[In the following essay, Wiseman discusses Ford's treatment of the incestuous body in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore as a context from which modern readers can examine seventeenth-century cultural attitudes towards sex, incest, and the human body.]

I

Soranzo.   Tell me his name!
Annabella.                      Alas, alas, there's all.
         Will you believe?
Soranzo.                  What?
Annabella.                     You shall
 never know.
Soranzo.   HOW!
Annabella.    Never; if you do, let me be
 cursed.
Soranzo.    Not know it strumpet! I'll rip up thy
 heart and find it there.
Annabella.               DO, do.

In this speech from Ford's mid-seventeenth-century play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore there are a number of gaps between what is presented on stage and what might be called the 'meanings' of what is happening in relation to cultural contexts. The story so far is that Soranzo is one of Annabella's suitors. She agrees to marry him because she is pregnant with her brother's child. Soranzo has discovered Annabella's pregnancy, but he does not know that the father is Giovanni. This exchange, therefore, draws our attention to several aspects of the play. Firstly, Soranzo's questioning dramatises the impossibility of knowing about incest from the evidence of the pregnant body; for the body does not of itself disclose the identity of the child's father, let alone the nature of the relationship between the two parents. Secondly, the conversation alerts us to the marital and legal structures governing the body, especially the female body, as the reference to a curse suggests the religious strictures which regulated sexual behaviour. Thirdly, and more generally, Annabella's body is subject to violent handling. The dialogue calls attention to the physical body, and its sexual significance is displayed to the theatre audience. Additionally, the idea of ripping up Annabella's heart to discover the name of the child's father there reminds the audience of the earlier incestuous exchange of vows between Annabella and her lover/brother Giovanni, while simultaneously echoing the rhetoric used in a lovers' exchange of hearts. The audience are in possession of these facts, but they also watch scene after scene in which the knowledge of incest is denied, concealed or re-read through the linguistic and dramatic structures of the text.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore was written for the theatre, but the relationship between the making of meaning in the theatre and its cultural context is problematic. Meaning in the theatre is itself destabilised by the complexity of theatrical representation and its use of a written or spoken text in combination with other sign systems (gesture, staging, etc.), which may support or contradict the linguistic text (obviously these contradictions are sometimes inscribed within the script itself). One way of formulating this is to separate linguistic and other signifiers. As the theatre semiotician Veltrusky put it [Jiri Veltrusky, 'Dramatic Text as a Component of Theatre,' in Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contribution, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titinuk, 1976], 'In theatre, the linguistic sign system, which intervenes through the dramatic text, always combines and conflicts with acting, which belongs to an entirely different sign system'. An example of this is the way in which, in Act I, Scene i, we see Annabella make a choice of Giovanni after a sequence of lovers have appeared and either been discussed or themselves paid suit. We, the audience, know that the 'truth' of any liaison between sister and brother must be an incestuous one, but as Kathleen McLuskie says [in Renaissance Dramatists, 1989], the script's 'structure of the lovers rejected and a lover chosen leads the audience to accept Annabella's choice in spite of the startling danger of incest'. However, this pattern of theatrical structure which makes Giovanni into a lover (and Giovanni's later use of language which makes their love into a platonic union) operates throughout in tension with the audience's knowledge of the confounding of nature and culture, self and other, which takes place in the incestuous act. It could be argued that the theatre, because of its specific representational status, offers a case study in the containing and naturalising function of sexual discourse. All the way through 'Tis Pity She's a Whore the audience hear words and see actions on stage which do not correspond to what they 'know' in terms of culture. Although the experience of an audience depends on specific historical circumstances, for both a contemporary and an early modern audience, this play would present a contradiction or paradox between a script (using or gesturing towards legal, religious, platonic or civil language to misdescribe incest) and the problem of assignable cultural meanings attached to a body on stage.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore offers a reworking of the familiar family drama of Renaissance tragedy. It extends the complex triangles of desire and specifically the sister-brother relations found in plays including Measure For Measure, The Duchess of Malfi (published in 1623 with a commendatory verse by Ford), James Shirley's The Traitor and Ford's own The Broken Heart. This essay uses 'Tis Pity She's a Whore to examine the relationship between the body and the languages (of, for example, love, law and sin) used to describe it in the English Renaissance. A central question is: what was the significance of incest and the incestuous body in the mid-seventeenth century? Moreover, what relationship can be seen between incest in a theatrical text and in other kinds of writing about sexuality, such as legal and religious discourse, or conduct manuals? Although the play is set in Parma, it is used here to raise questions about English theatre and the regulation of sexuality.

