[In the essay below, Kaufmann identifies jealousy as a tragic motif in The Queene, Love's Sacrifice, and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, commenting on how this theme manifests itself through the devices of misalliance, the "psychology of vows, " and counterfeiting.]

I

Ford has not been altogether fortunate in his critics. They have been attentive, but perhaps Ford, like children, would have fared the better for a little healthy neglect. His reputation has been refracted into a grotesque pattern of distorted and partial images, largely, one supposes, because there is much distracting foreign matter in his canon, many invitations to irrelevancy in his historical position. As the last of the great Elizabethan tragic writers on the one hand and as the somewhat bookish exploiter of these great predecessors' visions on the other, he is set either too high or too low by standards quite external to his manifest performance. It is time we accord Ford his proper status as a minor classic writer on the scale of Emily Brontë, E. M. Forster, Hawthorne, and Scott Fitzgerald—writers typically obsessive in theme, deeply constrained personally, and nervously unresponsive to all save their main concerns. Such writers share in consequence a tendency to self-parody which is the underside of their splendid local intensities. The critic of great minor writing is obliged to enjoin his readers to observe decorum, not to ask too much of these writers, lest in so doing they miss the exquisite psychological disclosures which are the hallmark of such art.

It is one's initial sensitivity to the obsessive quality of Ford's art which provokes resistance to T. S. Eliot's accusation that Ford's plays are marred by "the absence of purpose" and that, more particularly, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore "may be called meaningless" since the "characters of the greatest intensity" are not seriously related to "an action or a struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet" [Essays in Elizabethan Drama, 1956]. In this essay I am attempting to show the insufficiency of this judgment. Ford struggles purposively with humanity's genius for self-deprivation, with its puzzling aspiration to be the architect of its own unhappiness. He does this with the kind of persistence that argues "an action of the soul."

Recent years have been fruitful in the kind of cruel experience which makes Ford's anxious world imaginatively accessible—specifically, our acquaintance with the plays of the modern French theater has taught us to read him better. The sophisticated fairy tales of Anouilh, the geometry of neat but not portentous spiritual encounter in Giraudoux, the studies in the lonely and gifted man's search for a sufficient identity as we find it in Sartre's Flies and Camus' Caligula—all variously can instruct us in the tonal qualities and special intellectual mode of Ford's plays. Ford, too, is the type of intellectual who is humanly restive under the tyranny of mind and yet artistically dependent upon its more rigid formulations. Hence the neatly logical surface and the sense of inchoate emotion in these plays. All such playwrights share an insight into the self-defining quality of individual human action. If the root of existential thought is the conviction that each man "makes himself through a qualifying series of choices, then Ford is as surely and as interestingly an existentialist as Sartre.

But there is, I think, a more direct route to the analysis of Ford's tragic perspective.

In this essay I follow a set of interrelated themes through three plays: The Queene, Love's Sacrifice, and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. My narrower aim is to show Ford discovering more and more adequate means to project and analyze the central psychological motive which animates his protagonists. It will be initially sufficient to call this quality jealousy, though thereby we merely apply a label of convenience to a complex set of mental actions which Ford gradually explores. More broadly, I hope to reveal the special meaning of tragic jealousy for Ford, through examination of his key obsessive themes. These themes of misalliance, of the psychology of vows, of counterfeiting, all relate to Ford's heightened awareness of the arbitrary in human life. In fact it is as a student of the arbitrary that I see Ford and will seek to present him.

The core situation in Ford is one of misalliance, of natures subtly mismatched and progressively at odds with themselves and with received social sanctions. This central situation applies to external misalliance, as to marriages of persons of different social derivation in Love's Sacrifice, to unnatural extensions of social bonds, as in the incestuous love of 'Tis Pity, and to the sad mismatching of youth and age in The Broken Heart. It can also apply without distention to the misalliance of the inner and the outer self in a single character. It is the most special quality of the Fordian hero that he "calls" himself to a role that his residual nature (conscience and shaping habits) will not permit him to fulfill. The protagonist misidentifies himself through a too arbitrary choice, disregards too much in himself, and tragedy results. It is this troubled contest between overt resolve and inner need, between what we demand and what we are free to accept, that makes for the tension of tragic experience.

