Welcome to our online discussion of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore!
To start off, as much as I like juicy critical and theoretical discussions, the first thing I’m always curious about is what general impression the text makes. So, while we can later talk Bordieu until we turn bleu, I’d love to hear what your gut reactions to it are.
After that, well, let’s see how it develops. I was trying to figure out some preliminary prompts to kick the discussion off, but Renaissance Man has beat me to it; he has some great conversation-starters over there. (Thanks, michael5000!)
Or you can address whatever elements you think would be most interesting or productive. Please don’t be shy!
Michael5000’s comments inspired me to read the play last night, so I left some comments at his site.
Gut reaction: the decadent end of the revenge tragedy tradition.
This isn’t the first time I’ve read ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (alas, I’ve never seen it in performance), so it’s not quite fair of me to pretend these are ‘first’ impressions. I like the play very much, and see in its apparent clumsiness and moral confusion a very deliberate interrogation of social norms and power politics. That recurring exhortation – “be ruled” – helps form the founding question of the play: how far must we all submit to someone else’s agenda or rulebook, and how far can we create our own? The answer to this question is by no means simply.
Sexual politics is the ideal means to explore this question, involving as it does all the familiarly ‘just’ tropes of the comedy (as michael5000 points out), all the push-me-pull-me of any kind of negotation or contest, and all the external regulations and opinions which tend to govern us elsewhere in our lives. The extent to which the play is so highly sexualised is no accident – I think it is the decadent end of the revenge tragedy tradition, but it’s also an edgy exploration of a Catholic sexuality which was a topic of some fascination in the 1630s thanks to the presence at court of a Catholic Queen.
But, for me, the mood of the play is overcast and morally complex – there is far more emphasis on Hell than on Heaven right from the off. For this reader at least, Giovanni’s arrogance and the Friar’s despair, gives the whole play, from its very first scene, a dark energy and a deep foreboding which threads right through to the final speech of the corrupt (and yet re-authorised) Cardinal.
So, here’s a naive question: If it’s a revenge tragedy, where’s the revenge? Are we saying that Giovanni is really sticking it to Soranzo for daring to marry his sister, by killing his sister? Because that’s only “revenge” in Giovanni’s own whacked out mind….
If it’s a revenge tragedy, where’s the revenge?
Great question. Acts aimed at revenge are legion throughout the play: Giovanni’s dismemberment of Annabella, like you say, and also Hippolota’s plot against Soranzo, Richardetto’s against Hippolata, Donado’s suit against Grimaldi, and Soranzo’s against Giovanni. All of these, like the first, are frustrated in one way or another – usually fatally for the revenger. When Giovanni says, “Revenge is mine,” you’re absolutely right that he’s talking rubbish.
But this seems to me is central to the play’s project, which is to depict a broken society which has ceased to function properly. I agree with you that revenge is not won; but why should it be? What is this insistence upon revenge, this sick drive at the heart of Parman society? Ford sees it as corrosive, since it encourages mutually defeating behaviour: each plot is countered with another, until almost everyone is either dead or irrelevant. ‘Revenge’ as a concept is shown by the play to be thoroughly sterile, recrimination a destructive force. This, for me at least, makes ‘Tis Pity a revenge tragedy on profoundly conceptual level.
[…] So I read ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, and posted some thoughts over at EMU’s collaborative reading. There’s a great deal to say about the play, which I consider to be not just Ford’s […]
I suppose it’s fair to say that I’m not much of a fan of revenge tragedy, but I do like some of the fun you can have with it in terms of genre studies.
Michael5000’s question points to the first delicious bit: while it is a truism to say that revenge tragedy generally concerns a murder or other conspicuous crime, many of the most oft-cited examples fail that test, which you might think would be somewhat of a sine qua non. (Would you ever say, “Hey, here’s a play that has no love plot. Let’s call it a romance*”?)
The first example that comes to mind is The Spanish Tragedy. I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by the fact that the play begins with Don Andrea’s ghost explaining that the reason that he seeks revenge is because he was killed in war by Don Balthazar. It isn’t even until the third time of hearing about the battle that we learn that Andrea was attacked by halberdiers and that Balthazar finished him off when he was already down (contrasting with the fact that Balthazar himself is captured and held for ransom). Balthazar’s behavior does not reek of honor, but it’s not exactly a clear-cut case of murder in cold blood, either (unlike some of the later action of the play).