During the Renaissance, a range of (masculine) discourses and institutions claimed to give the body symbolic meaning. Peter Burke's definition of 'culture' as 'a system of shared meanings, attitudes and values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artefacts) in which they are expressed or embodied' offers some scope for the discussion of dramatic and particularly theatrical representation in relation to other 'symbolic forms' [Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1978]. Access to the past, however, is notoriously problematic, and different sign systems cannot easily be read as equivalent or arbitrarily connected. There must inevitably be important differences in the ways in which legal documents and dramatic and theatrical texts treat and utilise the symbolic representations of incest.

It has been argued by both historians and cultural historians that during the seventeenth century privacy became an issue for the individual, while at the same time it also became evident that the body of the individual was claimed not only by the individual her-or-himself and by the church, but also by the state. Michel Foucault and Robert Muchem-bled have argued that the period 1500-1700 saw a cultural change which produced a nexus of new ideas about family life and licit and illicit sexual behaviour. More cautiously, Martin Ingram concludes that 'these changes add up to a significant adjustment in popular marriage practices and attitudes to pre-marital sexuality' ['The Reformation of Popular Culture? Sex and Marriage an Early Modern England,' in Popular Culture in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Barry Reay, 1985]. What the historians do not address is the relationship between these societal shifts and Burke's 'performances'. Incest is often represented in early-modern cultural production (theatrical examples include Hamlet, Women Beware Women, The Revenger's Tragedy), and incestuous scenarios seem to have been part of the theatre's appeal to public interest. This crime is mentioned in sacred, legal and other secular official dis-courses, but such discourses differ in the ways in which they consider incest, and therefore, the meanings assigned to incest differ between legal documents and dramatic or theatrical texts.

Writers including Stephen Greenblatt, Natalie Zemon Davis and Lisa Jardine have tried, in different ways, to negotiate the relationships between different kinds of texts within a field of discourse. Stephen Greenblatt writes of sexual discourse as 'a field which in the early modern period includes marriage manuals, medical, theological and legal texts, sermons, indictments and defenses of women; and literary fictions' ['Fiction or Friction, Shakespearean Negotiations, 1988]. Granted that most texts in this field at-tempt to keep the meanings of sexuality stable and ordered, are all diese different writings on sexuality equivalent? Can the semiological systems of a theatrical text 'read' in the theatre be equated with a marriage manual?

One of the most obvious discourses about sexuality is found in conduct books by writers such as Gouge and Tilney which describe and prescribe marital arrangements and the proper ordering of sexuality within the domestic sphere [William Gouge, Of Domesticali Duties, 1622; Edmund Tilney, A Brief and Pleasant Discourse of the Duties in Marriage, 1568]. The discussion of incest in Bullinger's Christian State of Matrimony (1541) mediates between Biblical meanings of incest and the implications of the incestuous body in Christian civil society:

he that hath not a shameless and beastly heart doth sure abhorre and detest the copulations in the said forbidden degrees. Honesty, shamefastness, & nurture of it self teacheth us not to meddle in such: therefore sayeth god evidently and playnly in the often repeated chap. Levi. xviii Defile not your selves in any of these things, for with all these are the heathen defiled, who I will cast out before you. The land also is defiled therethrowe: & I will visit their wickedness upon them, so that the land shall spew out the inhabitours thereof.

Here both nature and 'nurture' are outraged by incest and associate it with both the heathen and with the rebellion of the land itself, which casts out those who commit it. For the literate these words would echo the commonplace interdictions of Leviticus and the tables of consanguinity and affinity found on church walls. It is a helpful passage in that, like 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, it discusses copulation rather than attempted marriage, as tends to be the focus of legal documentation, which concentrates on relationships of affinity rather than consanguinity. The connections between texts like this one, prescribing the regulation of the body, with legal records and theatrical representation constitute the complex formation through which ideas of sexuality circulate in language.

In a seventeenth-century context, incest became known through the religious language of confession, as it does in Ford's play through Giovanni's and Annabella's confessions to the friar, and Putana's secular confession to Vasques (IV. iii). Confession is needed for the church and law to assign meaning to an individual body in its social context, as the mere body in front of an audience is not self-explanatory. Even a pregnant body does not tell all its own secrets, and incest is undiscoverable from external evidence. Nevertheless, contemporaries did link sexual irregularity to external signs: in the early-modern period what was perceived as sexual laxity or deviance was associated with monstrous births. According to manuals of sexual conduct, such as the later Aristotle's Masterpiece, these births indicated indulgence in sexual extravagance or misbehaviour, for example intercourse at an 'inappropriate' time in a woman's menstrual cycle. Manuals such as the Masterpiece did not link incest explicitly to monstrous birth, but their illustrations do mythologise the dangers of forbidden liaisons, picturing, for instance, the offspring of a woman and a dog.