Ford does not write simply about "problems," as his critics seem to wish; he slowly learns to write about irreducible situations in which the qualities of the participants necessarily harden into tragic contours through their relations with each other. It is just this concession that Ford implicitly exacts of us as his readers: that the human entanglements he writes about are precisely not problems, and the minute we literal-mindedly seek solutions, we collapse the delicately achieved balance of his plays. Ford is like Henry James in this. As a writer of terminal tragedy, he starts with the assumption of the good breeding and dignity of defeat. He denies us any vulgar "escape" from disaster (which is, after all, what a solution is). This preference for the noble identity secured in defeat Ford shares with the late Stoics and with the modern existentialist writers of the literature of extreme situations. The Sartre of The Flies would recognize a brother in the Ford of 'Tis Pity.

Once this combined necessity for dignity in defeat and for triumph over misalliance in the self through the costly beauty of the kept vow is accepted, there is a marvellous, subdued consistency to Ford's plays. Only through constructive exertions of the protagonist's will is tragedy then possible. In effect, we watch Ford's heroes counterfeit an adequate heroic stature through equating of the self with an arbitrary vow, and, since these choices are never prudent or circumspect, rich opportunities are thereby earned for a death of dramatic intensity. The key phrase to Ford could well be Juliet's "If aught else fails myself have power to die." A powerful and personally organized death is the resolution of the soul's misalliance in Ford. But such deaths are no more perfect in their isolation than are the people who contrive them—there is the costly imperfection of jealousy which guarantees that the most stoical tragedy is still a social experience. We can watch Ford's insight and technical mastery grow together as he learns to organize adequately complex dramatic statements of these themes from the unformed but promising The Queene, through the halfway house of Love's Sacrifice to proper fullness in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

II

The Queene is an imaginatively amphibious play, for if in its language it is halfway onto the cool strand of Ford's detached and attentive mature manner, it is also washed by the billowing falsities of Fletcher's tragicomic trickery. It bears no date. It seems to me clearly the sort of work a dramatist writes who is just discovering his proper personal themes but has yet to work free of the prevailing "correct" way to dramatize them. It is the test of Caroline originality to be able to transcend the facilities of Fletcher.

The Queene is a sort of sophisticated, theatrical fairy tale that does not quite maintain itself. Ford, whose interest in the type of gifted man still ludicrously open to flattery (and hence a candidate for Ate is lifelong) has here in the central masculine role, Alphonso, an imperfectly convincing combination of Chapman's Byron and Shakespeare's King Ferdinand of Navarre, with a special vice of jealous misogyny. It is this seemingly paradoxical latter quality that will interest us, for I agree with Oliver that the play is a kind of preliminary attempt at the central action of Love's Sacrifice, "each of the plays treating a husband's baseless suspicion of the chastity of his wife" [H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford, 1955]. Ford being of analytical mind, he only slowly learned to do what a more spontaneously gifted writer does directly. He did not seem to work from a central core of fable. His plays have the quality always of being built up from separately conceived parts. This fact is useful to us in The Queene, for here we find in disjunction elements that mature reflection will fuse. I hardly want to do more than enumerate them, for Ford barely does more than that with them himself.

