Annabella (Saskia Reeves) and Giovanni (Jonathan Cullen) after consummating their relationship, Act II, scene i, in the 1991 Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by David Leveaux; Joe Cocks Studio Collection © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
John Ford was born into a well-to-do and well-connected Devonshire family in the spring of 1586, and on Tuesday 12 April he was baptised at St Michael’s church in his home town of Ilsington on the eastern edge of Dartmoor. He was the second son of six children: Henry, the eldest brother, who was about two years older than John; Thomas (baptised 6 September 1587); Elizabeth (baptised 11 January 1593); Edward (baptised 29 September 1596); and Jane, who is known only from a record of her burial. Their father, Thomas Ford, owned land in several local parishes, and their mother Elizabeth (née Popham) was a niece of the Attorney General John Popham (i53i?-i6o7), who was later knighted and became the Lord Chief Justice. The Fords too were legally minded: in particular, Thomas senior’s cousin, also Thomas Ford (1567–1635), eventually became a judge and a senior member of the Middle Temple, one of London’s four eminent law societies known as the Inns of Court. Both Henry, in October 1600, and John, in November 1602, were also admitted to the Middle Temple as junior members. John remained there for most of his life: he was still a member in 1638, when the published edition of his comedy, The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, included commendatory verses addressed to ‘Master John Ford of the Middle Temple’.
So Ford left home at the age of sixteen to live and study in London.1 He joined an institution that was not only a prestigious law school but also a centre of literary and dramatic activity: a prominent junior member at the time of his arrival was the fashionable commercial playwright John Marston.2 Initially, however, Ford had no discernible literary inclinations: it was not until 1606, at the age of twenty, that he wrote his first works for publication. It is tempting to link this with his money difficulties that year: in the spring he was expelled from the Middle Temple, apparently for failing to pay his buttery bill, and Fame’s Memorial and Honour Triumphant appeared soon afterwards. Both works, celebrating noble lives and values, look like thinly disguised bids for patronage; the fact that the particular aristocrat honoured in Fame’s Memorial was the late Earl of Devonshire suggests he may have been hoping that local connections would work in his favour. In any event, by June 1608 his financial affairs had become stable enough for him to petition for readmission to the Middle Temple, which was granted on payment of his debts and a £2 fine.
What we know of his London life during the ensuing years depends mainly on indirect or negative evidence. Only one document in the Middle Temple’s records bears on his career there, and on closer examination it proves bedevilled by an insoluble ambiguity. In May 1617, the society suffered an outbreak of indiscipline after its authorities had refused a group of junior members’ request to liberalize its dress code, which required the wearing of lawyers’ caps at meals and in church. The four young men concerned wanted to wear hats instead, and, when rebuffed, chose to flout the rules. When they were threatened with expulsion, the Middle Temple erupted in protest: some members defiantly wore their hats at communal meals, while others absented themselves altogether and dined in their chambers, or at eating-houses in the town. The authorities cracked down on 30 May, formally censuring forty- nine members. The tenth name on the list (which is not arranged in order of seniority) is John Ford. But by now there were two John Fords at the Middle Temple: the second, a young man from Somerset, had been admitted the previous November. It is impossible to say for certain which of them the authorities meant to rebuke. If it was the poet, then he would have been one of the oldest participants in a primarily youthful rebellion: of the forty-eight others named, eighteen were admitted in 1616 and 1617, and only five before 1610. The odds favour the Somerset Ford, but we cannot rule out the poet, who was evidently capable of association with much younger men: later on, several of the friends who wrote commendatory verses for his published plays were around twenty years his junior. The same material suggests a circle of acquaintance far wider than the closed society of the Middle Temple: by the 1620s he could claim friendship with successful London dramatists like Webster and Massinger, with the sons of important men, and with lawyers in other Inns of Court, notably Gray’s Inn where his cousin (yet another John Ford) was a member. Perhaps Ford, if it was he, became unwittingly embroiled in the ‘hats’ controversy simply because he was in the habit of eating out for other reasons.
It is not known what he was doing for a living at this time. He may have worked in some legal capacity, though there is no record that he was ever called to the bar. During the 1610s there was a trickle of literary writing: A Funeral Elegy (1612) on the death of William Peter, wrongly assigned by the publisher to one ‘W.S.’; a prose tract, The Golden Mean (1613); a religious poem, Christ’s Bloody Sweat (1613); a lost biography, probably in verse, of his murdered Middle Temple colleague, Sir Thomas Overbury (1615); and a moralistic pamphlet, A Line of Life (1620).3 At some time he also came into possession of two modest holdings of land in Devon. The death of his father in the spring of 1610 made little impact on his financial position, whatever it now was: Ford senior bequeathed his second son only a £10 lump sum, whereas the two younger sons were left annual incomes of the same amount. This has sometimes been interpreted as a sign that John had somehow incurred his father’s displeasure, though it is also possible that by now he was well enough established in London not to need more than a token legacy. In any event, he received a little more when his brother Henry died in 1616 after less than four years of married life: apparently concerned to consolidate the family’s Devonshire property in the hands of his heirs, he willed John an annuity of £20 in exchange for his two holdings of land. But this was not enough to make him independently wealthy: £20 a year would not have covered his living expenses at the Middle Temple.
We don’t know precisely when he began to write plays. The question is related to the equally uncertain issue of what plays, extant and lost, make up his total dramatic canon. At its solid core are the seven that were published in authorized editions between 1629 and 1639: The Lover’s Melancholy, The Broken Heart, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Love’s Sacrifice, Perkin Warbeck, The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, and The Lady’s Trial. Two other published plays, written collaboratively, name him as part-author, and scholars over the years have attempted, sometimes convincingly and sometimes not, to attribute four more to him in whole or part. A further seven titles of lost plays are associated with him in seventeenth-century documents of varying credibility. Discounting the triumphs of hope over plausibility, John Ford probably had a hand in fifteen plays still known to us.4
Many of those fifteen are hard to date exactly, but from the available evidence there emerges a blurry picture of Ford’s overall dramatic career. He probably started in the early 1620s as a junior writing partner of Thomas Dekker, a playwright of long experience who had recently emerged white-haired from seven years out of circulation in a London debtors’ prison. Ford may have come to know him through John Webster, who had himself been Dekker’s junior collaborator about fifteen years earlier (and whose father had, incidentally, been one of Dekker’s creditors at the time of his arrest); Webster probably knew Ford as a fellow writer of Overbury memorial verse, which was almost a little industry in mid-i6ios literary culture. In 1621, Ford and Dekker joined the comic actor William Rowley to produce The Witch of Edmonton, a tragedy based on a recent murder case. Their four other known collaborations all date from 1624: The Sun’s Darling, a ‘moral masque’ and the only survivor of the four; The Fairy Knight, The Late Murder in Whitechapel, a speed-written tragedy to which Webster and Rowley also contributed; and The Bristol Merchant. Meanwhile Ford began an association with the King’s Men, England’s principal acting company: he wrote the tragicomedy The Laws of Candy for them at some time before 1623, possibly working from an outline provided by a more experienced playwright, and in late 1625 he joined Webster and Massinger as part of a syndicate of writers hired to finish off The Fair Maid of the Inn, the last work of the recently dead house dramatist, John Fletcher. A few years later, he began to write without a collaborator, and the King’s Men staged his first three plays: the tragicomedy The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), the tragedy The Broken Heart (1629?), and the lost Beauty in a Trance (1630?), which may have been a comedy. Thereafter he wrote exclusively for the companies managed by Christopher Beeston (d. 1638) at the Phoenix theatre in Drury Lane: ’Tis Pity for Queen Henrietta’s Men, along with Love’s Sacrifice (1632?), Perkin Warbeck (1633?), and The Fancies, Chaste and Noble (1635?); and, for Beeston’s Boys, The Lady’s Trial (1638). After publishing the last of these in 1639, Ford disappears from history. It is not known when, where, or how he died.5
Except for his historical tragedy of Perkin Warbeck, Ford tended to devise his own plots, so ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore has no single, clear-cut narrative source: in the process of composition he synthesized situations, scenes, and character relationships from a range of material. He may well have found a hint for the initial scenario, with the suitors seeking Annabella’s hand in marriage, in John Florio’s Italian phrase-book, First Fruits (1578). The section devoted to ‘Amorous talk’ includes a conversation where a would-be lover describes the object of his passion: like Annabella, ‘She is a maid, daughter unto a merchant of this city, so famous and great.’6 Florio also gave Ford a name for the merchant, as well as a few phrases quoted in the play (one of them on the very next page of ‘Amorous talk’). Two of the suitors also took their names from an old book: George Whetstone’s Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582) includes characters called Soranso and Bargetto. The incest plot inlaid in this situation has some parallels with a story in Francois de Rosset’s Histoires Tragiques de Notre Temps (Paris, 1615), about the sexual relationship between a brilliant student and his older, married sister; Rosset also supplied the name Richardetto.