Incest was of two types: affinity (sexual relations or inter-marriage with non-blood relatives with whom there was a problem because of inheritance) and consanguinity. Lawrence Stone concludes [in The Family, Sex, and Marriage, 1979] that incest 'must have been common in those over-crowded houses where the adolescent children were still at home'. He also writes that 'all known societies have incest taboos, and the peculiarity of them in England was the restriction of their number at the Reformation to the Levitical degrees'. Moreover, he suggests that the fact that the punishment for incest was 'surprisingly lenient' indicates that sodomy and bestiality were accounted crimes of greater seriousness. Incest was not declared a felony until 1650, before which—like adultery and fornication—it was investigated, tried and punished by ecclesiastical authori-ties. Furthermore, incest tends to appear in the records only when people were caught or accidentally married within prohibited degrees, for which latter offences pardons were granted. In 1636 Sir Ralph Ashton in Lancashire was punished for having adulterous sex with a woman and her niece. In the same year Elizabeth Sleath and her father, by whom she had had a second child, received 'severe chastisement' at the house of correction before being sent for further punishment.

As Stone reminds us, information about 'sexual conventions' is hard to find. However, the law does offer certain insights into the possible fate of sexual offenders and particularly the female body. Bastardy provides a paler analogue for it in that the single woman's pregnant body partly confesses her crime; fornication and bastardy were meanings attendant upon her pregnancy, but the body of a woman would not reveal the father to whom the parish might turn to require economic support for the child. If a woman had committed fornication, she might be declared a common whore and punished with banishment by some church authorities. She might be put on good behaviour for a year, fined, whipped, put in the stocks and required to confess, wearing a white sheet in front of the church. Such punishments appear to reflect the economic, familial, physical, social and symbolic values associated with cases of women contravening the imperative to be chaste. The nature and sites of the punishment indicate the issues at stake.

In cases of bastardy where children were actually born rather than merely conceived outside wedlock, paternity was investigated by two Justices of the Peace. In 1624 a statute was passed whereby women who gave birth to an illegitimate child that would be dependant on the parish might be sentenced to one year's hard labour. Collective dishonour and financial burden seem to have been the crux of the matter for the parish, and the Justices were entitled to find ways of keeping the child off parish relief. As the body of the woman did not reveal the child's father, pregnant women could be subjected to mental and physical torture to elicit a confession of paternity. The Justices were also entitled to punish the parents by whipping, which could be done in the marketplace or in the street where the offender lived, as well as in the house of correction. In cases of fornication and bastardy, illegal sexual conduct is revealed physically in the pregnancy of the woman. The symbolic meaning of bastardy, however, like incest, was only made evident by the woman's confession and in the demonstration of her body and her physical punishment at church and market, sites of central importance in civil and religious society. For example, in 1613 one Joan Lea was to be 'openly whipped at a cart's tail in St John Street… until her body be all bloody', and in 1644 Jennett Hawkes was ordered to be 'stripped naked from the middle upwards, and presently be soundly whipped through the town of Wetherby'.

Incest, however, is a much more extreme and confused crime, in which the woman must confess paternity in order that the crime be known. Her body does not reveal the implications of its condition. Without confession the meaning of incestuous sexuality remains hidden. Without confession the sin cannot be identified and confirmed by the religious, financial, civil and familial discourses which converge to declare the (female) body sinful and which look for signs of its crime in the way Soranzo does in the speech quoted at the beginning of this essay. When incest is confessed, however, it merely exposes further and greater confusions surrounding the means of reproduction. Unlike the confession of paternity in the case of bastardy when the naming of the father clarifies a situation and enables the child to be socially placed, the naming of the father in the case of incest multiplies familial and social connections in incompatible ways. Incest and the child of an incestuous relationship have too many, contradictory meanings.

