'Tis Pity She's a Whore E-Book

John Ford

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 130

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price The tragic story of incestuous love between Giovanni and his sister Annabella. When Annabella is found to be pregnant by her brother, she agrees to marry her suitor Soranzo. But when the lovers' incestuous secret is discovered, vengeance and bloody murder follow. John Ford's play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore was first performed in London between 1629 and 1633, and was first published in 1633. This edition of the play, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is edited and introduced by Lisa Hopkins.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE

by John Ford

edited and introduced by Lisa Hopkins

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Ford: Key Dates

Dramatis Personae

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Act Five

Glossary

Copyright Information

Introduction

John Ford (1586–?)

Infuriatingly little is known about Ford’s life. He was born in Ilsington, Devon, in 1586, and went first to Exeter College, Oxford and then, like many other young Elizabethan men of good family, to study law at the Middle Temple in London, one of the Inns of Court. Unusually, he seems to have stayed there for the rest of his life, though he was never called to the bar. Since he was a younger son rather than the heir, he would have had to earn his living somehow, and it is usually thought that he must have done some kind of legal work. Some phrases in the dedication of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore suggest that he may also have travelled abroad, probably in the mid 1620s. He never married, and although his early poetry refers to his love for a woman called Lycia, this is clearly a made-up name, so perhaps the woman herself was equally fictitious.

Although he published a few poems and prose works as a young man, Ford did not start writing plays until late in life, first in collaboration with other, established playwrights such as Dekker, Rowley, and Webster, and finally on his own. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which he refers to in the dedication as ‘these first fruits of my leisure’, was published in 1633; we do not know when it was first written and performed, but some time in the later 1620s seems the likeliest, making Ford at least forty years old. He went on

to write six more plays. Three were tragedies, like ’Tis Pity; one revived the long defunct form of the chronicle history play; and the final two were tragicomedies, though comedy was never Ford’s forte and both contain some very weak scenes. After the publication of his last known play, The Lady’s Trial, in 1638, nothing further is heard of him.

The writer Gerard Langbaine, writing not long after the last known mention of Ford, declared that he had been friendly with all the major literary figures of the age. The only other contemporary hint about him comes from Heminges’ Elegy on Randolph’s Finger, where we find the couplet ‘Deep in a dump Jack Ford alone was gat / With folded arms and melancholy hat’, and this would certainly tie in with the dark tone of his work and his deep interest in troubled personalities and disordered mental states.

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: What Happens in the Play

The play is set in the Italian city of Parma. Giovanni, the hero, has just returned home from university at Bologna, accompanied by his tutor, Friar Bonaventura. During the opening conversation, Giovanni reveals to the friar that he is in love with his own sister, Annabella. The friar is horrified and tells him he must conquer his passion. In the next scene, we are introduced to some of the other suitors for Annabella’s hand, Grimaldi, a Roman nobleman, and Soranzo, an important local gentleman, who are bitter rivals; we also meet Florio, father of Giovanni and Annabella. Finally, we meet Annabella herself, and her companion, the ominously-named Putana (it is Italian for ‘whore’), who, in one of the play’s many parallels with Romeo and Juliet, are standing on the balcony, the upper stage space. Putana wants to know which of her suitors Annabella prefers, and points out another of them, the idiotic Bergetto, who enters briefly with his rather wiser servant Poggio; Annabella, however, shows no interest in any man until Giovanni appears below. At first she appears not to recognise him (perhaps because he has been away at university) and asks who this handsome but unhappy-looking man can be; then, when Putana points out that it is Giovanni, Annabella joins him – symbolically going down from the balcony as a sign that she is about to make a moral as well as a literal descent – and asks him what is the matter. Giovanni confesses his love and Annabella replies that she loves him just as much. Having sworn fidelity to each other, they exit to consummate the relationship. Florio meanwhile is still occupied with the question of Annabella’s marriage, and although we know that he has already promised her to Soranzo, he is also negotiating with Donado, uncle of the foolish Bergetto.