In filling in the outlines of his story, Ford drew on what was to him classic modern drama. Simple theatrical necessity may dictate that a forbidden love needs confidants to give the lovers someone else to discuss it with and the play another angle of approach, but Ford’s decision to make these figures a friar and a female servant, both of an older generation, must have been made with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1595–6) in mind.7 As we shall see, parallels with and deviations from the Elizabethan tragedy sometimes influence the way we respond to the situation in Ford’s play, and these would certainly have been recognizable to the original audience: Caroline theatrical culture had a strong nostalgic element, so the plays of the previous generation were frequently revived, and new dramatic writing often felt the weight of an established canon bearing down upon it.8 Ford himself is often characterized as a ‘belated’ writer who only arrived in London as a teenager after the first production of Hamlet (1600) and who only began to write plays in his mid-thirties after the golden Shakespearian quarter-century of English Renaissance drama had come to an end. Scholars have accordingly been prone to see echoes of that earlier drama in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Sometimes these are unmistakable. In the 1630s any climactic scene of tragic love and murder could scarcely avoid comparison with Othello (1604), then Shakespeare’s most popular and influential play, and Giovanni’s killing Annabella ‘in a kiss’ (V.v.84) is a direct parallel (compare Othello V.ii.368–9).9 Similarly, in Annabella’s incarceration and her communication with the outside world using a letter written in her own blood and dropped from her balcony, Ford imitated what was probably the oldest play still in the Caroline repertory, Thomas Kyd’s blood-and- thunder classic The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1586), in which Bel-Imperia receives similar treatment. But other suggested links are more tendentious, though sometimes suggestive; in particular, there are local parallels with two plays by Ford’s fellow Middle Templar John Marston. The scenic device of Annabella and confidante watching her suitors from the stage balcony (I.ii) was previously used in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1600), and Ford may also have been struck by Antonio’s, admittedly conventional, love rhetoric in the same scene:
Could your quick eye strike through these gashéd wounds,
You should behold a heart, a heart, fair creature,
Raging more wild than is this frantic sea. (I.i.227–9)
It is an image that recurs throughout Ford’s play, gradually shedding its metaphorical trappings until it becomes gruesomely literal at the climax: in their first scene together, Giovanni tells his sister,
Rip up my bosom: there thou shalt behold
A heart in which is writ the truth I speak, (I.ii.205–6)
and Lord Soranzo too avers, ‘Did you but see my heart…’(III.ii.24). Annabella’s eventual concession to Soranzo, ‘If I hereafter find that I must marry, / It shall be you or none’ (III.ii.62–3) in turn echoes Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605), in which Crispinella tells a suitor, with similar evasiveness, ‘if ever I marry it shall be you, and I will marry, and yet I hope I do not say it shall be you neither’ (IV.i.66–7), while her sister Beatrice shares a concern expressed by Giovanni: ‘Sister, shall we know one another in the other world?’ (IV.iv.65–6; compare ’Tis Pity V.v.36–7).10
What is striking about these various source materials is their early date. Most of them were written in or soon after the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and many were long out of print at the time Ford was working as a dramatist.11 (Florio’s First Fruits was only ever printed once, in 1578.) In his research for this tragedy it seems that he deliberately looked at rather old books, and the text itself contains many details, which would have been more obvious in the 1630s than they are now, indicating that he intended it as a period piece set in the recent past. Putana’s remark that Grimaldi has served in a war between the Papal states and Milan (I.ii.77) casually places the play in mid-sixteenth-century Italian history, and Soranzo’s taste for the love poems of Sannazaro (Il.ii) suggests the same, but unspoken details say the most. Nobody in Ford’s day wore a codpiece, as Bergetto does, and no seventeenth-century aristocratic wedding had a masque so simple as the one given in honour of Soranzo and Annabella in IV.i. Most telling of all is the fact that no character ever uses or even mentions a gun: firearms were commonplace weapons in Caroline plays set in contemporary times, but this one rigorously sticks to rapier and dagger.
Ford’s reason for choosing a period setting probably lay in his understanding of Renaissance literary theory. One of the ways this differentiated between the two principal dramatic genres was in terms of the historicity or otherwise of the stories they told: comic plots were fictitious, whereas tragic events had actually happened, and so were the more piteous and terrible. Thus in the prologues to his comedies, Ford tends to insist on the originality of his own invention, whereas the usually no less invented scenarios of his tragedies are said to have a basis in reality: as he puts it in The Broken Heart,
What may be here thought a fiction, when time’s youth
Wanted some riper years was known a truth.12
Tragedy is conceived as the present-day residue of real human lives, as the sufferings of one age turn into sad stories for another: in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the imprisoned Annabella, recognizing that she is doomed, anticipates the way that, in ‘ages that are yet unborn’, her life will become ‘A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy’ (V.i.7–8) – in fact, the very tragedy which the theatre audience is watching.
Naturally all this is a hindrance to scholars in determining exactly when the play was written: the source material is remote from Ford’s own time and there are no contemporary allusions. The overall pattern of his work during the late 1620s and early 1630s gives scope for a hypothesis – he seems to have written one play a year between 1628 and 1633, with 1631 suggestively vacant – but the only piece of external evidence is maddeningly opaque: in the dedication to the printed edition of 1633, he speaks of ’Tis Pity as ‘these first fruits of my leisure’. Some scholars infer that it was his first play written without a collaborator, before his three Blackfriars plays of 1628–30, but others think it was simply the first product of some indeterminable period of ‘leisure’. It is possible that this leisure followed the end of his (perhaps contractual) relationship with the King’s Men, when he was free to write for whichever company he chose. He may not even have had a particular company in mind: the play demands no unusual stage facilities, and though a lot of props are required, they are mostly commonplace objects that would have been part of any well-equipped company’s stock; only Annabella’s heart would need to be specially procured.
In any event, the play was staged for the sophisticated, socially elevated audiences who frequented Christopher Beeston’s Phoenix theatre. The resident company, Queen Henrietta’s Men, numbered fourteen principal actors, plus boy apprentices, which would have been ample for Ford’s modest casting requirements. Its leading man was Richard Perkins (d. 1650), who had been acting since 1602; what we know of his career indicates a performer of some range, from scheming villains to concerned fathers, and his likeliest roles would have been Vasques or Florio. (Vasques is the better of the two parts, but by the 1630s acting companies tended not to concentrate all their most rewarding roles in the hands of a single star actor.) The female parts would all have been taken by male actors: the young women, Annabella, Hippolita, and Philotis, would certainly have been played by boys, and perhaps also Putana, though it was not unknown for an adult male actor to play an older woman.13
The playhouse itself had an indoor stage and auditorium lit by candles, which were trimmed during the act-intervals while music was played; early performances were thus divided into five sections rather than the two of modern convention. The candles may also have enabled the company to control the level of stage light in a way that was not possible in outdoor theatres, so that nocturnal sequences like the end of Act III could be played in relative (though probably not absolute) darkness. The stage had three main entrances set across the back facade, two of them doors and the middle one a large curtained alcove known as the discovery space, which enabled large props (such as Annabella’s bed in V.v) to be brought onto the stage and could also be set with scenery to represent a confined space like Soranzo’s and the Friar’s studies in Il.ii and Ill.vi respectively. There was also a stage balcony, used in three scenes (I.ii, Ill.ii, and V.i) and large enough to accommodate at least two actors.