One theorisation of the meanings of incest is offered by Jacques Derrida, who takes incest as the example of a sign which confuses the oppositional status of 'nature' and 'culture'. Incest troubled Lévi-Strauss because it fitted the categories of both nature and culture, and Derrida comments, 'It could be perhaps said that the whole of philosophical conceptualisation, which is systematic with the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualisation possible: the origin of the prehistory of incest. ['Structure, Sign, and Play,' in his Writing & Difference, trans. alan Boss, 1978]. One of Derrida's aims here is to attack the truth value of philosophical concepts, which he sees as created by the pre-conditions which govern how any given discourse produces knowledge. We might see this remark as offering a way to read incest in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, where different discourses converge to make meanings around Annabella's and Giovanni's sexual relationship which actually serve to conceal the 'truth' of their incest.

For example, Giovanni's language in the early part of the play has two results. It confuses the categories of nature and culture and erases the confusions caused by incest through an appeal to 'beauty' as a 'natural' producer of desire and therefore as an endorsement of that desire. Where other signifiers such as 'heart' are expanded in the play to operate at a complex and ambiguous level of meaning, the idea of incest constitutes what we might call the absent centre in Giovanni's discourse, the hidden precondition of his platonic language.

II

In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore the female body is represented as an ethical, financial, spiritual, amatory and psychological territory. Annabella's body, the procreative feminine corpus, is located and relocated within these competing ways of looking at the body. The poetic language of love and service used by Soranzo and Giovanni serves to conceal or blur the illicit nature of the physical love that they describe, and to misrepresent the social and economic position of the women courted. It is the relationship of women to sex, money and language that actually deter-mines the outcome of the sexual relationships presented in the play.

This is made evident in Act II when Soranzo in his study considers adapting an encomium to Venice for Annabella.

Soranzo. Had Annabella lived when Sannazar
Did in his brief encomium celebrate
Venice, that queen of cities, he had left
That verse which gained him such a sum of gold,
And for one only look from Annabell
Had writ of her, and her diviner cheeks.
                                       (II. ii. 12-17)

Economic exchange is here implicit in the rhetoric of praise. Part of the project of courtly love is to redefine transgressive, physical acts of love and to transform what is, say, adultery in the discourse of civil society, into platonic union in the language of patronage. This language operates within an economy of patronage in which 'service' and 'duty' are rewarded. We might think of the contract of the luckless Pedringano in The Spanish Tragedy, or Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling. In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore this ends with literary language made literal in the ripping up of Annabella's heart.

The play indicates the duplicitous implications of the language of courtly love in the words of Soranzo and Giovanni. Soranzo appeals to Annabella in terms of courtly love (e.g. III. ii and the scene with Hippolita in II. ii). Giovanni similarly employs the comparative language of courtly love, notably in a scene of courtship (I. ii). It is here that two important metaphors are first encountered, that of the power of the gaze and the trope of the heart on which truth is written. The power of the gaze is attributed, in the terms of courtly love, to the mistress/sister (although, of course, the agent of attribution is Giovanni). Moreover, the scene suggests the legend of Prometheus, another myth of origins, crime and death:

Giovanni. … The poets feign, I read,
That Juno for her forehead did exceed
All other goddesses: but I durst swear
Your forehead exceeds hers, as hers did theirs.
Annabella. Troth, this is pretty!
Giovanni. Such a pair of stars
As thine eyes would, like Promethean fire,
If gently glanced, give life to senseless stones.
                                         (II. ii. 192-8)

This culminates in Giovanni bearing his breast:

Giovanni. And here's my breast, strike home!
Rip up my bosom, there thou shalt behold
A heart in which is writ the truth I speak.
                                       (II. ii. 209-11)

It is, however, Annabella's body rather than Giovanni's which comes to bear the meaning of their transgression. In this text the word 'heart', and her heart in particular, is a nexus of several different discourses. Moreover, the significance of Annabella's body is repeatedly transformed during the play by the powerful discourses which are here beginning to define it. This process locates the meaning of the female body within the dominant discourses of religion and courtly love, and her act of will in committing incest with her brother is ultimately subsumed into the civil discourse of whoredom.

If the language of courtly love serves as a structure to conceal, by reinterpreting, Giovanni's and Annabella's incest, where does the act of incest appear in the discourses of the body which permeate 'Tis Pity She's a Whore? Perhaps it is closest to being openly articulated in Act I. This introduces the 'uncanny' disclosure of hidden desire in Annabella's recognition of her sexual attraction to her brother (her platonic 'mirror' as he later notes) when she sees his 'shape' momentarily as an object of her desire without recognising it as her brother.

