[In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Rosen discusses 'Tis Pity She's a Whore within the context of Antonin Artaud's application of the tragedy to his theory of the theater of cruelty, concluding that Artaud fails to recognize that there is a fundamental balance between the cruel language and the violent action in the play.]

Though Antonin Artaud has been popularly deified as the mad martyr of the modern theater, his critical The Theater and Its Double deserves careful consideration not merely as an essential element in the bizarre alchemy of contemporary drama, but also as a provocative approach to orthodox dramatic theory. Indeed, Artaud's infamous “First Manifesto” of the Theater of Cruelty culminates in an apparently traditional program to stage “an adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent with our present troubled state of mind” or other “works from the Elizabethan theater.” Notions of traditional revivals are shattered, however, with Artaud's revolutionary stipulation that these “apocryphal plays” be performed not only “without regard for text,” but that they be “stripped of their text and retaining only the accouterments of period, situations, characters, and action.”¹ By offering John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore as a paradigm of his proposed theatrical epidemic (TD 28-32), Artaud provides us with a convenient pivot about which we may examine the efficacy of his approach to the Elizabethan drama on the modern stage.

Surprisingly, except for his disdain for Elizabethan verbosity, Artaud's discussion of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is primarily a passionate affirmation of the appraisals of more reserved commentators.² But Artaud uses the incestuous union consecrated in the course of Ford's play as a simile for his own concept of the theater of revolt. His focus upon the excessive cruelty of Ford's play and his emphasis upon the “paroxysm of horror, blood, and flouted laws” (TD 29) lead Artaud to his awesome analogy:

If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized.

Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction.

(TD 30)

By means of this circuitous syllogism, Artaud alludes to the cathartic value of the violated taboo in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Consequently, Paul Goodman's facile summation of this section of Artaud's manifesto—“And he ends with a rhapsody on Ford's Whore, whose content seems to him to be the plague itself”³—misses the metaphoric point. Artaud's obsession is far from rhapsodic; the aptness of Ford's play for Artaud's essay is demonstrated by the broken taboo at its core. As Brian Morris notes in his Introduction to the New Mermaid edition of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, though plays about incest were not uncommon in the Jacobean period, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore “is the only play which makes incest its central theme, and explores to the full the nature and consequences of the relationship.”⁴ The content of Ford's play is, in essence, the plague itself.

Seeking to revive rather than to recall the primordial theater “whose only value is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger” (TD 89), Artaud suggests an intensely savage stage which would externalize through grotesque images, exaggerated movements, stylization, and distortion the pervading cruelty of all human acts. He wants “to break through language in order to touch life … to create … the theater” (TD 13); like Cocteau, he longs to substitute a vital “poetry of the theater” for the impotent “poetry in the theater.”⁵ But by dismissing the text of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore as benign and obtrusive, Artaud undercuts Ford's dependence upon caustic language as dramatic texture. For it may be suggested that this crucial dramatic instance of overwhelmingly cruel forces exemplifies Artaud's theatrical concerns most concretely by means of its brutal language.

Artaud's base metaphor of the plague is itself anticipated in the language of 'Tis Pity.⁶ In the first scene of Ford's play, in fact, the Friar counsels Giovanni:

Beg Heaven to cleanse the leprosy of lust
That rots thy soul. …

(I.i.74-75)