We will need the bones of the plot. It is double and rests, typically for Ford, on the Queen's unqualified love for the vain, intolerant, woman-hater and political revolutionary, Alphonso, whom she repeals from execution at the outset in order to place him on the throne as King. This is paralleled by the equally unreasoning love of Velasco, the heroic military commander, for a widow. Both infatuated characters are made violently unhappy by their passion. Both are laid under the most arbitrary injunctions by their loved ones. The Queen is asked, immediately after the wedding, to establish separate households and to forego the privileges of marital love until Alphonso is satisfied of her purity and fidelity. Velasco is ordered to surrender his valiancy and to earn the title of coward, before his love will be acceptable. These could be dismissed as the rather arch postulates of sophisticated theater from Euripides to Anouilh, but such generic leveling obscures the peculiar tone of this play. We can see that Ford, the young man from the provinces, the puritan of Christes Bloodie Sweat, will always be an imperfect recruit to this sort of unanchored moral world. He will not be able to forget that the capricious love-game rests on an ennui which "is a meta-physical emotion" stemming from an unappeasable sense of inner emptiness. This emptiness provokes a sense of unworthiness which is the seedbed for jealousy and sterile manipulation of others whose regard or love must always seem ulterior to one who cannot value himself. An analytical anthology of key assertions in the play will make this clearer.

Critics have made the sense of honor a key emotion in Ford. Perhaps—but as Velasco says, "Ide rather loose my honor then my faith," and later, "passions at their best are but sly traytors / To ruin honour." (2728-30) It can be put almost syllogistically, this basic logic of Ford's world: Passion is able to dominate all men; Honor (reputation) is a frequent casualty of such passion; therefore, to cling to honor alone is unavailing. However, the logic of extreme situations is to join forces with the passions you cannot overcome. If you have an undeniable attraction, the intelligent recourse, then, is to place not only your love but your converted virtue there. This means narrowing your sense of honor or self-esteem deliberately, for the pleasing of the loved object. Hence the arrogant indifference to the rest of the world of a Giovanni, an Orgilus, even a Perkin Warbeck. I am as certain as one can be of anything conjectural that Ford thrilled to Othello's "My life upon her faith," and that slowly he learned that this statement contains one of the most profound ironies in Shakespeare's masterpiece of irony, for it can be better read "Her life upon my faith." The faith being defective in a Giovanni as it is in an Othello, desperate tragedy results.

The main action of The Queene is the unconvincing homeopathic cure of Alphonso, who is "most addicted to this pestilence of jealousy," (3593) but not before Alphonso has mindlessly conjured up visions of adultery and has sent his Queen towards the scaffold to answer for it. He even praises her beauty as she is being prepared for execution, till one of the lesser characters anticipates the reader: "Heer's a medley love / That kills in Curtesie." (3425-26) His real reason for having his Queen killed (as opposed to his public reasons) forms one of those psychic outcroppings which are the real basis for our insights in literature as well as in life:

          … had she bin still
As she was, mine, we might have liv'd too happily
For eithers comfort
                                                (3372-76)

This Calvinistic sentiment is, I think, a revealing one. Ford's characters are terrified by the threat of happiness which saps identity. They are forever controlling themselves, narrowing their characters down to monomaniacal attachments and pursuits which in turn they find more demanding than they can sustain. When we return to what we started from—Alphonso as a violent misogynist whose jealousy is stifling—we can see the full curve of the key theme. The Fordian hero fears women too much to have the faith in them which alone can save him. In The Queene we are far from the rarely subtilized jealousy and imperfect faith of a Giovanni, but the very inchoate quality of this earlier play provides a family of critical clues.

III

In Love's Sacrifice, we ask at once whether the title speaks of the sacrifices made to love or the very sacrifice of love itself through needless entertainment of passions destructively incompatible with it. It is this richer meaning that Ford pursued here, and only realized in later works. The grounds for believing the former are readily indicated. Clear cases can be made for all three characters in the triangle: the wronged husband Caraffa, the Duke, who has condescended to marry beneath him; his superficially errant Duchess, Bianca; and the troubled true lover, true friend, Fernando. Bianca is carried past herself into a real desire for Fernando, a desire which his courtly scruple and loyalty to the bonds of friendship will not permit him to gratify. Trapped in a relationship which cannot mature, she eagerly incites her shocked husband to murder her when he discovers and misinterprets this unperfected liaison. She asks to be and succeeds in becoming a sacrifice to her awakened sense of a love she is unable to obtain. Her problem is routine. Ford's handling of her development is sketchy, but promising. What in effect he shows us is that her character is decent but thin, lacking in the deeper compunctions we call nobility, and hence her undernourished sense of abstract honor would not alone have been sufficient to prevent adultery once she had put herself regularly in the way of temptation. It is one of Ford's distinctions that he understands the emotional process of the essentially feminine mind—the sluggish but impressive logic of radical emotion. We can say then at the outset that Bianca is a somewhat conventional self-elected martyr for love—her sacrifice is the standard romantic one of a now useless life to an unobtainable ideal of love.