We have no eye-witness accounts of the play in production at the Phoenix, although it seems to have been successful: the 1633 edition mentions ‘the general commendation deserved by the actors in their presentment of this tragedy’. There is a good chance that it was performed on one of the forty-nine occasions that Queen Henrietta’s Men appeared at court between 1629 and 1633, which may have been where it was seen by the 1633 edition’s dedicatee, the Earl of Peterborough; it may also have been part of the company’s touring repertory during the early 1630s. However, it evidently belonged to the theatre’s manager, Beeston, rather than to the acting company, and it passed to his own troupe, Beeston’s Boys, after they became the resident Phoenix company in 1637. The play was still associated with the Beeston family in 1661, when it was performed at the Salisbury Court theatre owned by Christopher’s son William. Samuel Pepys saw it there on Monday 9 September, and thought it ‘a simple [foolish] play, and ill acted’; he was more interested in the ‘most pretty and most ingenious lady’ sitting next to him in the audience.14 She would have had some female competition on stage: the actors, led by George Jolly, were the first English professional troupe to employ women, so this production would have featured the first Annabella played by an actress; sadly her identity is unknown.15 The company later set up as a touring operation with ’Tis Pity as part of its repertory of pre-Civil War plays; there is a record of a performance at the King’s Arms, Norwich in 1663. It was not seen again on any English stage until 1923.
William Gifford expressed the consensus of several centuries when he wrote in 1811 that ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore ‘carries with it insuperable obstacles to its appearance upon a modern stage’.16 To an extent, those obstacles arise out of Anglo-Saxon reticence about sexual matters in general: it is no surprise that the more sophisticated French should have taken the lead in the play’s return to the repertory, with Maurice Maeterlinck’s adaptation, Annabella, staged in Paris in 1894.17 In the twentieth century, it benefited from the upheavals in European society during the 1960s, including the abolition of theatre censorship in Britain and the growing acceptability of sexual frankness in the arts: in 1973, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi directed a heavily adapted film version whose cinematography paid attention to the beauty of the nude human body as well as of landscape and architecture (when it was released on video in 1993, it was marketed as a European sex-and-horror flick), and on stage the high water mark of sexual candour was a 1977 studio production directed by Ron Daniels for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which Giovanni and Annabella made love naked on stage.18 By the end of the 1970s, the play was firmly established, perhaps for the first time, as a classic of the stage as well as the study, one of the few non- Shakespearian works of its time to have been produced by both the leading British companies, the RSC and the National Theatre.19 Yet as the limits of tolerance and taste narrowed in the last two decades of the century, productions tended to become more cautious and restrained in their treatment of the incest elements: the play returned to the National Theatre and the RSC, in 1988 and 1991 respectively, in versions giving little overt attention to the lovers’ sexuality, and though they had their first sexual encounter on stage in the last major production of the twentieth century, directed by David Lan at the Young Vic in 1999, they were masked from the audience by the black cloaks of other actors.
The play’s title in particular continues to create difficulty: there are tales of student productions being unable to advertise in newsagents’ windows, and as recently as 1988 the National Theatre found it impossible to obtain commercial sponsorship for Alan Ayckbourn’s production without renaming the play. They didn’t, but the incident shows how little has changed in some quarters since 1831, when the text was omitted from a collection of Ford’s Dramatic Works which appeared in John Murray’s ‘Family Library’ series: in his introductory discussion of Ford’s career, the anonymous editor also chose to call the play Annabella and Giovanni, explaining in a footnote that ‘This title has been substituted for a much coarser one.’20 This sort of behaviour can only partly be put down to moronic prudery. The play has been making some readers squirm for centuries: one critic in 1891 went so far as to say that it could not be appreciated ‘by any well-regulated mind’ – in Victorian terms, virtually an imputation of obscenity.21 The problem was acutely articulated two hundred years earlier by the first great scholar of English drama, Gerard Langbaine: he noted that the play ‘were to be commended, did not the author paint the incestuous love between Giovanni and his sister Annabella in too beautiful colours’.22 The play often provokes a conflict in sensibilities which results in embarrassed discomfort and strong emotions: ‘though the language… is eminently beautiful,’ wrote the clergyman editor Alexander Dyce in 1869, ‘the plot is repulsive’.23 In other words, these critics felt that the play’s literary qualities seemed to prescribe a response that was offensive to their preconceived moral codes.
Ford often writes the incestuous relationship in the conventional terminology of romantic love, such as when Giovanni first broaches it to his sister:
I have too long suppressed the hidden flames
That almost have consumed me. I have spent
Many a silent night in sighs and groans,
Ran over all my thoughts, despised my fate,
Reasoned against the reasons of my love,
Done all that smoothed-cheek Virtue could advise,
But found all bootless: ’tis my destiny
That you must either love, or I must die. (I.ii.217–24)
What can make this disturbing for some readers and playgoers is the representation of a brother proposing incest in the same register as any young lover torturing himself with the fear of rejection: the flames of passion, sleepless nights, and contemplated suicide are all familiar from the Renaissance love poetry of Petrarch and his imitators. But then, what else would you expect? One of Giovanni’s more compelling points is that his emotional experience is the same as that of any other lover: ‘Must I not do what all men else may – love?’ (I.i.19) Accordingly, the language is doing the same job of expressing those feelings as it would with any other lover; it is only the particular circumstances of this couple which makes an ethical difference.
The issue is not allowed to remain latent, and so potentially ignorable. One of the distinctive qualities of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is that its drama is not only experiential but also intellectual: it overtly represents a conflict of ideas as well as of human beings. Giovanni and the Friar are academically gifted characters, student and tutor of the University of Bologna, to whom reason and argument are second nature. Instead of the essays, tutorials, and seminars of university life today, students of this period were trained through formal disputations, known as ‘exercises’, in which they would apply their skills in grammar, logic, and rhetoric to prove or disprove a given proposition. The proposition itself didn’t matter except as a focus for debate: logical ‘proof’ did not necessarily establish empirical truth, because that was not the point of the exercise; the objective was simply to develop the students’ faculties for arguing a case one way or the other. It is a system which has clearly shaped Giovanni: he is always offering to ‘prove’ things by systematic rational analysis, usually as a way of justifying some act or idea.