Annabella. But see, Putana, see; what blessed shape
Of some celestial creature now appears?
What man is he, that with such sad aspect
Walks careless of himself?
                                      (I. ii. 131-4)

When Putana looks and tells Annabella that it is her brother, she exclaims 'ha!' Quite the reverse of Giovanni's confessional disquisition on his incestuous passion, this exclamation marks textually the recognition of desire but also the danger attendant upon it. This moment of recognition of 'something secretly familiar' is reminiscent of the repeated moments of recognition in the story of the Sand-man retold by Freud in his essay on the uncanny.

Also, like Oedipus's self-blinding, it suggests the dangerous closeness of the double, more fully articulated at a linguistic level in the scene of the vows (I. ii. 253-60). The association between sight and desire is made explicit here but receives fuller elaboration later in the play when it is Putana who is blinded. For she has both 'seen' (metaphorically) Annabella's and Giovanni's act of love and has spoken of it. For Freud, blindness and damage to the eyes is a metaphor for castration. Putana, in seeing, sanctioning and speaking about the sexual union of Giovanni and Annabella, appropriates the rights of the law, the father and the Church. She takes over the role of the receiver of confessions and maker of meanings in relation to the incestuous union. However, she also recognises that the meanings she offers for incest (in which fe-male desire is of paramount importance) cannot be spoken in the public sphere. Putana's language is that of the individual acting pragmatically in civil society, but out-side the law, as at II. i where she joins with Annabella in concealing the incest, saying, 'fear nothing, sweetheart; what though he be your brother? Your brother's a man, I hope, and I say still, if a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take anybody, father or brother, all is one' (II. i. 46-9).

Thus during most of the play the languages of courtly love, platonism and pragmatism are substituted for that of incest. Simultaneously, in a series of episodes, blame and punishment are transferred from the central figures of higher social class on to the bodies of those of lower or more marginal status. These threads in the plot act almost as substitute punishments: lesser transgressions receive harsh punishment while incest remains at the centre of the play, invisible and unspoken.

An example of such a replacement can be found in the figure of Hippolita and the language associated with her. Hippolita, the 'lusty widow', has been drawn by Soranzo's seduction into adultery and attempted murder. She has previously entered into a relationship with Soranzo, and in the play we watch and hear Soranzo redefine their relations, not in the codes of courtly love but in the sacred (and civil, or pragmatic) vocabulary of adultery, sin and repentance. She appears in Soranzo's study when he is composing the courtly encomium we saw earlier:

Hippolita                          'Tis I:
Do you know me now? Look, perjured man, on her
Whom thou and thy distracted lust have
 wronged. …
Thine eyes did plead in tears, thy tongue in oaths
Such and so many, that a heart of steel
Would have been wrought to pity, as was mine:
                                     (II. ii. 26-38)

In this first interview with her Soranzo exchanges the language of courtly love, used to compose the poem to Anna-bella, for that of Christian repentance, used to justify giving up Hippolita:

Soranzo. The vows I made, if you remember well,
Were wicked and unlawful: 'twere more sin
To keep them than to break them.
                                           (II. ii. 86-88)

He appropriates whichever code serves his purpose, and the abandoned mistress of the language of courtly love becomes the 'whore' (a term which might signal a casual partner) and an adulteress in that of Christian repentance. The language of service and courtship reappears strangely distorted when Soranzo says, 'Ere I'll be servile to so black a sin, / I'll be a corse' (II. ii. 97). The dramatic irony implicit in this speech reminds us that Hippolita's crime and punishment contrast with the greater, central significance accorded culturally to incest. Soranzo's service to adultery is substituted by his service to incest. Once more what we see and hear is in tension with what we know.

The scene demonstrates masculine control over the discourses which produce the meanings of female sexuality. This example of femininity defined and redefined by masculine control of the languages of religion and law is repeated at IV. i. Momentarily, Hippolita appears to have taken control of the meaning of the masque for her own vengeful intentions. She and the audience discover at the same moment that she has been betrayed by the language of revenge, through the agency of Vasques, the manipulator. Her attempt to control the codes of masque and revenge for her own ends causes her to be, in Vasques's words, a 'mistress she-devil', whose 'own mischievous treachery hath killed you' (IV. i. 68-9). Although she is defeated, the language of her final curse on Soranzo is prophetic: 'Mayst thou live / To father bastards, may her womb bring forth / Monsters' (II. i. 97-9). Yet again a substitution occurs in the dramatic irony of the prophecy. The audience recognises the displacement of the central issue, incest, by the peripheral and structurable issue of bastardy, and the reference to 'monsters' reminds us of other criminal expressions of sexuality.