Fernando, her lover, is at once passionate and scrupulous. His finer self is aroused by Bianca's confession of helplessness against her need for his love; he voluntarily imposes upon himself a restraint whereby he renounces ready physical gratification in the interests of her supposed welfare. We could say that he is able to sublimate his passion through the agency of his excited sense of honor. What he turns to in this renunciation is the rather melo-dramatic compensatory pleasure of a grand death, in which he can speak scornful words of the Duke's failure to have trust in the perfection of Fernando's talent for friendship. There is something priggish about Fernando, and a good bit of as yet undeveloped Fordian hybris. Or, better, there is something close to Ate—to tragic infatuation with one's own sufficiency. There is a nice distinction here: the man fraught with hybris believes himself invulnerable to the gods; the man seized with Ate thinks he already possesses a full vision of himself and of the consequent interpretation that must be put on his actions by all observers. Hybris teaches one to say, "Nothing can happen to me." Ate persuades one to think, "Since I know what I am doing, no one else can misunderstand." Ford understood what confers significance in the world of events. Others do shape notions; we are misunderstood. His tragedies are mainly ones of Ate, of misguided and passionate attempts to deny not only the right of the world to judge (the tenet of romantic individualism), but the very ability of the world to assign values where the ego of the protagonist has established prior claims. The strange silences which attend the movements of Ford's heroes have been remarked by critics. They are silent because their private reasons are sufficient; the world's claims are thus not opposed and equal, but negligible and incommensurate. Fernando courts martyrdom in his own gently contemptuous fashion, refusing the moral canons of "life-hugging slaves." He is a sacrifice to a somewhat abstracted notion of love, one not perfectly separable from chillier Stoic notions of self-consistency.

The Duke sacrifices himself at the end of the play, largely because he must preserve his precarious dignity. He cuts a poor figure throughout, and his final theatrical self-execution before the dead "lovers'" tomb (in which he then assigns himself a place—a troublesome ménage à trois in perpetuity) is self-described as performed

           … for Bianca's love
Caraffa, in revenge of wrongs to her,
Thus on her altar sacrificed his life.
                                               (V, iii)

Were it not for the fact that, as Robert Ornstein has most interestingly pointed out, we tend to accept as true the self-evaluations spoken by stage characters not manifestly villainous and hypocritical, we would not find much in this remark at all ["Historical Criticism and the Interpretation of Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959)]. The simple, sub-theatrical fact is that the Duke has thoroughly botched everything, has displayed no hint of understanding or love or character. We find his final act gratuitous, his joining the dead lovers (whose relationship possesses at least a shred of validity) an intrusion.

Why does the play seem so centerless? Why do its well-phrased passions seem so stagey and false? I think the answer lies not in putative ethical confusion in the play which "preserves in the separate fates of the main protagonists a consistent ethical scheme" [Peter Ure, "Cult and Initiate in Ford's Love's Sacrifice," Modern Language Quarterly, XI (1951)]. Rather, it lies in the disastrously wrong point of view from which Ford chooses to "narrate" or project his play. It has been noted by earlier critics that the play resembles Othello. I point out now that it is a very oblique Othello, and that the uselessly novel obliquity of Ford's vision is what subtracts from tragic concentration and spoils his dramatic scheme. Let me briefly indicate how this off-center view of the action affects the play.