This is where the play begins, with Giovanni treating incest as if it were a disputation topic, a problem in abstract logic. Homing in astutely on the external prohibitions of religious law, he seeks first to argue them away as nothing more than a pointlessly restrictive social taboo: the terms brother and sister are ‘a peevish sound, / A customary form, from man to man’ (I.i.24–5) with no substantive meaning in themselves; the implication is that the concept of sibling incest is equally arbitrary. A corollary is that he speaks of his living father in the past tense: ‘Say that we had one father, say one womb / … gave both us life and birth’ (I.i.28–9). The one undeniable nexus between brother and sister is a point of origin, but to make incest permissible, that has to be kept firmly in the past: father can mean no more than the man who once sired them, so that their relationship is one of simple biological affinity rather than continuing kinship. The second stage of the argument takes that biological affinity as the basis of a positive case for incest: since they share their parentage,
Are we not therefore each to other bound
So much the more by nature, by the links
Of blood, of reason (nay, if you will have’t,
Even of religion), to be ever one,
One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all? (I.i.30–4)
Annabella (Saskia Reeves) and Giovanni (Jonathan Cullen) after consummating their relationship, Act II, scene i, in the 1991 Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by David Leveaux; Joe Cocks Studio Collection © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
In other words, because siblings are naturally like one another, it is also natural, and reasonable, that they should love one another as much as they love themselves: ‘one flesh’ leads to ‘one love’. Vocabulary here bridges what might otherwise seem a surprising leap in the argument from genetic similarity to incest, since ‘one flesh’ was also a well-known biblical way of expressing the relationship between husband and wife: if brothers and sisters too are one flesh, then they must have the same privileges and duties as a married couple, including what was then considered the duty of sexual consummation.
This is slippery logic, dependent on unspoken ambiguities and trying to have it all ways. In the theatre, where we don’t have the chance to stop and scrutinize the argument in detail, the crucial question is what balance the actor strikes between conveying its inherent weaknesses on the one hand and, on the other, the degree of personal conviction with which Giovanni presents his case: he can be portrayed as a genius, foolish rather than wise in his worldliness, driven by a misplaced confidence in the real-life application of academic ratiocination; or as a clever but intellectually dishonest obsessive trying to rationalize a predetermined course of action. The choice is important because it affects how we interpret the one moment when Giovanni obviously misleads his sister:
I have asked counsel of the holy Church,
Who tells me I may love you. (I.ii.236–7)
That is, of course, not true – the Friar said only ‘you may love’ (I.i.20), without a qualifying pronoun – but it depends on the characterization of Giovanni whether it is a deliberate lie or a tendentious refashioning of the truth by someone who honestly believes in the power of human reason to change reality. In this connection it is important that in all other respects the liaison is shown to be completely consensual at its inception: ‘what thou hast urged,’ says Annabella, ‘My captive heart had long ago resolved.’ (I.ii.240–1) Were it not for their prior social and biological relationship, the starting-point of Giovanni’s positive case, this would be an utterly normal, appealing case of romantic love: the play’s similarities to Romeo and Juliet, obvious to sophisticated audiences from the 1630s to the present day, are very much to the point. Giovanni ultimately proposes that the human authenticity of the experience should override the moral precepts which classify it:
If ever after-times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorred. (V.v.68–73)
The mismatch between the two ways of responding raises awkward questions; some of the play’s earlier readers would evidently have been more comfortable if these had remained unasked.
Part of the problem is that the play, and indeed human moral culture in general, cannot offer Giovanni an intellectually adequate answer. Prohibitions of sibling incest always end up having to invoke the arbitrary dictates of some higher authority such as nature or God. The only rebuttal the Friar can make is to give up arguing: ‘Dispute no more in this,’ he tells his pupil, ‘These are no school points’ (I.i.1–2). Like St Bonaventura, the thirteenth-century scholastic philosopher after whom he is named, his fundamental position is that truths revealed by God, even to the mind of a fool, are superior to the truths which may be discovered by the most brilliant processes of empirical human reasoning: thus he dismisses Giovanni’s arguments as ‘ignorance in knowledge’ (II.v.27). Throughout the play, his only counter-position is to call attention to the divine sanction of hell with which he vividly terrifies Annabella into repentance (III.vi.8–30), but this has no basis in authenticated empirical experience, only in cultural tradition: seventeenth-century audiences knew from Hamlet that the afterlife, if there is one, is an ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’.24
Many of the characters casually assume the existence of a dimension beyond the material – Vasques and Annabella both speak of their attendant ‘good genii’ (II.ii.154, V.i.31), and Richardetto supposes that ‘there is one / Above begins to work’ (IV.ii.8–9) in the failure of Soranzo’s marriage – but if there really are such metaphysical beings mingling with the action, they are ‘not with mortal eyes / To be beheld’ (IV.i.4–5), as the Friar has to admit when he claims that the saints are guests at the wedding feast. In the play’s performance history, attempts to realize such elements on the stage have tended to detract from its intellectual content, because they too easily belie Giovanni’s philosophical development away from the others’ non-rational belief in the supernatural: the sinister black-hooded figures who patrolled the margins of the 1999 Young Vic production implied, as one reviewer noted, ‘a belief in hellfire that Ford’s play resolutely declines to state’.25 Initially Giovanni may take the Friar’s admonitions seriously and offer up fruitless prayers to avert divine vengeance, but by the end he is rejecting scholastic assertions about the end of the world and the hell to follow as mere ‘slavish and fond superstitious fear’ (V.iii.20): custom and tradition are now just ‘Busy opinion’ (1), to be accepted only if he can himself see their empirical justification. This is the point at which the Friar ultimately has to concede defeat: appeal to authority has been his sole argument, and once Giovanni no longer finds that intellectually valid, the only recourse is to leave Parma and abandon him to his fate.
To sum up, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore enacts a debate between orthodox Christian revelation and the new sceptical empiricism of Renaissance philosophy, with Giovanni’s incest placed at the sharp end: it is a relationship forbidden by every canon of received morality, but not one to which there is any obvious rational objection in terms of actual, material harm. The two underlying systems of thought are intellectually irreconcilable, and many of the play’s perceived problems arise out of a desire that dramatically it should nonetheless reach a definite resolution favouring one side or the other – in effect, that it should take up a position about the difficult issues it raises by directing audience sympathy unambiguously. The play’s earlier Christian readers obviously wanted it to support their preferred ideology and condemn incest, and they were (to say the least) disappointed. More recently, critics and directors have wanted to present the lovers as innocents manipulated and condemned by a grotesquely corrupt society, and to romanticize Giovanni in heroic terms, ‘battling with Christianity’, as Jude Law put it when he played the part at the Young Vic in 1999.26 As we shall see, that doesn’t work either.
The rather narrow focus of this discussion so far illustrates one of the oddities of ’Tis Pity’s construction as a work of art: the way some of its major intellectual concerns seem barely to impinge on the thread of its narrative. If Giovanni and the Friar are the central players in the confrontation between the old philosophy and the new, they are also placed on the sidelines of the story rather than at its centre: throughout the action, neither of them speaks at length to anyone but each other and Annabella, while the plot mainly goes on elsewhere. Giovanni has nevertheless been the role of choice for many a star actor, from Donald Wolfit in 1940 onwards: it has attracted, as well as Jude Law, Edward de Souza in 1961, Ian McKellen in 1972, Rupert Graves at the National Theatre in 1988, and Val Kilmer in New York in 1992, all of them prominent names in twentieth-century theatre and film. Yet for all the lines and stage time it offers, it is a role which consistently seems to disappoint. Wolfit dropped the play from his company’s repertory after its few London performances, and subsequent actors have generally not found the heroic stature which is often expected of the part: in production, the role has more often conveyed petulance than power. Generations of theatre reviewers, looking for intellectual and emotional grandeur, have carped at the boyish immaturity of successive Giovannis: it was said that Nicholas Clay, who played the role in the National Theatre’s first production in 1972, ‘in adversity… merely seems to have a fit of the sulks’; Simon Rouse, who affected teenage acne in the 1977 RSC production, was dismissed as ‘a pale schoolboy’; Tristram Wymark, at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre in 1988, was ‘a petulant, arrogant, sub-Byronic boy’; and in 1999 Jude Law was ‘like an undergraduate going through an unstable phase’, who ‘does little except roll about on the floor and snivel a lot’.27 The point is made most clearly in a review of Ian McKellen’s performance in the 1972 Actors’ Company production: ‘he moves from frustrated unhappiness to a childish defiance of the Church, moping rather than being carried terribly onwards by passion. He eats cornets, wears lovely clothes, and mopes like a dissatisfied child. It is hardly Giovanni.’28 But when good actors have repeatedly found those very qualities in the part, perhaps it is Giovanni after all: perhaps the failure is one of preconception rather than performances, and the character just isn’t designed to be the conventional tragic hero he is often taken for.
