 (Spring, 1988), pp. 305–28.
43. Ford’s first published work, Fame’s Memorial (1606), was an elegy for Blount, dedicated to Penelope.
44. Clifford Leech, John Ford (Harlow: Longman, 1964), p. 27.
45. See Roberta Barker, ‘Death and the Married Maiden: Performing Gender in The Broken Heart’, English Studies in Canada 30.2 (June 2004), pp. 67–89, on Penthea’s influence, particularly in Michael Boyd’s 1994 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
46. The slip here is revealing: The Broken Heart is a Caroline rather than a Jacobean play, but its strong links with the earlier period, not least through its debts to Webster, explain the mistake.
47. Brian Morris (ed.), The Broken Heart (London: A & C Black, 1994), pp. xx–xxi.
48. Michael Neill describes the dramatists’ ‘self-perfecting aesthetic of death’ in Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 355, 363. See also his discussion of The Duchess of Malfi, pp. 328–53.
49. Peter Holland, ‘Modality Ford’s Strange Journeys’, Times Literary Supplement (28 October 1994), p. 41.
50. See R. J. Kaufmann’s use of this term in ‘Ford’s Tragic Perspective’, in Elizabethan Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Kaufmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 356–72, 357.
51. Possible sources include Canace and Macareo in Ovid’s Heroides, translated in Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion (1624); and Doralice and her twin Lyzaran in Francois de Rosset’s Histoires Tragiques de Notre Temps (1615).
52. Lois E. Bueler, ‘The Structural Uses of Incest in English Renaissance Drama’, Renaissance Drama 15 (1984), pp. 115–45, 127.
53. Arthur Lake, Sermons with Some Religious and Divine Meditations (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1629), pp. 21–2.
54. See Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 245–9.
55. Some critics find Parma fulfilling the same role, with Corinne S. Abate even identifying the city as the ‘whore’ of the play’s title, ‘Identifying the Real Whore of Parma’ in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: A Critical Guide, pp. 94–113. See also Sonia Massai’s discussion of the fallen city in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (London: Methuen, 2011), pp. 6–20.
56. For further discussion, see Robert Smallwood, ‘’Tis Pity and Romeo and Juliet’, Cahiers Elisabéthains 20 (1981), pp. 49–70.
57. See Raymond Powell, ‘The Adaptation of a Shakespearean Genre: Othello and Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), pp. 582–92.
58. This point is made by Sonia Massai, who argues that ‘What is staggeringly radical about Ford’s play is not its decadence, but its profoundly moral concern about the level of disorder unleashed by the extreme passions signified by Annabella as “whore” ’, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, p. 36.
59. Cyrus Hoy, “Ignorance in Knowledge” Marlowe’s Faustus and Ford’s Giovanni’, Modern Philology 57 (1959–60), pp. 145–54, 146.
60. See John S. Wilks, The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 264.
61. See Richard McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 216; and Massai, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, p. 12.
62. The fullest discussion of these meanings is given by Michael Neill, ‘ “What Strange Riddle’s This?”: Deciphering ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ in John Ford: Critical Re-Visions, pp. 153–80.
63. McCabe, quoting the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law, p. 18.
64. Martin Wiggins (ed.), ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (London: A & C Black, 2003), p. 19.
65. R. J. Kaufmann, ‘Ford’s Tragic Perspective’ in Elizabethan Drama, p. 370.