What Ford omits in imitating Shakespeare's great play on the theme of misalliance is precisely the indispensable feature—the massive centrality of Othello himself. Shakespeare puts us squarely behind Othello, whose mighty figure steadily gains control over our imagination. By something very close to expressionist techniques, the latter part of the play becomes for us more and more a vision of the world as Othello mistakenly sees it; we are swept up and hurried to his dreadful, misconceived, and yet inevitable destiny. We are very precisely with Othello as he chooses and acts. Anyone who doubts this must not have felt the shocked recall to reality that Emilia's knock at the death-chamber door constitutes, nor noted how strange the intrusion of commonplace language seems, after the rhythms of Othello's spacious and noble misconception. It almost makes one weep to read prim critical reductions of this terrible error which we are never asked to approve, only to understand in process. The precise poetic quality of this tragic fantasy as it usurps the world is what we are asked to see—what we do see. Jealousy is what we call it before Shakespeare has brought us within it; afterwards we know how a violent "purity" of faith in Othello has been used by Shakespeare to raise an otherwise uncomprehended indignity of life to the level of tragedy. The tragedy is made out of the patient contemplation of one man's re-actions to torment, his consequent re-editing of reality, and his subsequent conduct.

In Ford's hands the theme of misalliance is apparently abstracted, and the Duke is given a set speech or two early in the play to let us know that he dotes on his wife's beauty and that he realizes that he has gone against custom in marrying beneath his rank:

Though my gray-headed senate …
Would tie the limits of our free affects
  [affections]—
Like superstitious Jews,—to match with none
But in a tribe of princes like ourselves …
But why should princes do so, that command
The storehouse of the earth's rich minerals?
                                                         (I, i)

As superficially similar as this is to the standard plot-postulates of Fletcherian tragicomedy, I think we would be wrong to follow the current fashion and reduce the play to mechanical, problem-play exploration of the consequences of the Duke's foolish disregard of custom in making this wilful misalliance. The truth seems to be rather that Ford is troubled by the Duke's presence and can supply him with no real interior function. Now and then he is recalled to the stage, to watch from a position of bemused detachment the apish deformations of behavior visible, as usual, in Ford's minor characters. Ford makes a gesture at the theme of "authority," which orders Shakespeare's play, when he has the Duke exclaim,

           How we
Who sway the manage of authority
May be abused by smooth officious agents!
                                              (I, ii)

The critical significance of Ford's quandary is detectable right here. If one's authority is to be abused with tragic (rather than comic or merely didactic) consequences, then the authority must be conveyed, not merely assumed as an artistic convenience. Ford's Duke appears on the stage only spasmodically, and merely to be manipulated by his embittered sister and the purportedly fiendish servant, D'Avolos, who together perform Iago's dark functions. The effect is of a goodly catalogue of officious agents, of much intended malice and much cause for suffering of which we see little convincing evidence. One senses a deeply insufficient engagement of Ford's imagination. What he really wanted to write about here, I think, is how the fineness of the lovers was a product of the Duke's jealousy. The Duke's presence as a lens for conventionally evaluating their acts, however, is a technical embarrassment not to be overcome. Either the Duke is right, in which case the lovers are morally swamped; or he is as irrelevant as Soranzo in 'Tis Pity, a person whose claims are negligible and whose sufferings have no dramatic assertion whatsoever. Ford, by borrowing the half-remembered authority of Othello's compelling figure, has deepened his artistic predicament. It makes it harder to ignore the Duke, a thing we must do if we are to feel the effect of what is viable in the play. What he has yet to learn is that the noble lover and the jealous lover must be one and the same. Ford, the student of misalliance, has misallied themes in this play. As a result, the whole play has a dreamlike quality, and an uninvited irony of tone playing over its surface.

There is much to interest us in the crisscross pattern of true and counterfeit loves, of true and counterfeit reports, of true honor and its deceptive likeness, of false sacrifice as a self-relieving act and true sacrifice as giving up what you want most for reasons of Conradian delicacy. There is a real dignity in the lovers' acceptance of the roles they wish to play and then act out to their logical and terrible conclusion. The Duchess, when accused by her husband before he sacrifices her, makes no excuses, asks no mercy, but rather, accepts her role gladly; she only demands the right to define it as it really is, not as it seems to be. She has no wish to be a real martyr for counterfeit reasons. Fernando's attraction was physical, a fact she faces without illusion. She will not falsify her own nature to buy life. The heroic self in Ford is one free of illusions about what one intends to be. Fordian heroes can read their own motives, however conventionally base.