Jude Law as Giovanni with Eve Best as Annabella, Act V, scene v, in the 1999 Young Vic production directed by David Lan; Colin Willoughby/ArenaPAL
It is worth remembering that, in its one moment approaching self-con- sciousness, the play lays its emphasis elsewhere: it is ‘A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy.’ (V.i.8) Giovanni may be the longer role, but Annabella has the more structurally central position in the narrative: the early stages juxtapose the progress of the incestuous relationship with the competitive wooing of her three other suitors, and the subsidiary murder intrigues involving Hippolita and Grimaldi radiate out from that. The facts of human biology and the patriarchal organization of Renaissance society mean that it is Annabella who suffers the immediate physical consequences of extramarital sex – pregnancy and brutal treatment by a jealous husband – and the play’s title places her carnal degradation as the cause of tragic pity.
In performance, tellingly, Annabellas tend to prove more successful than Giovannis. From the ‘dew and flame’ of Rosalind Iden, Wolfit’s Annabella, twentieth-century actresses mined the role’s contradictory complexities: directed by David Thompson at the Mermaid Theatre in 1961, Zena Walker conveyed ‘both the intensity of her passion and the depth of her horror at it’; in the RSC’s second production of the play, in 1991, Saskia Reeves, portrayed ‘a woman rent apart between conventional fears and continued love of her brother’; and Eve Best, playing opposite Jude Law at the Young Vic in 1999, was ‘a mild, wilting figure of non-specific pathos, who cannot deal with the strong emotions that she arouses in herself’, and whose ‘hands hover above her brother’s body like a strimmer on a lawn’, wanting, but not quite daring, to touch.29 These performances astutely located Annabella as the play’s hinge, 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.
A corollary of Annabella’s centrality is that directors wanting to focus the play on incest have to make some fairly drastic adaptations, usually streamlining the busy action surrounding the prenuptial negotiations. An extreme example is Griffi’s film version, which removes virtually the entire wooing (only the successful suitor Soranzo appears), whilst also building up the incest strand by making Giovanni (Oliver Tobias) spend a week at the bottom of a well trying to kill off his illicit desires. In the text itself, the lovers slip more easily towards an early consummation between the first two acts, when the play has barely finished its initial exposition; Romeo and Juliet, in contrast, are halfway through their play before they consummate their love. Ford’s lovers do not require the same kind of extended build-up because, as brother and sister in the same household, they already have physical access, and because each is already disposed to love the other; all they have to do is pluck up the courage to admit their feelings and to disregard external moral inhibition. The obstacles are few, so the narrative is relatively simple; the main interest of the play obviously lies elsewhere.
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is not so much about incest, then, as about a situation of which incest is a part – the part that happens to have most horrified, and therefore most preoccupied, many readers. One reason why it stands out is that, particularly in the early part of the action, Ford is careful to develop a sense of the sheer ordinariness of his Italian setting: the action takes place in a lived-in world, scarcely touched by the politics of state, and the characters lead recognizable everyday lives in which domestic relationships between family members, and with servants, are paramount. They visit one another at home, hold dinner parties, and enjoy the arts: Philotis plays the lute, Soranzo reads and writes poetry, Bergetto loves visiting fairground attractions and puppet shows.30 In production, directors who want to present the lovers as appealing innocents usually find they have to disregard Ford’s emphasis and make Parma instead a highly-coloured environment of evil and corruption full of things that are nastier and more grotesque than anything in the original text: Roland Joffé’s 1980 production for BBC television inserted a scene where Vasques anally rapes Hippolita, for example, and Philip Prowse’s even more radically adapted version at Glasgow in 1988 portrayed Bergetto as a hunchbacked, mentally-handicapped mute whom his uncle (or father?) the Cardinal is trying to dispose of in marriage.31 Though, as we shall see, the text’s Parma does contain some dark undertones, there is no question of mitigating incest by any such crude contrast. Several successful twentieth-century productions updated the setting, thereby evading the misleading Gothic suggestions that can accompany period costume: audiences were left to focus on the familiar domestic detail, like (at the RSC in 1977) the lovers’ frantic remaking of the bed in which they have just had sex, or (in the Actors’ Company production of 1972) the brittle, civilized elegance of Soranzo’s world, with its bone china, fine silver, evening dress, and – in the final scene – lots of white table-linen for the characters to bleed on. Some theatre critics worried over ‘the problem of expressing Jacobean passions in white tie and tails’ (as one put it apropos of the Actors’ Company production), but the incongruity is entirely to the point.32 Incest isn’t allowed to be just the lesser social evil, venial in comparison with the horrors that surround it; productions which try to make it so simplify the play and draw much of its challenging sting.
Suzan Sylvester as Annabella is reproached by Richard Cordery’s Friar Bonaventura, Act III, scene vi, Royal National Theatre, 1988, directed by Alan Ayckbourn; Nobby Clark/National Theatre
At the hub of the plot lies the process of finding Annabella a husband, and this too was a commonplace social practice in the period, though one that is less recognizably so in productions with updated period settings. Renaissance daughters needed to become wives because fathers needed to transfer patriarchal responsibility to husbands: as Giovanni tells Annabella, albeit in jest, ‘You must be married, mistress … Someone must have you.’ (II.i.22–3) This meant that there had to be an acceptable financial settlement, but the daughter also had formally to consent to the match. There is nothing at all unusual about the way these negotiations are conducted in the play.33 Money is an issue (it is clearly the rich booby Bergetto’s only asset as a potential son-in-law), but unlike many a tyrannical stage father of the time, Florio genuinely cares about Annabella’s happiness as well as her material well-being:
As for worldly fortune,
I am, I thank my stars, blessed with enough.
My care is how to match her to her liking:
I would not have her marry wealth, but love. (I.iii.8—11)
She is twice introduced to a suitor, first Bergetto in II.vi and then Soranzo in III.ii, and each time her father expressly gives her freedom to speak her mind, albeit in the latter case with a strong recommendation in Soranzo’s favour. Whereas Shakespeare’s Juliet is presented with a stark choice between marrying Paris or begging in the streets, and seeks Friar Laurence’s help in finding a way out of the dilemma, the only excessive pressure on Annabella comes from the Friar and his alarming account of eternal torment, forcing her to a penitent acceptance of the husband Florio evidently wants for her.
One factor which complicates the play’s sense of the mundane is its attention to the striations of social class among its characters. There are hints of this in the way they are formally addressed – Soranzo and the Cardinal are called ‘Lord’, Florio and Donado ‘Signor’, servants like Vasques by name alone – and many details point up particular class attitudes: the nobly born Hippolita’s disdain for Annabella, ‘Madam Merchant’ (II.ii.48), who has supplanted her in Soranzo’s affections; Florio’s bourgeois respect for religion and learning in the person of the Friar, ‘A man made up of holiness’ (II.vi.4); Vasques’ below-stairs devotion to proverbial folk wisdom. But the things which most repeatedly divide them along class lines are sex and violence.
Bad behaviour is not uncommon in Ford’s Parma, but it is also not endemic. The servants are sometimes casually coarse, notably Annabella’s tutoress Putana, whose sole criterion for a desirable fiancé is sexual prowess. Productions often emphasize this side of the role by portraying her as a frustrated older woman, mutton dressing herself as lamb: the blonde hair of Annette Badland’s 1999 Young Vic Putana rather obviously came from a dye bottle, and in David Leveaux’s 1991 RSC production, Sheila Reid’s version had pathetically tarted herself up in black silk lingerie and suspenders; many a Vasques has wormed the truth out of many a Putana in IV.iii by using physical intimacy ranging in degree from a comforting cuddle to outright masturbation. It is appropriate that the servants are the ones who most abet their masters’ sexual misconduct, Vasques in helping Soranzo to evade the consequences of his illicit affair with Hippolita, and Putana in being the lovers’ only secular confidante.