This motif of internal decay echoes throughout the play. Its incremental effect is intensified as well as counterpointed by antithetical stage action. In Act IV, scene iii, for example, this grotesque image of the plague contrasts with the stage presence of Annabella, an innocent involved in a double edged action. Soranzo berates his wife for her “hot itch and pleurisy of lust” (IV.iii.8), he vows to drag her “lust-be-lepered body through the dust” (IV.iii.61), and he calls her “a damned whore” who “deserves no pity” (IV.iii.78-79). Yet Annabella remains pure; she braves the harsh sound of Soranzo's ravings, and finally, she rebels against the cruelty of his words. To Soranzo's threats of torture (“I'll rip up thy heart, / And find it there” and “with my teeth / Tear the prodigious lecher joint by joint” [IV.iii.52-55]), Annabella responds with sarcasm and laughter. In response to his furious physical attack (“I'll hew thy flesh to threads” and “Thus will I pull thy hair, and thus I'll drag / Thy … body” [IV.iii.57-61]), she staunchly sings to the Heavens. But Soranzo's belittling of a lover who trifled with lesser parts than “the part I loved, which was thy heart, / And … thy virtues” (IV.iii.127-28) hurts Annabella to the quick. For her brother's incestuous love she cries out now in anguish:

                                                                                                                                            O my lord!
These words wound deeper than your sword could do.

(IV.iii.128-29)

Clearly, the language of this scene intensifies its cruelty. For the angry, savage epithets hurled by Soranzo are the dark double of the innocent action of the siblings off-stage. Also, the horrible visual conclusion of the play is foreshadowed by Soranzo's verbal abuse of Annabella's torn heart. In this scene, Annabella's appeal for the audience is heightened by Soranzo's words perhaps even more than by his blows.

Citing this scene (IV.iii) as the crux of cruelty in 'Tis Pity, Artaud alludes to the antithetical stage effect of shrieks and songs:

With them we proceed from excess to excess and vindication to vindication. Annabella is captured, convicted of adultery and incest, trampled upon, insulted, dragged by the hair, and we are astonished to discover that far from seeking a means of escape, she provokes her executioner still further and sings out in a kind of obstinate heroism. It is the absolute condition of revolt, it is an exemplary case of love without respite which makes us, the spectators, gasp with anguish at the idea that nothing will ever be able to stop it.

If we desire an example of absolute freedom in revolt, Ford's Annabella provides this poetic example bound up with the image of absolute danger.

(TD 28-29)

Artaud's visceral approach to the play compels him to call attention to this scene. Here, the tension between lawful cruelty and pure yet criminal rituals shreds the action in a conflict of energies. A vital paradox of deeds and demeanor, Annabella is guilty of incest and adultery, yet she stands as an image of innocence before us. Though Artaud is struck by the double nature of the action at the heart of 'Tis Pity, he strikes out the words which parallel the poetic duplicity of the action.

The power of words to inflict as well as to aggravate wounds echoes throughout 'Tis Pity, particularly in coarse allusions to blood and lust. A verbal distortion of love's image is, in fact, invoked by Florio, whose first angry utterance, though aimed at Grimaldi and Vasques (a soldier and a servant), nonetheless suggests the oral abuse to be hurled by an entire society at the incestuous love shared by his children, Annabella and Giovanni. Florio confronts the brawlers outside his home with the demand, “Have you not other places but my house / To vent the spleen of your disordered bloods?” (I.ii.21-22). This image reinforces the Friar's early admonitions concerning the seductive bonds of “lust and death” (I.i.59), and it also anticipates Annabella's final profanation of her love as “lust” (V.i.9).

When spoken by Soranzo and his betrayed mistress, Hippolita, however, the lusty language of 'Tis Pity is more precisely suited to the actions and characters being depicted. Hippolita's accusation of Soranzo as her seducer, whose “distracted lust” and “sensual rage of blood” have combined to wrong her (II.ii.27-28), for example, puts this verbal image in its proper visual perspective. For the language of blood in 'Tis Pity has a double nature. At once it applies both to the violence and lust of Parma and to the blood-ties and rites of purification enacted by Giovanni and his sister.