Titus Andronicus is similar, with Titus ordering the “sacrifice” of Tamora’s eldest son to appease the ghosts of his sons who died in war even though there is no suggestion that they were killed unfairly (as war goes). It is difficult to tell where the cycle of revenge starts—with the death of Alarbus, or with the deaths in war, or what.
The next example I like is The Duchess of Malfi. You know the “crime” there? A marriage. The Duchess’s brothers are seeking revenge for her marriage to the man they (naturally, given the time) see as an inappropriate partner, her steward, Antonio. Having the “revenge” be taken for a marriage puts an interesting spin both on the genre of revenge tragedy and on the concept of tragedy by itself.
Given the precedents I’m citing, your questions, michael5000, about “where’s the revenge” and whether we read Giovanni as a hero, are obviously going to affect how we interpret the actions that he and others take, particularly regarding how they reflect on honor and virtue.
Since revenge often replaces institutions of justice (because if there were not corruption, the revenger could simply report the crime and watch the wheels of justice work, thus linking revenge with honor and virtue), I think that perhaps the most interesting justice may be that accomplished by Giovanni. When he has Annabella pray and then kills her in a state of grace, guaranteeing that she will go to heaven, and when he dies a few minutes later, gloating over his revenge and bearing the unrepentant guilt for at least three deaths (according to the logic of the play), he has (either ironically or redemptively) performed good by ensuring that they will be separated eternally.
Other than that, I thought that while the play (which I read once before, many years ago) has some interesting touches, overall, it is considerably less elegant than the best of the Jacobean plays—even the revenge tragedies. My overall judgment is, “I wish Webster had written this instead.”
*That’s today’s common definition of romance, not the literary prose genre or the anachronistically-named Shakespearean dramatic genre.
Dan and Jennifer have filled out what I meant by “decadent end of the revenge tragedy tradition.” Ford is writing forty or so years after “The Spanish Tragedy,” and twenty years after Webster. The genre is exhausted. Ford ingeniously incorporates that exhaustion in his story.
I wish Webster had written this instead.
Me too.
Love Jennifer’s thoughts on the genre – The Changeling is another play which, it occurs to me, is a curious one in terms of its spur for vengeance.
I wanted to defend Ford a bit, though. Jennifer, you’re right that his play lacks elegance, but I’m less sure than you and AR that this is necessarily a bad thing. Undoubtedly Webster has a better turn of phrase – a surer hand, perhaps. But isn’t it the point of ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore that everything’s a bit unwieldy, even a bit demotic?
When Richardetto declares Soranzo “a noble and virtuous gentleman”, Florio replies ambiguously, “As any is in Parma.” You’ll all get by now that my thesis is that ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore sets out a society in pieces; and to make the inhabitants of that society all silver-tongued, and their deeds smooth and contained, would fatally undermine the whole piece. Everyone is a great deal more compromised than that, and it is Ford’s goal to rub our noses in that.
I’m not making a claim that Ford’s weaknesses are deliberate – clearly he is not as great a writer on Webster’s ground as Webster. I might argue, though, that had Webster written ‘Tis Pity, it wouldn’t have been ‘Tis Pity at all…
So here’s a question that’s going through my head — a question that could sound inflamatory, but isn’t meant to be: If (1) the strength of ‘Tis Pity is that it “sets out a society in pieces,” and (2) the play is pointedly placed in Catholic Italy, with society’s corruption explicitly linked to a personal representative of the Papacy, and (3) we like the play, how far is that from saying “It’s a great play because it really pours on the anti-Catholicism”?
Mind you, I’m only saved from having to answer my own question because I’m exempt from point (3). Some of y’all are seeing some sort of philosophical exploration of a society where moral order has broken down, but fiction set in a broken-down moral order is hardly a rare or inherently interesting thing. It’s inherent to all exploitation literature, from your pulp paperbacks to B-movie noir to post-Kinsey Report “expose'” shock literature. ‘Tis Pity is thoroughly in this tradition — it pretends to condemn, but aims to titillate (Act II Scene I is such blatant sensation-mongering to be unintentionally hilarious). Nor, frankly, does it strike me as especially good exploitation lit; it has characters that serve no purpose, setups that go nowhere, a hodge-podge of a plot, and a thoroughly clumsy ending.
[…] Given my lack of participation in the conversation on ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore hosted by Jennifer and Michael5000, I thought I’d write my own post here. Since Jennifer and Michael5000 have decided […]
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