What distinguishes the aristocrats, meanwhile, is a privileged insouciance in the way they treat people who get in the way of their desires and objectives. It is striking that this seems to become more calculating as matters escalate: Hippolita initially tries to promote her extra-marital affair not by having her husband murdered but by encouraging him to undertake a dangerous journey and merely hoping that it will be the death of him, and Grimaldi’s first attempts to beat Soranzo in the marriage game use slander rather than the sword; in both cases, elaborate revenge plots only come later. Until the final scenes, all of the play’s physical violence arises from upper class vindictiveness and in-fighting, and the participants evidently do not much care what happens to innocent bystanders like Bergetto, killed when Grimaldi mistakes him for Soranzo in the dark. This is a moment at which audiences usually see the unbearable pity of it (a reviewer of the 1923 Phoenix Society production even found ‘dazzling psychological truth’ in Harold Scott’s terrified, dying Bergetto);34 but it is typical of the aristocratic characters’ behaviour that the Cardinal’s response to the crime should be one of class solidarity: Grimaldi is granted protection for no better reason than that ‘He is no common man, but nobly born / Of princes’ blood’ (III.ix.56–7).
Among the middle classes, though, other standards obtain. The structural spine of the play is a sequence of social meals, each one interrupted by violence: the off-stage lunch which Florio holds for the suitors, during which a fight breaks out between Grimaldi and Vasques, the latter acting for Soranzo (I.ii); the wedding feast, at which Hippolita plans to poison Soranzo but is double-crossed by Vasques (IV.i); and Soranzo’s birthday feast, when his dark plot involving hired banditti is pre-empted by Giovanni (V.vi). On each occasion, Florio’s reaction is revealing. First he is clearly distressed at the degree of ill feeling among the competing suitors at his table:
I would not for my wealth my daughter’s love
Should cause the spilling of one drop of blood. (I.ii.60–1)
After blood is metaphorically shed at the second meal when Hippolita dies by her own poison, he is the first person to speak, stigmatizing her as uniquely, incredibly horrible: ‘Was e’er so vile a creature?’ (IV.i.99) Thus he draws an insulating distinction between this extreme event and the norms of his own life: there is no expectation that he will ever see its like again. When he does, at the third meal, he rises to full-scale denial: Giovanni’s entrance with a freshly eviscerated human heart impaled on his dagger is explicable only as madness, and his admission of incest simply cannot be true – ‘his rage belies him!’ (V.vi.51) This is middle-class propriety facing the dangerous edge of things, and capable of no adequate response; it should be no great surprise that moments later Florio dies of shock.
This attention to rank and, at Florio’s level, to proper social demeanour, means that deviant behaviour stands out. The obvious example is Bergetto, Donado’s nephew, who is characterized as juvenile beneath his years. Though of marriageable age, he is sexually innocent: he seems to know that visiting prostitutes is the done thing among gallants, but he has evidently never used one himself, for he wildly overestimates the fee (Il.vi. 107–8), and later he doesn’t understand the ‘monstrous swelling’ (III.ν.45) he gets when he kisses Philotis. He is also still subject to corporal punishment, as Poggio reminds him (II.iv.44), and apparently not unused to babyish incontinence: when Grimaldi runs him through in the dark, he is puzzled that this time the obvious explanation for finding his clothes wet doesn’t fit – ‘I am sure I cannot piss forward and backward, and yet I am wet before and behind.’ (III.vii. 11–12) He lacks the maturity or sophistication to conform to the polite standards of middle-class society, a point which is enhanced when Poggio is played, as Guy Henry portrayed him at the RSC in 1991, as his more intelligent minder.
There are many prominent instances of Bergetto’s irrepressible gaucherie of behaviour and even of language. Most of the characters’ dialogue is notable for its restraint: Giovanni will not name the female genitalia (‘what is… for pleasure framed’ (II.v.57)), Putana avoids referring directly to menstruation (III.iii.12—13), and almost everyone typically speaks of ‘Heaven’ or uses some other genteel periphrasis for the name of God. Bergetto is the first to swear (and Vasques is the only other), using one of the most offensive oaths, ‘’Sfoot’ (III.i.4). As the play’s principal broad-comedy role, he inhabits a different dimension from the rest of the cast: he owes his dramatic pedigree more to Jonsonian comic twits like Bartholomew Cokes in Bartholomew Fair (1614) than to the play’s dominant strains of philosophical tragedy and social realism, and in production the part offers actors exceptional latitude of interpretation. Richard Bonneville’s Woosterish version in the 1991 RSC production approached life with asinine seriousness, and other actors have seized the opportunity for slapstick. Played as a ‘queenly fop’ by John Tordoff in the 1972 Actors’ Company production, for example, Bergetto licked away at an ice cream which eventually plopped onto another character’s polished shoe: the moment neatly underlined the character’s misplacement in Parma’s smooth, cultured society, here a genteel Italy of the early 1900s.35 The character is also sometimes made physically distinct by casting an unusually tall actor, like Stephen Thorne at the Mermaid Theatre in 1961, or by making him excessively fat or thin: the National Theatre’s first Bergetto, in 1972, was the lanky David Bradley, followed by a podgy Russell Dixon in 1988, who looked in his crimson satin cavalier suit more like an overdressed King Charles spaniel than a human being.
People also stand out because they are strangers in town. Parma is portrayed as a close society whose members have, at least within their own class, the kind of easy intimacy with one another that we see when Florio comforts the grieving Donado in the aftermath of Bergetto’s murder. So it is noticed when, for example, a new physician arrives, as he says, from Padua: his medical ability ‘through the city / Is freely talked of’ (II.iii.35–6), but nobody really knows him as a person because he is still in the early stages of establishing himself socially (and, of course, because he is really Richardetto in disguise). We can see the same process behind the way, after the murder, an officer gropes around his memory for the identity of the person he saw running through the streets with a bloodstained rapier: ‘sure I know the man, they say a is a soldier. [To FLORIO] He that loved your daughter, sir’ (III.ix.17–18). Grimaldi is a Roman who has come to Parma recently: the officer has seen him around, and has heard the common talk about his occupation and the purpose of his visit, but little more, and certainly not his name.
Rumour and gossip – ‘the speech of the people’ (II.i.47), as Putana calls it – run through the homely world of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. As well as outsiders, the Parmesans talk about scandalous behaviour amongst their own: Hippolita’s brazenly open affair with Soranzo is widely known (Putana takes it as evidence that Soranzo is the most suitable of Annabella’s suitors), and later the breakdown of his marriage is a matter of common report; ‘Much talk I hear’ (IV.ii.13), says Richardetto. And there are good reputations, too: in the second act, Annabella is told,
Loud fame in large report hath spoke your praise
As well for virtue as perfection. (II.i.59–60)
Only minutes before, however, she was talking about having lost her virginity to her brother.