Like Annabella's note of warning, the central action of Ford's drama is “double-lined with tears and blood” (V.i.34). Indeed, the incestuous lovers seem to have heeded the Friar's advice to “wash every word thou utter'st / In tears (and if't be possible) of blood” (I.i.72-73). On one level their actions are termed monstrous, lewd, and unnatural. On a more symbolic level, however, the language of lust and blood is consistently undercut by the actions of tears and cleansed blood. For example, Hippolita's curse, when she is poisoned at the wedding of Soranzo and Annabella, proves ironically prophetic:

Take here my curse amongst you: may thy bed
Of marriage be a rack unto thy heart,
Burn blood and boil in vengeance—O my heart,
My flame's intolerable—Mayst thou live
To father bastards, may her womb bring forth
Monsters. …

(IV.i.93-98)

This burning speech not only foreshadows Soranzo's realization that his own “blood's on fire” (V.ii.25) and “blood shall quench that flame” (V.iv.27), but it also creates a strong verbal contrast with the pure visual image of the final monstrosity presented on stage. Similarly, Florio's early comments to Vasques bear a prophetic double-edge:

I would not for my wealth my daughter's love
Should cause the spilling of one drop of blood.
Vasques, put up, let's end this fray in wine.

(I.ii.60-62)

Verbally turning blood to wine, Florio fosters a motif of sacrilegious communion which, like Hippolita's bloody curse following a drink of deadly wine, culminates in the final scene of 'Tis Pity. Here the potent image of wine is transformed back to the symbolic blood of childbirth as one heart is untimely ripped (V.vi.60) and another is broken (V.vi.63), suggesting a double pagan sacrifice when Giovanni attends a last banquet “trimmed in reeking blood, / That triumphs over death” (V.vi.9-10).⁷

Constituting a cruel coup de théâtre, Giovanni's appearance with the essential prop of 'Tis Pity fuses poetry and plot into the vital poetry of the theater. For the heart of Annabella, which her brother bears as an offering at the last banquet, serves the drama concretely as well as emblematically. Bringing to fruition Artaud's modern concept of the stage as a magical “concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak,” the overwhelming reality of Annabella's heart envelops the action in a concrete physical language which, according to Artaud, is “truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language.” Thus, the stage property of Annabella's heart exemplifies Artaud's ideal of a solidified and sensual “poetry in space” (TD 37-38).

Annabella's heart is also more than a visible metaphor. It is the real “fragile, fluctuating center” of 'Tis Pity (TD 13); it is, in effect, the life obscured by language in dramatic form. As such, it illustrates the elusive double nature of theater and its magical core postulated by Artaud. In his preface to The Theater and Its Double, “The Theater and Culture,” Artaud asserts:

Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose.

Like all magic cultures … the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations. …

But the true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

(TD 12)

In Ford's 'Tis Pity, Annabella's lifeless heart suggests that “real effigy” insulated by the shadow of its form.

Though it is carried out upon the tip of a bloody dagger, the double significance of Annabella's heart (even on Artaud's metaphysical terms) is ultimately tied to the text as if it were a stake. First, it is, as its deliverer stresses, “a heart, / A heart, my lords, in which is mine entombed” (V.vi.27-28). To Giovanni, then, his sister's heart symbolizes their union in blood. Their marriage bed has become a coffin, and Annabella's heart is now Giovanni's grave. Secondly, Annabella's heart is a concretization of the lovers' bond and the ripened product of their love. For Giovanni has “ripped this heart” from Annabella's bosom as his dagger's point “ploughed up / Her fruitful womb” (V.vi.32-33). So Giovanni also equates Annabella's heart with the miscarried fruit of her womb; and his emblematic gesture, as he bears in his “fists … the twists of life” (V.vi.72), becomes a sacrificial birth rite. Finally, the brutal interruption of a banquet visually recalls the Friar's foreboding words at a previous feast. Witnessing the murder of Hippolita, the Friar expresses his fear to Giovanni that “marriage seldom's good, / Where the bride-banquet so begins in blood” (IV.i.109-10). The celebration of the marriage of Soranzo and Annabella which begins Act IV of 'Tis Pity thus prefigures the ritualistic content of the interrupted final banquet. Whereas the first feast is halted by the masked entrance of Hippolita and ladies in white robes, with garlands of willows (IV.i.36), the last feast ends with the sudden appearance of Giovanni. Each entrance inverts the purity of a ritual by means of unexpected murder. For in the course of the first banquet, the bloody happenings of its crueler double are foreshadowed as Hippolita takes a poisoned cup of wine as a token of charity. Clearly, then, Annabella's heart embodies the ripened seeds of death which have been verbally acknowledged throughout prophetic actions. As various meanings merge in a single moment, Annabella's heart's blood compresses the ritualistic occasions of 'Tis Pity into a single ceremony of innocence, combining aspects of communion, childbirth, and marriage rites.