The replacement of incest by other language in the play as a whole is indicated most obviously by the fact that the word is rarely enunciated. Just before the play opens Giovanni has confessed incestuous desire to the Friar and made himself 'poor of secrets', though he remains rich in desire. During his post-confessional conversation with the Friar, Giovanni begins to elaborate the secular theory of beauty, fate and desire which is soon to find its elaborate ritual expression in the vows he and Annabella take by their mother's 'dust'.

The lovers themselves do not name their incest, though the Friar finally names it to Annabella in III. vi. Annabella does not utter a description of her own actions until she repents in Act V, and then she speaks of Giovanni: 'O would the scourge due to my black offence / Might pass from thee, that I alone might feel / The torments of an uncontroll'ed flame' (V. i. 21-3). The language describing Annabella's body and interpreting the incestuous desires and actions of the siblings (for actors and audience) has for most of the play been that of courtly love, Neoplatonism and the pragmatic discourse of Putana. Annabella here confesses her actions:

Annabella. My conscience now stands up against
 my lust

With depositions charactered in guilt, [Enter Friar]
And tells me I am lost: now I confess,
Beauty that clothes the outside of the face
Is cursed if it be not clothed with grace.
                                           (V. i. 9-13)

This moment not only offers us access to Annabella's subjectivity, in which lust and conscience are coterminous, but refers us to signifiers which also existed cultur-ally during the Renaissance; the pun on guilt/gilt points to the interpretation of incest in society by returning us to the tables of consanguinity figured in the the prayer book and on church walls. Annabella's confession fuses for a moment the problematic language of the play which refuses to reconcile incest and the interdiction available to any church-goer. Moreover, we find in this speech not an opposition of inner and outer, but a contrast of surfaces in which grace becomes a kind of clothing. In its concentration on surface and externals the language serves to call attention to the social and cultural construction of the sequence of sin and repentance, further underlined by the entrance of the Friar as eavesdropper/audience.

In the final act of the play the word 'incest' is used in the discourse of Parmesan society. Vasques says the word, and so does the Cardinal: its articulation by these two ambiguous figures is accompanied by the ritual punishment of offenders. Giovanni at this point makes literal the discourse of courtly love using the symbolism of the ex-change of hearts in describing his murder of Annabella. His reappearance bearing the bloody organ cannot be interpreted by the characters on stage. For on the one hand the appearance of the real heart makes literal on stage the discourse of courtly love, yet on the other hand it makes evident the inability of this discourse to contain, explain or give meaning to incest, which has a meaning so much more illicit than that of, say, adultery.

The enigmatic but mobile figure of Vasques plays a central role in exposing the faults of women, especially in the final stages of the play. It is only in Act V that we find that Vasques, who hears the confessions of both Hippolita and Putana, is acting for the Father—for Soranzo's father, thence for Soranzo, and therefore for the determination of meaning in relation to the father, law and religious discourse. When, at last, Vasques offers an 'explanation' (or confession) of himself, he says 'this strange task being ended, I have paid the duty to the son which I have vowed to the father' (V. vi. 111-12). In a short prose speech he 'explains' his conduct:

Vasques. For know, my lord, I am by birth a Spaniard, brought forth my country in my youth by Lord Soranzo's father, whom whilst he lived I served faithfully; since whose death I have been to this man, as I was to him. What I have done was duty, and I repent nothing but that the loss of my life had not ransomed his.

(V. vi. 115-21)

Vasques's manipulation of language has permitted him to act as a confessor to the women, who are lured into telling him their secrets and thence, through language, brought to their downfall. It is he who has already (at this point) ordered Oedipus's punishment to be inflicted not on Annabella or Giovanni but on Putana.

The uncanny recognitions of incestuous desire in Act I are mapped more fully here when Giovanni reveals to his father the doublings brought about by incest—'List, father, to your ears I will yield up / How much I have deserved to be called your son' (V. vi. 37-8). The Oedipal punishment for incest is transferred from the male to the female body, as well as down the social scale. Vasques names Putana as 'of counsel in this incest', and he renders up Putana, 'whose eyes, after her confession, I caused to put out' (V. vi. 127-8). In Act I Giovanni endowed the eyes of his mistress with the power to give life, linking this to Promethean fire. In Act V, the only possible reason that Putana's eyes are burnt out is because she has been witness to the incestuous passion. The importance accorded to knowledge at this point in the play suggests the power of incest to confound the boundaries of nature and culture and thus elide any clear distinctions between self and other. The maiming of Putana keeps incest hidden by removing it 'from sight'.