Act Two begins with Giovanni and Annabella emerging from the bedroom, teasing each other about what they have done. Giovanni takes his leave. Putana comes on and expresses no disapproval of the incest, but then Florio arrives with a new visitor: a supposed doctor called Richardetto, and his niece Philotis. Richardetto, we soon learn, is the husband of Hippolita, a woman who was seduced by Annabella’s prospective husband Soranzo; he is so ashamed by this that he has disguised himself and let it be supposed that he is dead. Indeed we meet Hippolita in the next scene, angrily confronting Soranzo about his desertion of her and his proposed marriage to Annabella. She is eventually calmed by Soranzo’s servant Vasques, who pretends to go along with her plans for revenge on Soranzo. We then see Richardetto reveal his true identity in conversation with Philotis and, in pursuance of his own plan to be revenged on Soranzo, warn Grimaldi that it is Soranzo who is Florio’s preferred suitor for his daughter. He offers to poison Grimaldi’s rapier so that he can kill Soranzo. Meanwhile Bergetto meets Philotis after a brawl in the street and decides that he much prefers her to Annabella; Giovanni confesses to the horrified friar that he has slept with his sister; and Florio tells Annabella that he intends her to marry Soranzo.

Act Three sees Soranzo’s first attempt to court Annabella, secretly observed by the jealous Giovanni. She rebuffs him, but then she faints; Putana reveals to Giovanni that she is pregnant. Florio consults Richardetto and Giovanni consults the friar, who both advise immediate marriage, and the friar terrifies Annabella into agreeing by warning her that otherwise she will go to hell. Meanwhile Bergetto and Philotis have sneaked away to be married, but Bergetto is killed by Grimaldi, who, in the darkness, mistakes him for Soranzo. Grimaldi is shielded by his relative the Cardinal.

Act Four begins just after the wedding of Annabella and Soranzo. Hippolita arrives diguised and tries to poison Soranzo, but is prevented by Vasques, who tricks her into drinking the poison herself. Appalled by everything that has happened, Richardetto advises Philotis to become a nun; she agrees and is not seen again. Soranzo discovers Annabella’s pregnancy, but, though he threatens her, she will not reveal who the father is; however, Vasques tricks it out of Putana, and then gets his hired banditti to blind and imprison her.

Act Five opens with Annabella repentant, standing once more on the balcony from which she had descended into incest. She is found by the friar, who blesses her and agrees to take a letter to Giovanni urging him to repent. Soranzo, planning revenge, invites Giovanni and Florio to celebrate his birthday, and a defiant Giovanni agrees. On arriving at Soranzo’s house, Giovanni goes first to see Annabella, and kills her. He then appears at the birthday feast with her heart impaled on his dagger. Florio drops dead. Soranzo calls for his banditti, but Giovanni manages to kill him, before being himself finished off by Vasques. The Cardinal is left to pass judgement on those who survive; he banishes Vasques and confiscates all the money and property of the deceased.

The Title

John Ford took trouble with the publication of his plays, procuring commendatory verses from his friends and devising an anagram (Fide honor; honour through faith) of Iohn Forde, one form of his name, to go on the title-pages of the later ones (though not of this). Probably as a result, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is unusually free of errors or textual difficulties for a Renaissance play. There is, however, one notorious ambiguity. Towards the close of the play, the Cardinal orders,

Peace!-First this woman, chief in these effects: My sentence is, that forthwith she be ta’en Out of the city, for example’s sake, There to be burnt to ashes.

When he says ‘this woman, chief in these effects’, the Cardinal must be talking either about the dead body of Annabella or about Putana. In either case, his sentence may well appear unnecessarily vindictive. Annabella has already been stabbed and butchered, and Putana has been blinded – the traditional punishment for incest, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Surely both have suffered enough.

We may, moreover, question what right the Cardinal has to pass sentence at all. As in so many of the plays of Protestant Renaissance England, it has already been made quite obvious that the Catholic church is venal and corrupt, and that the opinions of its highest officers are for sale. While the Friar has struggled, however unsuccessfully, to do his best by all concerned and to bring spiritual advice and comfort whenever he can, the Cardinal has been busy perverting the course of justice by shielding his relative Grimaldi, even though he knows that the latter has murdered the entirely innocent Bergetto. Whichever woman the Cardinal means, therefore, we are not necessarily likely to agree with him.

However, that does not mean that the ambiguity is unimportant. Although on stage it could be resolved easily enough by having the Cardinal actually point at Putana, or gesture offstage towards where the corpse of Annabella may be presumed to be, perhaps it would be more useful to allow the audience to wonder for a moment who actually is ‘chief in these effects’. In short, whose fault is it? The Cardinal has no trouble finding someone to blame and summing up events, glibly tossing off the concluding couplet, which gives the play its title: ‘Of one so young, so rich in nature’s store, / Who could not say, ’tis pity she’s a whore?’ Ford himself seems to have felt nervous about this phrase, since in his dedication of the play to the Earl of Peterborough he writes, ‘The gravity of the subject may easily excuse the lightness of the title, otherwise I had been a severe judge against mine own guilt’. Actually one might have thought the opposite – that a grave subject would be better fitted by a grave title – but the fact that the phrase stands at the head of the play, appears as its last line, and is commented on by the author himself, suggests that it deserves attention.