Indeed, metaphoric language transforms symbolic action into ritual throughout Ford's play. In Act I, for example, gestures made in childish games are infused with ominous portent through the language of intuition. The game-world is established by the comments of secondary characters: the Friar describes choosing between degrees of sin as risky because “in such games as those they lose that win” (I.i.63), Florio reassures Soranzo of his “word” by reminding him that “Losers may talk by law of any game” (I.ii.55), and Donado strikes the central chord of 'Tis Pity as he rhetorically inquires of his foolish nephew, “wilt make thyself a may-game to all the world?” (I.iii.46-47) Likewise, the real-world of Parma is immediately established, as R. J. Kaufmann observes in his essay on “Ford's Tragic Perspective,” as a “carefully contrived world … in which marriage is debased, sacraments are violated, vows are disregarded, churchly and secular sanctions are loosened and enfeebled.”⁸ Before this distorted mirror of their actions, the children of Florio invent a double-game of deadly vows and tragic promise.

The interplay between Giovanni and Annabella in Act I, scene ii of 'Tis Pity may thus be approached as the “real effigy” of actions by sacrosanct shadows in acceptable society. Giovanni first appears to his sister as “some shadow of a man” (I.ii.132), and he admits that he is already suffering from “incurable and restless wounds” (I.ii.143). He offers his own heart as well as his dagger to his sister:

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.

(I.ii.205-07)

With these words, Giovanni verbally reverses the play's final image of his sister's heart wrenched in ritualized murder. Similarly, Annabella anticipates future repercussions of their mimetic actions when she joins her brother in an eerie game of simonsays. Instinctively kneeling in an imitation of the marriage-game, Annabella charges her brother with a vow. “Love me, or kill me, brother,” she intones for him. And in a microscopic inversion of the play's progression, Giovanni responds in kind. “Love me, or kill me, sister,” he swears as he kneels beside Annabella and they kiss in a mock consummation of the marriage vows (I.ii.252-58).

While they improvise miniature representations of the rituals by which they will be destroyed, Giovanni and Annabella also perform symbolic acts of sensuality (the offering of the sword and the simultaneous rising after the exchange of vows, for example). In addition, they recognize the insufficiency of language to purge an inner pain. Having shared the anguish of enforced silence, they now share a scorn for words used to define roles. Giovanni asserts that he “must speak, or burst” (I.ii.153), and Annabella admits that she has sighed and cried “not so much for that I loved, as that / I durst not say I loved, nor scarcely think it” (I.ii.246-47). Now they dismiss the import of words like “brother” and “sister” (I.ii.228-30), and they become bound to each other by the “links / Of blood … to be ever one, / One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all” (I.i.31-34).

Ironically, however, as Giovanni and Annabella free themselves from the bounds of Parma propriety, they are faced with more complex entanglements. In their first scene together, they form the pattern for 'Tis Pity, naively anticipating the traps as well as the macabre trappings of parallel rituals to follow. Vows and bonds of blood take on the double nature of crueler actions, and ultimately they negate themselves in a pattern turned inside out.