The entire play, Love's Sacrifice, centers to one side of the issues that characterize a normal adultery-revenge play. Ford's interest is not in what people think happens, what is said to happen, or even in the possibilities for physical action, but in what happens to the sensibilities of the people involved—how those who are apparently wrong achieve dignity and how the one apparently right (the Duke), sacrifices everything, always too late and always without comprehension. The unmodulated descent into terrible self-knowledge, which makes Othello the most searing of Shakespeare's plays, is totally lacking here, not because the Duke does not repent of his error, but because he has no artistically achieved character, through empathy with which we can know the quality of this change. The Duke's only recourse at the end is a cold, self-destructive fury, whereby to make a meaningless sacrifice of himself. The Duke has never had the existentialist opportunity that confers privilege in Ford's world; he has had no chance to choose a role, to counterfeit a true self. Ford does not make the same mistake with Giovanni in 'Tis Pity.

IV

'Tis Pity She's a Whore has all the assurance Love's Sacrifice lacks. The first act has such a heat economy of attack, such a rare directness, that it argues Ford's confident impatience to give body to a world he sees rising before him. The writing blooms with certitude. It is worth the trouble to state how Ford builds the telling structure of his first act. It has four parts: Giovanni's incestuous compulsion is presented through an argument, entered in medias res, between the Friar and Giovanni. This stands apart like Euripides' prologue to Hippolytus, where the causal agency is announced, so that we are free to concentrate on the human consequences.

Next we see Annabella beleaguered by suitors whose characteristics are venality, cowardice, and corrupt worldliness. By their defects of quality these suitors create a predisposition in favor of the girl's need for love; we grow sensitive to her isolation and learn to justify her despair of beauty and dignity in her life. Ford's strategy throughout is here prefigured. The carefully contrived world of the play is one in which marriage is debased, sacraments are violated, vows are disregarded, churchly and secular sanctions are loosened and enfeebled. Without being baroquely overdrawn, the world of the play is made to act (in its negations of beauty) as a foil to the desperate choices of Giovanni and his sister. This is not, of course, because Ford approves of incest, but it is done to put the unthinkable within access of thought. Not the least of the functions of tragedy is to enlarge our imagi-native tolerance.

This necessary climate being indicated, Ford brings the lovers together. They declare their loves, and, in a fashion obligatory in Ford's world, cement a pact, a mutual vow. Vows are important in Ford's world where an aestheticism of morality prevails, with its accompanying distaste for an ignoble and pointlessly frivolous existence distracted by too much meaningless privilege. By a solemn vow, one circumscribes his choices and hence gains a predictable future. Vows are at once the expression of taste and the most arbitrary and compelling form of self-definition—a vow can confer identity. We should pay attention to vows in Ford's plays. The one exchanged between Giovanni and Annabella is like a bethrothal, and each repeats the same formula on their "mother's dust":

      I charge you,
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate:
Love me or kill me.
                                (I, iii. Italics mine)

Contrary to conventional opinion, this is precisely what Giovanni does; his love being corrupted, he kills his sister. Once we credit the literal and sanctified binding force of this vow, much of Giovanni's frenetic behavior in the latter part of the play, his "mirth or hate," becomes intelligible. More of that later.