Gossip, carefully drawn out of Putana by Vasques in IV.iii, is the way the incest ultimately comes to light, but before then the play is shot through with double meaning and dramatic irony: sex between brother and sister is a possibility which seems literally unthinkable, so that characters misinterpret events and behaviour, ascribing meanings which are often the polar opposite of the truth. Florio’s paternal attitude to Giovanni is one of mixed pride and concern: he expects his studies will ‘teach him how to gain another world’ (II. vi.5), but also worries that being ‘so devoted to his book’ (I.iii.5) will make him ill; whereas in reality Giovanni’s mastery of academic argument enables him to pursue bodily desires at the expense of his spiritual health. He is universally regarded as the one young man who can safely be left unchaperoned with Annabella (even Putana thinks so at first, and says she would expect a bribe from anyone else), when actually he is the only sexual partner she wants; their father sees nothing wrong in his wearing a ring which, by the terms of their dead mother’s will, Annabella may give only to her husband (II.vi.36–42). And when she falls pregnant, morning sickness is diagnosed as ‘a fullness of her blood’ (III.iv.8), a condition suffered only by young female virgins: it is the starkest possible illustration of the way false assumptions shape the other characters’ understanding of the situation and so keep incest hidden from a gossipy outside world where there are few other secrets.
Another element of society which needs to be considered here is the Church. With its Friar and Cardinal, the play has an overtly Roman Catholic setting: productions often emphasize this with supplementary trappings like the overpowering smell of incense which filled the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre in 1988, or the large crucifix which dominated the 1977 RSC stage design. Ford’s England, in contrast, was a broadly Protestant country, for all that Queen Henrietta Maria, the original acting company’s patron, had blurred the ideological lines at court by introducing a fashionable Catholic coterie. The play’s narrative contains a thread of suspicion about the institutions of the Catholic church, which is most explicitly focused on the Cardinal who abuses his power for purposes which are far from spiritual: the characters express open outrage when he shelters the murderer Grimaldi (Guy Henry’s Poggio removed the crucifix from his neck, threw it to the floor, and spat on it in a powerful moment immediately before the interval), and I have never seen a performance where his closing confiscation of ‘all the gold and jewels’ (V.vi.148) was not met with a sardonic laugh from the audience; his pragmatic materialism need not be represented as corrupt (though it often is) for it to be obviously inappropriate in a churchman. But if Friar Bonaventura is clearly a more sincere Christian, he too is a focus for criticism.
Giovanni may make himself ‘poor of secrets’ (I.i.15) when he tells the Friar about his incestuous desires, but all he is really doing is marginally widening a privileged circle of knowledge. One of the practices attacked in anti-Catholic writing of the period was confidential confession, which put priests in possession of sensitive personal information, but also prevented them from divulging it; this was thought to make them accessories, albeit perhaps unwillingly, in all manner of crime and immorality which could be restrained or punished if it were only known about. This is precisely Bonaventura’s position: as confessor to both Giovanni and Annabella, he knows of their incest but can only counsel repentance, not tell anyone. How difficult he finds this dilemma is a matter for interpretation in performance, but it is striking that his practical advice always involves secrecy. Giovanni is encouraged to repent and pray for grace, but to do it in strict privacy:
The crucifix dominating the set of the 1977 Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Ron Daniels, with Simon Rouse as Giovanni confessing to Matthew Guinness as the Friar; Joe Cocks Studio Collection, © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Alone within thy chamber, then fall down
On both thy knees, and grovel on the ground. (I.i.69–71)
Similarly, after he has pressurized Annabella into penitence, there is no question of telling even those, such as Florio, who arguably have a right to know:
’Tis thus agreed:
First, for your honour’s safety, that you marry
The Lord Soranzo; next, to save your soul,
Leave off this life, and henceforth live to him. (III.vi.35–8)
The concern for her soul may be conscientious, but why should he be interested in her honour? It is not as if there is no alternative course of action available. The play juxtaposes Annabella’s unusual romantic life with the more straightforward love story of Richardetto’s niece Philotis, who is introduced as a virgin (II.i.62) just after Annabella has ceased to be one, who experiences sexual awakening when she kisses Bergetto (III.v.37), and who is finally packed off to the chaste life of a nun after her fiancé’s murder. If, as Richardetto says, ‘No life is blesséd but the way to heaven’ (IV.ii.21), then it would be entirely proper for Annabella to follow the same route. In his complementary concern for her worldly well-being, the Friar only participates in the hypocrisy surrounding honour, where what matters most is not being found out. It is a bad mistake, and not just because it neglects other legitimate interests: Soranzo is bound eventually to find out (the pregnancy is so far advanced before the marriage that there can be no question of his being responsible), and from there the plot winds out to its catastrophe.
The central dynamic of the play’s narrative is the discovery of secrets, but some secrets are better kept than others. We are made privy to the incest throughout its development, but other characters’ behaviour is sinister because it is not fully explained. Vasques is a case in point: we are left pondering the unusually proactive role he takes in furthering Hippolita’s and Soranzo’s plots until he finally explains his motivation as a bizarrely ethical sense of loyalty to his master’s family.36 In other cases, notably Richardetto, we are never told at all: he will not take Philotis into his confidence (II.iii.16) and, hoping to resume his place in society, he has too much to lose from a full confession at the end; all we see of his revenge are its collateral effects, not the plan behind them. But the most important hidden agenda is Lord Soranzo’s in the final act.
We are shown the preparations leading up to the birthday feast, including the engagement of banditti who are given a watchword for action; we hear Annabella tell Giovanni, ‘there’s but a dining-time / ’Twixt us and our confusion’ (V.v.17–18); but we never see the plot come to its intended fruition because Giovanni seizes the initiative. Obviously one of Soranzo’s objectives is a revenge killing of Giovanni (and possibly the rest of his immediate family) in the presence of the eminent men, ‘The states of Parma’ (V.ii.9), who are the other guests. The public nature of the act is important because it demands a strong element of justification: even aristocratic dinner parties are not normally enlivened by blood-letting, but last time, after publicly murdering Hippolita, Vasques was exonerated and called ‘a trusty servant’ (IV.i.101) because he could show good cause for it. The crucial detail on this occasion is Soranzo’s instruction that Annabella should ‘deck herself in all her bridal robes’ (V.ii.11): there is more to this than the poignant ominousness of Desdemona’s wedding sheets in Othello, as we can see in performance if Annabella is already dressed when she next appears in V.v. Ford makes Giovanni very explicit about how long his relationship with her lasted:
For nine months’ space in secret I enjoyed
Sweet Annabella’s sheets; nine months I lived
A happy monarch of her heart and her. (V.vi.43–5)
If we take this to indicate that her pregnancy is close to full term, and therefore visible, then Soranzo’s intentions are clear: the murder is to be preceded, and sanctioned, by a public shaming ritual which will lay open what was previously hidden, and unsuspected; Annabella will be exposed in her wedding dress as the pregnant bride she was, damaged goods returned to the merchant ‘in the original packaging’, a living emblem of her own whoredom.37
This makes an instructive contrast with what actually happens in the final scene when Giovanni makes his first, and only, open intervention in the play’s social action. Soranzo’s plot has a certain rigid propriety in its use of a convivial occasion to reveal and punish deeds offensive to Parma’s prevailing social mores. Giovanni’s supervening action – his entrance with Annabella’s heart spitted on his dagger – has an appalling impropriety which he intensifies when he regales the seated diners with talk of food:
You came to feast, my lords, with dainty fare.
I came to feast too, but I digged for food
In a much richer mine than gold or stone
Of any value balanced. ’Tis a heart. (V.vi.23–6)
It too is a stage image that literally reveals to view what was hitherto hidden, an internal organ of the body, by making an emblem of it. Throughout the play, the heart has been rhetorically established as the seat of love; hence it is, he says, ‘A heart… in which is mine entombed’ (V.vi.27). Pierced, it can also signify the pains or cruelty of love, and several of its different valencies – the phallic knife piercing the vaginal heart, for example, or the killing of love – can be taken together to exemplify more particularly Giovanni’s role, not himself the tragic hero but the agent of destruction at all the key stages of his sister’s tragedy: he whores her, he impregnates her, and at last he kills her, eliciting a cry of ‘Brother, unkind, unkind’ (V.v.93). Annabella’s heart assaults us with a range of possible significances, in contrast with the simple clear statement in the spectacle Soranzo aimed to orchestrate.38 Yet ultimately it is as pointless trying to read a coded meaning here as it is to agonize over whether the play promotes or condemns incest.