Foremost among these doubles of the original ritual is Act III, scene vi. This scene opens with Annabella kneeling and whispering to the Friar. Immediately, the positioning of the actors in Act I, scene ii is recalled in a distorted form, because Annabella now repents her incestuous vows and she seeks forgiveness. Upon completion of his graphic lecture on Annabella's wretchedness, the torment of “raging lust,” and the condemnation of “secret incests” (III.vi.7-26), the Friar warns Annabella: “Then you will wish each kiss your brother gave / Had been a dagger's point” (III.vi.27-28). By echoing, yet significantly distorting Giovanni's first sacrificial offer, the Friar foreshadows the final movement of 'Tis Pity. With these words, the Friar does “work / New motions in [Annabella's] heart” (III.vi.31-32), for he twists the “love or kill” vow towards its final malignant form.

Another counterpart to the basic ritual of 'Tis Pity is to be found in the double scene of Act III, scene ii. Echoing Giovanni's claim, Soranzo pronounces himself “sick to th' heart” (III.ii.34). He also pleads to Annabella for grace, even offering, as did her brother, to show her his heart (III.ii.21-26). This scene is performed not only before the audience, but also beneath Giovanni, whose voyeurism concretizes the double nature of his love and obsessive uncertainty. While watching this “looking glass” of his own actions (III.ii.40), Giovanni overhears his sister telling Soranzo, “If I hereafter find that I must marry, / It shall be you or none” (III.ii.61-62). This double-talk is necessitated by Annabella's new “sickness.”⁹ For Annabella's early sickness caused by silence has been changed into a more concrete morning sickness. She has, herself, become double, pregnant with another life inside her. Puzzled by Annabella's peculiar remarks and by her subsequent fainting spell, Soranzo, too, is “doubly … undone” (III.ii.76). And now, Hippolita's opinion of Soranzo (“You are too double / In your dissimulation” [II.ii.51-52]) can come to fruition.

The ritualistic ceremonies of Act I, scene ii are finally most emphatically negated when the less innocent participants awaken from their “dream” and “night-games” (V.v.36 and 2). They can no longer play their marriage-games of exchanging vows and rings (II.vi.36-42). Instead, the cycle is completed; the dark side of Giovanni's vow is fulfilled as he kills his sister “in a kiss,” repeating “Thus die, and die by me, and by my hand” (V.v.85) in what might be called a frenzied chant.

The concept of the feast is also negated in the final action of the play. Previously viewed as a celebration of fertility, the idea of a feast has gradually changed. As Richardetto foresaw, “And they that now dream of a wedding-feast / May chance to mourn the lusty bridegroom's ruin” (III.v.23-24). Now, a supposedly redemptive rite portends evil; this feast is a funeral; this banquet is, as Annabella suggests, “an harbinger of death” (V.v.27). Giovanni arrives late. Recalling the image of Hippolita, who arrived like a spectre at an earlier marriage-feast, Giovanni belittles numbed spectators:

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 is mine entombed:
Look well upon't; d'ee know't?

(V.vi.24-29)

When Vasques asks, “What strange riddle's this?” (V.vi.30) he is startled by Giovanni's coldhearted reply. “'Tis Annabella's heart” (V.vi.31). The game is over.

Perhaps the most significant parallels in the play may be drawn between the ritualistic action of the main plot and that of the subordinate plot which also depicts a bloody stylized revenge for an unlawful love. The two plots, merging in Soranzo's “sensual rage of blood” (II.ii.28), counterpoint each other even to the mimesis of a “second death” (II.v.61). In the sub-action, the substitute murder of Bergetto in the place of Soranzo is a mistake; the irony of this dual revenge is intensified by the fact that the revenger himself (Richardetto) is playing a double role of doctor and destroyer. This bloody revenge by a man in disguise in Act II, scene iii serves as a counterpart both to Hippolita's deception (revealed in the removal of her mask during the masque) and to Hippolita's mistaken trust in the double nature of Vasques, who betrays her shortly afterwards (IV.i.35-63).