What follows has been disputed by critics. The Cardinal, who is both a Churchman and a powerful manipulator of the language of the city, begins his summing up:

Cardinal. 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.
Donado.                      'Tis most just.
                                         (V. vi. 133-7)

Soon after this Vasques is banished 'with grounds of reason', but not because of his crime. It is not entirely clear who is to be burnt. Two women are on stage, the body of Annabella and the blinded (but living) figure of Putana. It seems likely that it is Putana who is the object of the Cardinal's sentence. In delivering his judgement he takes the figures in reverse order, moving from the bottom of the social scale to the top. He turns to Annabella last. Moreover, he and Vasques have just been talking of Putana, who appears to remain on stage until the end of the play. Donado—another wronged father—is given responsibility for the burning of whichever body it is, and it seems unlikely that he would be given rights over Annabella's body in preference to her father. Thus, it seems to be Putana who is pronounced 'chief in these effects'. As Hippolita is punished by civil society for sharing Soranzo's desire, so Putana is punished by a combination of church and state for seeing and knowing but, above all, telling. The Promethean fire of Act I is translated into the purgative fire of Act V.

If Putana is to be burnt, how can the body of Annabella be read in the final scene? Her brother has taken her heart and the significance of this is explored in metaphors of consumption:

Giovanni. You came to feast, my lords, with dainty
  fare;

I came to feast too, but I digged for food
In a much richer mine than gold or stone
Of any value balanced; 'tis a heart,
A heart, my lords, in which mine is entombed:
Look well upon 't, d'ee know 't?
Vasques. What strange riddle's this?
Giovanni. 'Tis Annabella's heart, 'tis; why d'ee
  startle?
I vow 'tis hers: this daggers point ploughed up
Her fruitful womb, and left to me the fame
Of a most glorious executioner.
                                      (V. vi. 23-33)

We know that Giovanni and Annabella have been lovers for 'nine moons', but we do not know when she conceived. It would be possible to play Acts IV and V with her very heavily pregnant. Annabella's body is first ex-posed to violence when she becomes pregnant, and the wound by which she was murdered might run from her womb to her heart in the cut an anatomist might use to open a body. Many signifiers converge on Annabella's body. It is food, or has food buried within it. It is simultaneously a mine, an evidently vaginal image, in which Giovanni has 'digged' and found something more exotic than the minerals yielded by mining in distant places, a heart. The heart is her body, but it also signifies his heart within her breast. Her body is a rich vagina-womb-mine, but also a burial ground (ploughed up) from which Giovanni must disinter his buried heart. The uncanny doublings of the vows come to a mordant fruition here. The child is cut off and the womb invaded, not by a doctor extracting a child but by the brother-lover in search of her heart which signifies him, his identity. The vows, sworn by Annabella 'by our mother's dust', by Giovanni 'by my mother's dust', (I. iii. 254, 257), are fulfilled here as Giovanni possesses and consumes singly all those relations which have become so doubly double.

The opposition here is between inner and outer, and between surface and depth (unlike the metaphors in Annabella's speech of repentance above). The heart, now ex-posed, is endowed by Giovanni's public confession with all the private and confused meanings of incest. At one level, of course, it is a religious emblem and the emblem of the lover's heart, but like Annabella's dangerously pregnant body, the flesh itself cannot be completely interpreted without language. Giovanni stands on stage with a dripping heart, but the meaning of the murder is constructed by language. Evan Vasques, that underminer of plots and reader of signs, cannot answer this sphinx's incestuous riddle. He, however, returns to the stage to inform the feasters that Giovanni has, indeed, ripped out Annabella's heart. It is possible to read Giovanni's final confession, or explanation, of her heart as once again re-inventing the meaning of his love, and of Annabella's body, for he concentrates the illicit multiplicity of relations on her heart. If we read the end of the final act this way, it comes as no surprise to find that when the Cardinal finally mentions Annabella's sin, he does not speak of all those double meanings Giovanni had elicited from her body in that half-emblem, half-meat, her heart. The Cardinal's address trans-forms the incest once again into something containable within the single realm of culture when in the closing words of the play he pronounces, ''tis pity she's a whore'.