Tragedy is not a genre which trades in definitive meaning. It shows how things fall apart into chaos and entropy, and the survivors’ closing attempts to ‘restore order’ are always unsatisfying, or compromised; so it is misguided to look for some stable way of reading and making ‘acceptable’ the extreme events which have gone before. We cannot expect to be able to say, with the Cardinal, ‘’Tis pity she’s a whore’ (V.vi.159) and leave the theatre confident in the victory of society over incestuous deviance, any more than we should feel secure in identifying finally with Giovanni. In the image of the eviscerated heart, there is a collision between an enormous metaphoric suggestiveness and a concrete reality that resists interpretation, which was anticipated in Annabella’s mockingly literal misconstruction of Soranzo’s conventional love rhetoric:
SORANZO
Did you but see my heart, then would you swear –
ANNABELLA
That you were dead. (III.ii.24–5)
There is a difference between the metaphor and the reality, between an emblematic picture of a heart and the grisly human organ itself: if there is something bathetic about the legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) programme credit, ‘heart by Dewhurst the Family Butcher’, there is also something utterly to the point. We may struggle to find an answer to its ‘strange riddle’ (V.vi.29), to make the image discursive, transcendent, beyond the merely physical; but in the theatre our efforts will always founder on that very physicality, confounded by the terrible fascination of a piece of meat.
Florio’s response is twice to call his son a madman, but for us to follow suit would be intellectually lazy. Giovanni’s actions in the crescendo of the play are not inexplicable: it is a mistake to attribute to him the opacity of meaning that is a characteristic of the stage image he creates. By the fifth act, the world-shaping exercise of intellect has liberated in him a tremendous will to power, which responds to danger by offering destruction for destruction:
If I must totter like a well-grown oak,
Some under-shrubs shall in my weighty fall
Be crushed to splits; with me they all shall perish. (V.iii.77–9)
To an extent, too, he acts from that pagan sense of honour which also motivates the doomed Brutus in Julius Caesar when, beaten by his enemies to the pit, he adjudges it more worthy to leap in of his own volition; so Giovanni, certain of his own fall, takes it upon himself so that it may be his triumph and not his enemy’s. As Antonin Artaud put it in 1933, he ‘places himself above retribution and crime by a kind of indescribably passionate crime, places himself above threats, above horror by an even greater horror that baffles both law and morals and those who dare to set themselves up as judges.’39 It is through this assertion of existential superiority that the stage action is moved beyond discourse and into the visceral atrocity celebrated by Artaud as the theatre of cruelty – a savage spectacle which disrupts the cultural norms and expectations onto which it obtrudes. Foreshadowed throughout the play from the point in I.ii when Giovanni offers Annabella his dagger and invites her to inspect his heart, this climax is where the play’s curiously bifurcated structure finally pays off: it is for this moment that Giovanni has been kept back, linked to the rest of the action only through the hinge of Annabella while the play developed its separate social world of bourgeois ambition and aristocratic love and honour. When the two worlds intersect and the play’s secret parts are exposed to view, all the easy certainties of everyday life dissolve, and its petty forms of social organization become irrelevant. The ultimate truth embodied in Annabella’s heart is not what we strive to make it, but the very corporeal meatiness that we would rather evade: it forcefully confronts us with what tragedy always asserts, and what our pretensions to civilization and culture are so keen to deny – the pitiful, terrible frailty of our mortal lives.
The control-text for any modern edition of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is inevitably the Quarto of 1633 (Q) printed by Nicholas Okes for Richard Collins. Since it contains a dedication signed by Ford, it is generally taken to be an authorized edition printed from an authorial manuscript. The play was not reprinted in the seventeenth century, although in 1652 a copy of Q was bound with six other Ford Quartos, with a general printed title page, to produce a collection of Ford’s Comedies, tragi-comedies; & tragaedies.40 All subsequent editions derive their text either directly or indirectly from Q.
Q is a book rich in bibliographical interest, providing much material for speculation about printing-house mishaps and even a visit to the press by the author.41 However, there is little to pose any major textual difficulty: a few words are misprinted and verse and prose are often confused or mis- lined (sometimes because the copy was wrongly marked up into pages, forcing the compositor to squash and stretch material to fit the space available). A number of surviving copies contain sheets printed after press-correction, which introduce a total of forty-five variants; in this edition the corrected reading has been silently adopted in all substantive instances. The notes record all emendations and significant changes to the lineation of verse passages (including prose erroneously set as verse in Q); but changes to the division of prose passages and verse lines split to accommodate them within the margins of the Q page are not recorded. Q divides the text into five acts, and I have followed the usual convention of marking a new scene every time the stage is completely cleared. Q supplies a list of ‘The Actors’ Names’, which provides some interesting hints about how Ford conceived the characters and their relationships, but which requires interpretation and, obviously, does not address itself to the needs of the modern reader; in this edition the list of the persons of the play has been compiled afresh, while the 1633 list appears as an appendix.
Speech prefixes have been silently expanded and all Latin stage directions silently translated into English, with the exception of the now- conventional exit and exeunt. Although it is possible that some of Q’s stage directions were written for the seventeenth-century reader rather than for the playhouse, there are a number of points where necessary stage action is unclear, or where the reader is obliged to infer actions from subsequent dialogue references to them; stage directions (or parts thereof) which appear in square brackets have been added to resolve such issues. A number of directions to enter are given late in Q, presumably to indicate the point at which the characters concerned enter the action, rather than the stage; with one problematic exception (on which, see the note to II.iii.28 s.d.), such stage directions are repositioned in this edition to indicate the point at which those characters become visible to a theatre audience, and to other characters already on stage.
Spelling and punctuation are modernized throughout in accordance with New Mermaid series conventions. No previous editor has attempted a full modernization of Q’s light, rhetorical punctuation, which is eccentric (and sometimes mystifying) in its use of dashes, and tends to use commas and semi-colons to separate entirely distinct syntactic units. This edition uses heavier, grammatical punctuation in an effort to guide the reader through the syntax.
Perhaps the greatest challenge which the play offers its editor lies in the deceptive simplicity of some of its language: a number of its unadorned and unspecific lines are open to irreconcilable alternative interpretations. This is quite a different matter from the deliberate, meaningful ambiguity celebrated by the critical school of William Empson (and which is also present in some parts of the play), where the multiple senses of a word coexist and interact to create a richer matrix of significance; I refer instead to cases which might be seen as the literary equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat, where the process of realizing the text forces you to choose one meaning and exclude all others. The less virtual the play becomes, the more these possibilities will cease to exist: an edition with modernized spelling and (especially) punctuation will have closed down some, and a production all of them. In preparing this edition, I have tried to be alert to this issue, to avoid imposing one possible stage realization at the expense of another, and to discuss the more clear-cut interpretative options in the notes.
Like all editors, I owe much to the work of my predecessors. After Q, the play next appeared in print as part of Robert Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays (1744), which was later revised by Isaac Reed in 1780. From Dodsley onwards, the editorial history has been one of progressively introducing emendations to Q, and more recently rejecting them in favour of the original Q readings; this edition continues the latter trend. I have been especially indebted to the important contributions to the play’s bibliographical and textual history in the editions of N. W. Bawcutt (1966) and Derek Roper (1975), and to the thorough modernization of the spelling in that of Marion Lomax (1995). I have also found useful the editions of Henry William Weber (1811), William Gifford (1827), Alexander Dyce (1869), A. K. Mcllwraith (1953), Brian Morris (1968), Keith Sturgess (1970), Colin Gibson (1986), and Simon Barker (1997).