With great rapidity, Ford has shown us the isolation of both Giovanni and Anabella and then brought them together with a resolution quiet and fiercely pure. They now will have significance only in relation to this arbitrary vow whereby they have separated themselves from any hope of conventional felicity. This counterfeit marriage represents a radical misalliance which is made narrowly sacred by an arbitrary vow. It is the perfect concentrate of Ford. It is also typical of Ford that this scene should be counterpointed immediately with Bergetto's fatuous trivialities, as his prejudicially cheerful inanities are permitted to speak for the world the lovers are denying. But Ford is not content, even with this marvellously compressed total, as his accomplishment in the first act. He makes one other point which invites careful reflection. The uncle of Bergetto, a straightforward sort of man without any illusions but still hopeful, watches the idiotic ineptitude of his nephew (whose suit to Annabella he is trying to forward) and factually observes, "Ah, Sirrah, then I see there is no changing of nature. Well, Bergetto, I fear though wilt be a very ass still" (I, iv). There are useful implications in this comical assertion of our fixed natures.

One of the commonest criticisms of Ford as an artist concerns the evident unsuccess of his comic subplots. This is possibly unjustified, since we are beginning to see how funny is the ardent status-seeking of the stupid and un-qualified now that we are again socially swamped by it. But by the use of comic characters (required to express unchangeable qualities), Ford can slyly forestall any hesitation we might feel in accepting the inflexible, self-defeating commitments which are the hallmark of his tragic protagonists. Ford's world, in consequence, must often be solemn and pompous, lest its close alliance with the world of comedy—the arbitrary quality of his characters—be too distractingly apparent.

We are led directly from this to the special dilemma of dramatists like Ford (and Euripides, whom he resembles in many ways). Ford centers his dramatic world on fixed and irrevocable commitments which the characters them-selves contract. Fernando, Giovanni, Penthea in The Broken Heart, Perkin Warbeck—all hold sacred their own declarations of purpose, and their tragedy relates to these openly stated dramatic vows and is displaced from any external agency which can operate only as a secondary cause. Ford's characters are self-defining and nonpolitical. They do not so much defy society as deny its relevance to their lives.

Observing this, we find in Ford's non-dramatic prose the source of a moral contradiction which is latent in the stoical as it is in the extreme protestant ethic. In A Line of Life we find him saying, "where the actors of mischief are a nation, there and amongst them to live well is a crown of immortal commendation." The difficulty comes in determining what it means "to live well" when a community standard of intelligible virtue is lacking. One must be his own light. Elsewhere in the same work, Ford opines, "Let no man rely too much on his own judgment; the wisest are deceived." Without the guidance of a community whose approbation one seeks and by whose judgments one abides, how is one to avoid the deceptions which lurk even in the choices of the wisest? The Stoic notion of Reason is troublingly like this Humean consensus of the approbation of the best people. The unearned confidence of modern theologues aside, the difficulty in reconciling these two contradictions—that one can no more live by the lights of a corrupt community than he can be the sole sponsor of his own morality—creates the very area in which tragedy is to be found. Ford found it there and Giovanni gives expression to it; he is a martyr to the tragic limitations of the Stoic vision. It is priggish to suppose that, in times of extreme social dislocation, there is always a better vision than the stoical one available. If a little of this is conceded, then Giovanni is a legitimate tragic figure. Let me conclude my discussion of 'Tis Pity by indicating precisely in what I think his tragedy consists.

While watching the play, one grows strangely tolerant of the unaccommodated Giovanni, to whom the mindless frivolity of a Bergetto, the casual immorality of a Soranzo, the slack conventional optimism of his father, and the angular traditional arguments of the Friar are alike irrelevant to the passionate central truth of his life—that his sister is good and beautiful. Since he has been educated to prefer the good and the beautiful, he prefers her with a kind of exclusive purity of vision which has at once the narrowness of madness and the cultivated clarity of a splendid sanity. But Ford knows that a vow, a reasoned choice made in the stillness of a moment of seeming truth, must then suffer the tests of a world which impinges on one's acts. A miscalculation of one's purposes, a misalliance of purpose and capacity, can spell corruption. Ford saw, and makes us see, that for Giovanni and for Annabella what has happened is a deeply working denial that others have a reality commensurate to the sense of their own being.

