John Ford’s tragedy‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, set in the Italian city of Parma, tells the story of a young brother and sister, Giovanni and Annabella, who discover a mutual love for each other and embark on a passionate sexual relationship. The challenges of family, church and society increasingly curtail their freedom to pursue their desires, and the play culminates in a terrifyingly brutal and bloody climax. When Ford wrote the play, probably in the late 1620s, he was in his forties and was nearing 50 when it was published in 1633. The play is so often talked about as if the work of a rebellious, youthful writer, keen to shock, whereas it is more accurately viewed as a considered portrayal of a complex sexual relationship by a mature author. It is revived this week by West Yorkshire Playhouse.
Incest is a surprisingly common theme in classical and English medieval literature, nor was Ford the first dramatist of his time to write about it – Shakespeare, Massinger, Webster and Middleton all did too. But he was the first to make incest between brother and sister the mainspring of a play, and to make it clear that the lovers were as driven by satisfaction of their sexual desires as by their need for emotional closeness.
What is particularly noticeable about this and other of his plays is how Ford draws extensively on the work of other writers, especially Shakespeare. Here he echoes lines from Othello (a play Ford obviously admired greatly) but engages most fully with Romeo and Juliet. It is characteristic of Ford to place his characters in extreme emotional, social and familial circumstances and then to trace how they negotiate these, and in ‘Tis Pity... he takes Shakespeare’s tragic story of a love obstructed by tribal conflict, but by making his lovers brother and sister ratchets up the relationship to be one of the most pervasive and persistent taboos in virtually all societies, in all periods, apart from certain aristocratic families.
Given its main theme, and Ford’s uncompromising treatment of it, it is hardly surprising that the play has produced strong reactions. Many critics, and not only those from earlier periods where we might anticipate a different moral compass from our own, have been particularly troubled by what they see as Ford’s too-lenient attitude to the lovers, arguing that surrounding them with a Parma society rife with adultery, deceit, corruption and revenge has the effect of making the incest seem less deviant by comparison.
The earliest known comment on the play is found in a complimentary verse by Ford’s friend Thomas Ellice in which he praised the balanced portrayal of the lovers, and how he allowed Giovanni’s love to be "unblamed" (which we might disagree with), and Annabella to remain "gloriously fair, even in her infamy". Some critics, however, have interpreted this tension between criticism and understanding as evidence of some moral defect in both writer and play, both frequently being labelled "decadent" and "reprehensible". But such views make the elementary error of forgetting that a play is not a documentary, and mistake the arguments of characters with their own fervent desires and ambitions for the views of the author.
But the ultimate judge of a play’s success will be in performance. We don’t know how popular Ford’s play was in its own time, but it was still in the possession of a theatre company in the late 1630s and so likely to have been in their repertoire too, and in 1661, when the theatres re-opened after the Restoration, Samuel Pepys saw it, and disliked it. But after the last recorded performance in the 17th century, in Norwich in 1662, like the vast majority of early modern plays it disappeared from the English stage for another 250 years. In 1811, the critic William Gifford summed up the reasons why:‘Tis Pity... "carries with it insuperable obstacles to its appearance on a modern stage", with its portrayal of "a professed and daring infidel... a shameless avower and justifier of his impure purpose", and with Annabella "not a jot behind him in precocity of vice", and (apart from a version staged in Paris in 1894 under the title Annabella) it was 1923 before the play was given two private performances in London, and 1940 before it was finally restored to the public, commercial stage. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a revival of interest by theatre companies in the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, since when Ford’s play has been staged comparatively frequently on the professional stage, as well as in countless amateur productions, been filmed by an Italian director and (more successfully) seen on British television.
Audiences seem to have had few difficulties in recognising the play’s complex, multilayered presentation of its theme, or in distinguishing between Ford’s sympathy for his protagonists and approval of their actions. For the fact remains that the outcome of the siblings’ relationship is disastrous for them and those close to them. And in performance we may be even more aware than in reading that Giovanni and Annabella, while deeply committed to each other at first, are increasingly faced with very different pressures. While he can pursue his single-minded desire to possess his sister, she must negotiate the tricky turns and pressures of the marriage market. And whereas she finally seeks some closure through acceptance that this incestuous love cannot survive, Giovanni, moving from the false reasoning of a student wilfully arguing an impossible case to a vision of himself as virtually a deity who can command her fate, cruelly and relentlessly seeks only his own violent and obscene triumph over those who would deny him his desire.
Recent writings on Ford have largely left behind the well-worn path of its moral standpoint to explore its sexual politics, for example, or examine the play in the light of the religious tensions and the frictions between gentry and aristocracy or king and parliament throughout the 1620s and Thirties. But although the play’s contemporary milieu is crucial, Ford is, above all, the dramatist of the individual human heart, the emblem that pervades the language of this play but which is given a final, horrifying reality. Ford’s play confronts us with difficult ideas and unpalatable acts by people living on the edges of experience. That can make uncomfortable watching, which is, of course, precisely one of the things serious theatre should do.
Book tickets for 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at West Yorkshire Playhouse until 28 May
Find 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and other works by John Ford on Amazon- Martin White is Professor of Theatre at the University of Bristol, and the author of a book-length study of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore to be published later this year by Palgrave Macmillan
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