The fusion of the two plots is most clearly demonstrated in the final confrontation between Giovanni and Soranzo. Here, Giovanni's ecstatic proclamation that “Now brave revenge is mine” (V.vi.75) almost parodies the conscious motivations of Soranzo, Hippolita, and Richardetto. Twisting mad logic to his own ends, Giovanni declares his rage to be “the oracle of truth” (V.vi.53), and he offers to objectify the union of revenge by exchanging the heart of Annabella for the blood of her husband, Soranzo (V.vi.74). The torment of physical particularly which pervades the main action of 'Tis Pity (especially IV.iii and V.vi) is also grotesquely burlesqued in the subplot of comic pain recounted by Bergetto (II.vi.69-85).

Obviously, the clearest indication of ritualized cruelty in silhouette is to be found in the balance between Ford's intertwined actions. Hence an emphasis upon the bloody nature of the double plot might be offered as a tentative defense for Artaud's dismissal of Ford's potent words. But a consideration of Maeterlinck's translation and adaptation of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, the version of Ford's play with which Artaud was familiar,¹⁰ invalidates this defense. For there is no doubled subplot in Maeterlinck's Annabella. In his preface to the play, Maeterlinck denounces the “melodrame” of Hippolita, and he derides the “grosse comédie” of Bergetto and his “obscène valet,” Poggio. Deciding that “Ces scenes sont illisibles,” Maeterlinck proceeds to eliminate them from his text.¹¹

A reading of Maeterlinck's version of 'Tis Pity also eliminates the possibility of justifying Artaud's scorn for Ford's piercing language on the basis of a faulty adaptation lacking the cruel images of the original text. On the contrary, Maeterlinck's translation is more than occasionally accurate; rather, it is almost literally exact. Yet its poetic force is ruthless as well, particularly in the crucial scene of IV.iii and in the concluding scene (which Maeterlinck ends, appropriately enough, with Giovanni's final speech and his death [V.vi.108]). Indeed, Maeterlinck's analysis of the dark workings of 'Tis Pity foreshadows (and almost overshadows) Artaud's attempt at articulating the efficacy of ritualizing a drama dealing with the broken taboo. Maeterlinck writes:

Ford est descendu plus avant dans les ténèbres de la vie intérieure et générale. … Annabella est le poème terrible, ingénu et sanglant de l'amour sans merci. C'est l'amour charnel dans toute sa force, dans toute sa beauté et dans toute son horreur presque surnaturelle. … Les mots qui le déclarent ont déjà sur leurs lèvres le goût âcre et sombre du sang.¹²

Like Artaud, Maeterlinck cites scene iii of Act IV as the crux of ruthless cruelty in the play. Asserting, “Je ne crois pas qu'il y ait dans la littérature une scène plus belle, plus douce, plus tendre, plus cruelle et plus désespérée,” Maeterlinck also notes that Annabella braves the attack of Soranzo “avec des mots magnifiques arrachés comme des pierreries dans une tempête, aux abîmes éternels de l'âme humaine.”¹³ So although, like Artaud, he stresses the inner horrors implied by Ford's 'Tis Pity, Maeterlinck recognizes moreover the necessity for the language of the play. The words are hurled like bricks; in 'Tis Pity

la moindre parole que l'on prononce alors a une signification et une vie qu'elle n'a jamais ailleurs. Le ton du drame, là où ce ton existe, se modifie aussi.¹⁴

Maeterlinck, then, unlike the revolutionary Artaud, is not careless with traditional texts. “Les vieux dramatistes,” writes Maeterlinck in his preface (perhaps anticipating Artaudian theatrics), “n'avaient pas peur des mots.”¹⁵

Taking Artaud's theories and Ford's play in a complementary context, it becomes increasingly apparent that Artaud's choice of 'Tis Pity as a conceit for and as an instance of the theater of cruelty is more than understandable; it is unquestionably apt. Indeed, the action of 'Tis Pity emphatically illustrates Artaud's extreme notions about a double drama of painful exposure. Nevertheless, if the action of 'Tis Pity were simply to be mimed, as Artaud suggests (TD 99-100), then the edge of its essential weapon would be severely dulled. For the torrential language of 'Tis Pity engulfs the drama in cosmic anguish as both the sound and the fury of ceremonies of innocence reverberate in the twisted redundancies of ruthless words. This balance between the word and the unspeakable deed makes Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore the quintessential drama of cruelty.