The phrase insists that even if we condemn Annabella as a whore – which she is, in the Renaissance sense of someone who is neither a virgin nor a widow at the time of her marriage – we should recognise that it is a pity that she is so. So why has it happened? As with modern ideas about criminal behaviour, there are essentially two possible explanations for the disastrous careers of Giovanni and Annabella: either they are innately wicked, or their behaviour has been conditioned by society and thus society is, at least in part, responsible for their actions. The earliest critics of Ford thought that Giovanni and Annabella were indeed evil and abhorrent, and were worried that Ford himself did not seem necessarily to share their opinion. As in his later play Perkin Warbeck, where Ford refuses ever to make clear that Perkin Warbeck was an impostor and not the rightful king of England, so here he withholds any direct condemnation of Giovanni’s and Annabella’s love, and thus was repeatedly accused by early critics of glorifying incest. Though it is hard to see the last act, in particular, as any kind of celebration of incest, it is nevertheless true that it is equally hard to read or watch the play without feeling at least some degree of sympathy for Giovanni and Annabella, whatever one may feel about the advisability or morality of their behaviour.

Incest

One reason for this, of course, could be that their incest might not seem to belong to the realm of morality at all. Unlike the abuse of a child by a parent, brother-sister incest can be seen as consensual and victimless. It is taboo because inbreeding can produce deformed children, but intermarriage has also been the traditional tactic used by ruling families from the Egyptian Pharaohs to the Habsburgs to cement power within the dynasty. Giovanni himself alludes to this when he calls Annabella his Juno, reminding a mythologically informed audience that incest is commonplace in stories of the classical gods (as well as being a staple feature of all creation myths and myths of origin, which typically postulate one originating couple from whom all subsequent humans are descended: whom did Adam and Eve’s children marry?). But gods and rulers are one thing, and ordinary people another; perhaps Giovanni and Annabella’s real crime, in their society, is not so much to commit incest as to commit incest while belonging, as Hippolita spitefully observes of Annabella, merely to the merchant class.

This brings us back to the question of society, and of its rôle in events. As well as the question-mark over whom the Cardinal means by ‘this woman’, one other aspect of his final dispensing of justice seems worthy of note. Whoever it is that is to be burned is to ‘be ta’en / Out of the city, for example’s sake’. And if he seems unnecessarily harsh in this instance, he might well seem surprisingly lenient when he dismisses Vasques with simply, ‘Fellow, for thee, since what thou didst was done / Not for thyself, being no Italian, /

We banish thee forever’. In the context of murder and incest, two things against which there is a virtually universal prohibition that some might see as rooted in ‘human nature’, the stress on civic communities and specific nationalities might seem surprising.

However, this emphasis is not new. In a small but significant scene, III, ix, we have earlier seen the civic officers powerless to pursue Grimaldi when he enters the grounds of the Cardinal. This scene, set at the Cardinal’s gate, shows us individuals as being simply pawns in the tussle between civic and religious authorities. Moreover, though the Cardinal seems to think it a punishment to be expelled from the city, we are made very aware of the stresses of city life, with Annabella unable to find privacy and living under virtual siege by her suitors. In Shakespeare’s comedies (As You Like It is a good example), there is a characteristic escape from city life to a ‘green world’ where resolution can occur; in ’Tis Pity, there is no such possibility. This is one area in which Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s 1973 film of the play, with its isolated farmhouse and lush countryside, is seriously misleading, since the play is actually so rooted in the experiences of urban living that more than one critic has termed it a ‘city tragedy’. The same, of course, is true of Romeo and Juliet, the play which ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, with its lovers, nurse and friar, virtually rewrites, as the Baz Luhrmann film, Romeo + Juliet, with all its trappings of high-pressure city life and fast communication, clearly captures. And Annabella’s and Giovanni’s story does not unfold in isolation any more than Romeo and Juliet’s does; we judge Annabella and Giovanni in the context within which they live and against the poverty of example set to them by those around them, so it is unsurprising if, although they are so much more guilty than Romeo and Juliet, we still sympathise with them.

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