In their ignorance, they overrate themselves. They become coarsened by the necessity they are under to engage in pretenses to preserve the "utopia for two." From the moment Giovanni wants more to preserve his rights in his sister than her sense of her own dignity and freedom, he begins to deteriorate morally. We can mark the stages: an embarrassing, callow bravura when speaking of his sexual privileges which (solipsistically) he supposes even the Friar must envy; (II, v) a possessive edginess; (II, vi) an hysterical inflation of language which mounts as he grows less and less capable of crediting any other feelings but his own (V, ii) In the final murder we can see very clearly that Giovanni is no longer with his sister. He acts unilaterally. He no longer possesses the love to share even his plans for a Liebestod with her. His selfishness has grown perfect, his love become an abstract and self-oriented thing. He is true only to the negative sanction of their "marriage" vow,

Do not betray me to your mirth or hate:
Love me or kill me.
                                                  (I, iii)

We watch the monomaniacal workings of his mind as he does betray her to "mirth and hate" and, having done so, having killed all but the gorgeous verbal residue of their love, he kills her.

Giovanni's tragedy is deep and it does provoke terror and pity, for like Othello's, it rests on the most terrible sacrifice of love—not of the object of love only, but of one's ability to give and receive love. 'Tis Pity is a tragedy of the attrition of dignity and humanity of a man in the pos-session of Ate. The tragic moral is not readily abstractable, and has nothing to do with incest as such. It is rooted in Ford's profound grasp of the psychological autointoxication which can result from too arbitrary a dedication of one's mysterious humanity. Like Othello, Giovanni is so obviously the dreadfully suffering victim of his own tragic infatuation with phantoms that we are moved closer to the core of our own humanity. The judgment is in the situation; we need not impose one.

Ford's choice of incest as a theme around which to build his greatest play was not itself arbitrary. From it he obtained an intensification of his grasp of the spiritual roots of jealousy that nothing else could have given him. A good complementary text for 'Tis Pity is D. H. Lawrence's study of Edgar Allan Poe, from which I quote two passages:

The trouble with man is that he insists on being master of his own fate, and he insists on oneness … having discovered the ecstasy of spiritual love, he insists that he shall have this all the time … He does not want to return to his own isolation.

And

It is easy to see why each man kills the thing he loves. To know a living thing is to kill. You have to kill a thing to know it satisfactorily. For this reason, the desirous consciousness, the spirit, is a vampire … Keep KNOWLEDGE for the world of matter, force, and function. It has got nothing to do with being.

[Studies in Classical American Literature, 1953]

Ford raised a conventional theme of stage jealousy to a level of comprehension at which I think he would have understood exactly these urgent words of Lawrence's, so instinct with our own aroused sense of the sanctity of being. In brilliantly literalizing the metaphor that the truth of love is written in the heart of the beloved, he has made Giovanni's desperate gouging-out of Annabella's heart more than a piece of sensationalism. It is an act exactly appropriate to Giovanni's austerely curious, intellectual, character; it is also the perfect correlative of the frenzied, higher jealousy to which Ford is giving tragic expression.

To speak one last time in conjunction with Lawrence,

… the love is between brother and sister. When the self is broken, and the mystery of the recognition of otherness fails, then the longing for identification becomes lust … it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem.

Listen to the triumphant words of Giovanni as he shows the heart of Annabella,

             'tis a heart,
A heart, my lords, in which is mine entombed.
                                           (V, vi)

Ford has traced this tragic confusion to its very source. He has answered for himself a question asked by Bianca, importuning Fernando to make love to her in Love's Sacrifice, "what's a vow? a vow? Can there be sin in unity?" This is the radical misalliance—this uncomprehended urge to a unity life does not permit. Aristophanes' comic parable to explain love in Plato's Symposium can here be seen as the deep source of human tragedy as well. Giovanni, like Othello, asks for a quality of certitude life does not afford, and hence he "violates the delicacy" of things. Incest is a model of this—the vehicle of his tragedy; the failure in mutual faith is at once its moral and its cause. After thus tracing Ford's patient exploration of the jealousy that tragically undermines essential faith, it is hard to see in him the purposeless and soulless opportunist of T. S. Eliot's caricature.