This phrase reconstitutes the dominant position of family, state and the church within society. Simultaneously, however, it calls attention to the failure of the secular and sacred languages used in the play to contain or reinterpret incest. The bodies of the incestuous couple have been represented by the lovers themselves (particularly Giovanni) in the languages of courtly love and Platonism. The Cardinal's words appear to be a bid for closure, marking a point at which the irreconcilable nature of the conflicting claims of church, state, family and economics on the body—particularly the reproductive body—fail to be resolvable and fail to verify and stabilise the meaning of incest.

Incest, which is the central concern of the play, disappears once more in the Cardinal's words which reinstate the social placing implicit in the designation 'whore'. The centre, for Derrida, is 'the point at which the substitution of contents, elements or terms is no longer possible', and incest signals the collapse of the structure of separateness between bodies and families. Instead of substitution there is doubling. In the Cardinal's closing line of the play (also the title) the waters of language return to cover incest and to substitute a crime which allows the meanings of femininity to remain stable. Annabella is returned from incest to the dangerous (but less dangerous) general category for the desirous female. As a 'whore' Annabella once again signifies within the problematic of endless female desire.

However, the Cardinal's closing words leave unresolved the theatre of competing demands which the play has articulated. The tension between what we hear ('whore') and the incest which we 'know' to have taken place re-mains. His words present another riddle which, by asserting one of the meanings of Annabella's dead body, throws into relief all the others which remain unspoken.

III

The competing discourses of the play are interwoven with its context, but are not reducible to 'sources': they are re-invested with new meanings in the 'symbolic performance' of theatre. The body alone has no meaning. But the question of what happens to the body in a play such as 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and what gives that body meaning is complex. How is a critic to interpret the body in a play? For an anatomist, meanings exist within the body, but in the theatre only the combination of script and other codes makes the meaning of the theatrical figure. Obviously, much depends on production decisions, but the relation-ship between text and context is important, if fraught. As Roger Chartier says [in Cultural History, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, 1988]:

To understand a culture … is above all to retrace the significations invested in the symbolic forms culture makes use of. There is only one way to do this: to go back and forth between texts and contexts; compare each specific and localized use of one symbol or another to the world of significance that lends it meaning.

Put this way, the relationship of text to context is very complicated for symbolic bodies in the theatre, with all their precarious and slippery meanings. The context can only be other texts, other bodies in texts and the field of discourse within which these textual bodies exist.

Of course, it is not possible to talk with the dead, or to fully re-animate a field of discourse of which literary language is only a part. Nor is it possible to work out exactly how the seventeenth-century theatre audience for 'Tis Pity She's a Whore made the leap from their own experience of sexual crimes in the community to an analysis of a symbolic performance. According to Derek Hirst [in Authority and Conflict, 1987], policing of 'the proper order of personal relationships' in early modern England was part of the role of neighbours, and this included regular denunciations for sexual deviance. Hirst suggests that as many as one person in seven might have been denounced by neighbours for sexual deviance. This might lead us to ask how we can begin to imagine the relationship between an audience who participated in such a very active neighbourhood policing and the incestuous bodies in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

One answer must be to compare the play with other texts in a similar field (what, for instance, might a theatrical text share with legal texts, conduct books, etc.?). Another might be to attempt to identify the specific purposes and investments of a particular discourse, which might not be shared with other texts in the field. For example, Michael MacDonald's recent study of suicide suggests that the significance of self-murder changed with the rise of the newspaper. He suggests that eighteenth-century newspapers 'altered the reader's relationship to events: attitudes to crime, like suicide, were increasingly determined by reading, rather than by direct experience and by rumor' ['The Secularisation of Suicide in England 1660-1800,' Past and Present CXI, May 1986]. The newspaper, with its pretensions to forensic veracity, might fix and report 'facts' for private consumption; the theatre, with its reputation for tempting fictions, might endow the body with an ephemeral plethora of meanings. Thus, evidence from texts in a similar field help to illuminate the script of the play, and we can to some extent move between text and context to map a loose set of relationships between punishments in the ecclesiastical courts and the significance of the body in the theatre. Yet, in both the theatre and the church court the body on display does not reveal its own significance. Without explanation from script, set and costume the body of a pregnant woman cannot be fully 'read' either by the figures on the stage or by the audience. Veltrusky, quoted at the beginning of this essay, suggested that script and the actions of the body on stage were parts of independent discourses. He went as far as to say that the body on stage and the dramatic text (language) belong to completely different sign systems; as he sees it, the dramatic text, where it exists, can control everything except the actor. This makes it possible to regard the incestuous body in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, with the attendant gaps and misrepresentations in the script, as being constituted by the cultural understandings of the audience in relation to the interdependent contexts of analogous texts and theatre practice.