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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Whether reflecting the social theme in a drama alive to contemporary issues, or reacting to the jaded taste of a theatrical clientele, or probing individually for the most effective delineation of man's tragic plight, the Jacobean dramatists explore a view of life more somber and pessimistic than their Elizabethan counterparts.
John Ford represents the culmination of this basic dramaturgical trend. In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore he creates central figures whose affection, if unrighteous, is also intensely sincere and whose aberrant conduct must be weighed against the treachery and hypocrisy of the society whose morality the lovers have rejected. The anagnorisis as well as the protagonist is doubled, and the spectator is left to choose between the wisdom of Annabella's Christian repentance and Giovanni's stoic insistence on the sanctity of private values. The result is a fundamentally pessimistic view of life in which man's challenge is the ambiguity of moral values constantly frustrating his search for a meaningful life.
1 “Ford's Tragic Perspective,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1 (1960), rpt. in Elizabethan Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. R. J. Kaufmann (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 366. Una Ellis-Fermor's assertion that Ford's focus is “microscopic, . . . excluding] everything beyond the area of a few minds” (The Jacobean Drama, London: Methuen, 1936, p. 228) seems quite wrongheaded; to the contrary, the spectators are constantly forced to consider the value structure of the entire society, “full of intrigue and of an evil which is as pervasive as it is real” (Irving Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962, p. 163). Harold J. Oliver has aptly noted that this Italy is a land where the principle of justice does not generally prevail (The Problem of John Ford, London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1955, p. 88).
2 John Lawlor, The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt, 1966), p. 14.
3 “Biblical Faith and the Idea of Tragedy,” in The Tragic Vision and the Christian Faith, ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (New York: Association Press, 1957), p. 30.
4 With “conventional ethics in conflict with immutable physical forces” (George F. Sensabaugh, The Tragic Muse of John Ford, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1944, p. 93), the tragedy “postulates nature opposed to law, love opposed to morality” (George C. Herndl, The High Design, Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1970, p. 263). Sidney R. Homan, Jr. claims further that, since incest violates even an ideal moral system, the “lovers' deaths cannot benefit the diseased world in which they suffered” (“Shakespeare and Dekker as Keys to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 7, 1967, 274).
5 All line references in this essay to 'Tis Pity She's a Whore are to the edition of N. W. Bawcutt (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966).
6 Arthur Kirsch complains, justly, I believe, that Annabella's impudence at this point is inconsistent “with what we have seen of her earlier in the play” and with “our acceptance of what happens to her at the end of the play” (Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives, Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1972, p. 125). To brand her “a moral defective” (T. S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama, New York: Harcourt, 1932, p. 131), however, is totally to disregard the ultimate emphasis upon Annabella as “an example of the noble victim” (Mark Stavig, John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968, p. 96).
7 If one is not fully convinced by the assertion that Ford is a scientific determinist (Sensabaugh, Muse, p. 70) concerned with portraying Giovanni as one “afflicted with religious melancholy in defect” (S. Blaine Ewing, Burtonian Melancholy in the Plays of John Ford, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1940, p. 72), there is no argument that Giovanni at this point is a confirmed atheist who does not believe his love is sinful (Alan Drissenden, “Impediments to Love: A Theme in John Ford,” Renaissance Drama, 7, 1964, 100). Jeanne Addison Roberts has recently described him as the current generation's “portrait of an ethical and moral man” (“John Ford's Passionate Abstractions,” Southern Humanities Review, 7, 1973, 331).
8 “To have an incestuous adulterer seek vengeance upon the cuckolded husband surely is a remarkable variation on a familiar theme, but the playwright makes it credible” (Donald K. Anderson, Jr., John Ford, New York: Twayne, 1972, p. 100).
9 This moment, far from being “a dash of Marstonian sensationalism” (Thomas M. Parrott and Robert H. Ball, A Short View of Elizabethan Drama, New York: Scribners, 1943, p. 247) providing a touch of “extravagant physical horror” (Havelock Ellis, ed., John Ford. New York: Hill, 1957, p. xii). is—according to Bawcutt (p. xxii)—“a symbol of the play as a whole”; for a full analysis see Donald K. Anderson, Jr., “The Heart and the Banquet: Imagery in Ford's 'Tis Pity and The Broken Heart” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 1 (1962), 209–17.
10 Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1940), p. 210.
11 Herndl, p. 264; Muriel C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1936), p. 227.
12 “Love, Lust, and Sham: Structural Pattern in the Plays of John Ford,” Renaissance Drama, NS 2(1969), 164.
13 Kenneth A. Requa has recently maintained that Bonaventura's flight, his “culminating blunder,” is the more serious “because it is rooted in despair” (“Music in the Ear: Giovanni as Tragic Hero in '77s Pity She's a Whore,” Papers on Language and Literature, 7, 1971, 24). For an extended comparison of Faustus and 'Tis Pity, see Cyrus Hoy, “ 'Ignorance in Knowledge' : Marlow's Faustus and Ford's Giovanni,” Modern Philology, 57 (1960), 145–54.
14 There is enough critical smoke on this point to suspect a dramatic fire. On the one hand are those scholars like Stavig (p. 110) and Johannes A. Bastiaenen (The Moral Tone of Jacobean and Caroline Drama, Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1930, p. 103), who accept the Friar's morality without qualification. On the other, Robert Ornstein's perception of a “muddled moralist” (The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1960, p. 208) is mild compared to Joan Sargeaunt's assertion that he is “either a complete knave or a complete fool” (John Ford, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935, pp. 124–25).
15 This esthetic objectivity toward incestuous passion has occasioned charges that Ford was decadent (Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatic Poets, London, 1691, p. 222; Vernon Lee, Euphorion, London, 1884, i, 102), that he was an ardent believer in free love (Stuart P. Sherman, “Ford's Contribution to the Decadence of the Drama,” in John Fordes Dramatische Werke, ed. Willy Bang, Louvain: A. Uystprusyt, 1908, pp. xii-xiii), that he reveled in his moral heresy (Wallace A. Bacon, “The Literary Reputation of John Ford,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 11, 1948, 197; Thomas B. Tomlinson, A Study of Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964, p. 273).
16 John Ford and the Drama of His Time (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 46.
17 William Gifford (quoted in Ellis, p. xiv) and Bradbrook (p. 256), among others, describe the subplot characters as “a despicable set of buffoons,” “mere supers.” More perceptive is Ornstein's comment (p. 203) that the figures are created “for comic and moral contrasts,” as “lewd antimasques to romantic tragedy.”
18 For similar views, see George F. Sensabaugh, “John Ford Revisited,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 4 (1964), 212; Mary E. Cochnower, “John Ford,” Seventeenth-Century Studies by Members of the Graduate School, University of Cincinnati (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1933), pp. 211–12; Leech, p. 60; Stavig, p. 120.
19 World Theater (New York: Horizon, 1973), p. 188.