Notes

1. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, tr. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 99-100. Subsequent page references to The Theater and Its Double, henceforth “TD,” will appear in the text.

2. See, for example, Fredson Bowers' examination of tainted revenge in Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (1940; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 208-11; M. C. Bradbrook's discussion of the sensual implications of Ford's language in Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), p. 253; T. S. Eliot's provisional acceptance of Ford's “double-stressing the horror” of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in Essays on Elizabethan Drama (1932; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960), p. 130; Ralph J. Kaufmann's analysis of the obsessive core and “delicately achieved balance” of “Ford's Tragic Perspective,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1 (1960), 522-37, reprinted in Elizabethan Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. R. J. Kaufman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 356-72; Clifford Leech's recognition of the cultivation by Ford of the “horrible and the shocking” in “The Last Jacobean Tragedy,” in Shakespeare's Contemporaries: Modern Studies in English Renaissance Drama, 2nd edition, ed. Max Bluestone and Norman Rabkin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 387-99; and Mark Stavig's discussion of the inversion of Christian rituals in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 95-121.

3. Paul Goodman, “Obsessed by Theatre,” in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Eric Bentley (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. 77.

4. John Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, ed. Brian Morris (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), p. x. For convenience, this edition of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore has been used as the source of quotations and citations in this paper.

5. Jean Cocteau, “Preface: 1922” to “The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower,” trans. Michael Benedikt, in Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism, ed. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth (New York: Dutton, 1966), pp. 96-97.

6. It is important to note, however, that Artaud's choice of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore as a model for his theater of cruelty has its basis in the play's obsessive quality, use of ritual, and breaking of taboo. This is substantiated by a consideration of the similar qualities exhibited by Arden of Feversham, the only other Elizabethan or Jacobean play Artaud mentions (TD 99). Though the image of the plague echoes throughout 'Tis Pity, it is also understandably common in other plays of the period (e.g., Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy [IV.i.38, 196]).

7. For a discussion of Ford's “hypnotic” use of the word “blood,” see Brian Morris' introduction to 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, pp. xxiv-xxv.

8. Kaufmann, “Ford's Tragic Perspective,” in Elizabethan Drama, p. 366.

9. This guessing-game of incest, reminiscent of Pericles (I.i), is another instance of childish play which oversteps its bounds in 'Tis Pity. For an illuminating discussion of play which may be applied to Artaud's concept of Ford's drama, see Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1949; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 107-11. Huizinga describes play as lying “outside morals” (p. 213) in a magic circle which absorbs “the player intensely and utterly” (p. 13) with a savagely poetic game which tends to be beautiful. Huizinga states, “All true ritual is … played. We moderns have lost the sense for ritual and sacred play. Our civilization is worn with age and too sophisticated” (p. 158). Huizinga's theories seem to support Artaud's quest for savage terms of artistic expression.

10. Artaud began his acting career under the direction of Lugné-Poe, who founded the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre (where Maeterlinck's adaptation of 'Tis Pity was first performed on November 6, 1894). See Naomi Greene, Antonin Artaud: Poet Without Words (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 18.

11. John Ford, Annabella ('Tis Pity She's a Whore), traduit et adapté par Maurice Maeterlinck (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1895), p. xviii. For a discussion of the weakness of the subplot of 'Tis Pity, see also H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1955), p. 97. For a defense of the subplot, however, see M. Joan Sargeaunt, John Ford (1935; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), p. 108.

12. Maurice Maeterlinck, “Préface” to Annabella, pp. xii, xvi. See also Maurice Maeterlinck, quoted in Clifford Leech, “The Last Jacobean Tragedy,” p. 398.

13. Maurice Maeterlinck, “Préface” to Annabella, pp. xviii, xvii.

14. Ibid., p. xiii.

15. Ibid., p. x.