[In the following essay, Leech discusses Ford's drama within the context of Jacobean tragedy, asserting that in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore Ford comes closest to recreating the Jacobean tragic spirit.]

If 'Tis Pity She's a Whore can be described as belonging with the Jacobean tragedies of Shakespeare, Chapman, Webster and Middleton, we must approach it by considering the attitude to the nature of things that underlies those plays. The attitude, of course, will vary to some extent from writer to writer, even from play to play—it would be absurd to equate the dominant feelings and effects of Hamlet, Bussy d'Ambois and Women Beware Women—yet it is possible to speak in general terms that have a validity for the whole body of major tragic writing in the earliest years of the seventeenth century. Basically, then, this drama is characterized by an intellectual tension. On the one side there is a feeling of exaltation in the nature of man, a delight in his dominance among created things, in his ambitions and his potentialities, his daring, his readiness to assume responsibility for the pattern of his life, his capacity for love and understanding; on the other side there is a recognition of the limitations of man's power, his isolation in the universe, the isolation among his fellows that great gifts or unusual ambition or the inheritance of high place inevitably brings, the death that must come at the end. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans were not anti-Christian when they wrote tragedy, but they were concerned with a phase of human life that began with the establishment of a perilous situation and that ended with the hero's death. They were not, during the time of composition, concerned with what might follow. At the end of Hamlet we have a perfunctory prayer that flights of angels will sing the Prince to his rest, and perhaps Shakespeare believed that a man who behaved as Macbeth did would go to hell. But when we see the plays we are not comforted by the thought of Hamlet among the blessed, or amended in our conduct by the thought of Macbeth's damnation. The ultimate concern in Hamlet is for the Prince's earthly reputation, and any celestial addition to Macbeth's sufferings, to us idle and revolting, is not explicitly affirmed in the play. In the tragedies of Chapman the indifference to the Christian scheme is more overt: for him, as for Shakespeare, there may be a world of ghosts and devils that can exercise some influence on human action, but that world is important only for its relation to the span of human life.

But, though these writers were not anti-Christian in their intent, neither were they giving us mere intellectual exercises of an ‘as if’ type. They were not saying, in effect, that if we were to disregard revelation this is how the world would look. Professor John Danby in his perceptive study of Antony and Cleopatra has indeed suggested that this was the case when Shakespeare wrote that play.¹ But Antony and Cleopatra, like all the major tragedies of its time, seems a much more personal thing than that interpretation would suggest. If the human situation is looked at without thought for an ultimate, supra-terrestrial setting of things to rights, it is inevitable that there should exist in the mind some feeling of resentment. This may be strong, as it surely is in Marlowe and Chapman, or subdued, as it generally appears in Shakespeare—largely perhaps because Shakespeare's interest in human characters as individuals was so strong as often to dominate his field of attention—but it is never wholly absent from Jacobean tragedy. As we see the tragic loading of the bed in Othello and contemplate without joy the torture which is to be Iago's, as the dead bodies of Lear and Cordelia are carried away, as Macbeth is reduced to the condition of the baited bear, we cannot feel other than at odds with the great scheme of things in which these events occur.

But resentment against the scheme of things implies a measure of anthropomorphism. That perhaps is one reason why tragedy has become increasingly difficult to write in recent years. There is something of the blasphemous in tragedy and, as G. K. Chesterton once pointed out, you have to be a believer if you are to blaspheme satisfactorily. Thomas Hardy at the end of Tess had to transform his Immanent Will into a President of the Immortals who was heedless and sadistic, but the last paragraph of Tess, eloquent as it is, does not ring true. It is too obviously a contrivance to allow for the expression of a resentment that for Hardy was irrational. But at the beginning of the seventeenth century the situation was different. The tragic writers had enough of Montaigne in them to consider the span of human life on earth as their proper study, and this concentration of interest made them uneasy and rebellious; at the same time the Christian tradition was powerful, and with part of their minds they feared God and were anxious to love him. So the continuing strength of Christian belief gave a special edge to tragic writing of that time, complicating the pride in man with a sense of guilt, leading to a strange alternation of pagan and Christian notions concerning the governance of the universe, and facilitating a convenient personalism in the apprehension of the divine. These complexities come out sharply in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The Duchess, a woman for the most part heedless of religion's claims, yet prepares herself for death with a thought of heaven and the humility needed for admission there. Yet, before she has thus achieved a mood of acceptance and submission, she has cursed the stars which she sees as emblems of the cosmic power. Bosola, her pitying tormentor, draws her attention to the ineffectiveness of such curses: ‘Look you,’ he says, ‘the stars shine still.’ She retorts that her curses have a long way to travel. Here we have an indication of the human need, very strong in the tragic dramatist, for the existence of a Being, a Power, who can feel man's resentment. Even after the Duchess has died in Christian humility (though with her last word proudly sent to her murderous brothers), the play has yet its girds at Omnipotence: it is in V, iv, that Bosola exclaims:

We are meerly the starres tennys-balls (strooke, and banded
Which way please them).

So, too, Shakespeare's Lear is full of references to the ‘gods’. In his physical agony Gloucester compares them to wanton boys, later they are for him ‘you ever gentle gods’ as he submits to their will. They are for Edgar and Albany ‘just’ in their punishment of the adulterous Gloucester, the totally evil Goneril and Regan. But their justice is seen as terrible, impersonal, remote. The ultimate wisdom of Shakespeare's tragedy seems to be that our resentment should be kept in its place: love and understanding, repentance and the capacity to endure, are more important things.

If the continuing hold of a Christian cosmology gave a special edge to the tragic feeling, so did the persistence of a Christian ethical scheme. This can be seen most obviously in the complex views of revenge and ambition in the plays of the time. Revenge had always been condemned by the Church and it was manifestly, too, an offence against the social order, a usurpation of authority's privilege. But, like ambition, it gave to a man a sense of being sufficient to himself, as he assumed the right to ‘Be his own carver and cut out his way’²: it was in tune with the Renascence pride of life, delight in individuality. Moreover, the Senecan drama gave a powerful precedent for revenge as a tragic motive and endowed the passion with classic authority. Ambition likewise was encouraged by the condition of flux in political affairs, despite its incompatibility with the traditional belief that each created thing must function within its given orbit, must not of its own will move into another. So the tragedies of the time demand our sympathy for revengers and for ambitious men. Hieronimo and Tamburlaine, Richard III and Marston's Antonio, Hamlet and Macbeth, Tourneur's Vindice and Webster's Vittoria, are human beings who go against the traditional injunctions: some of them are oppressed by a consciousness of the evil in their purpose, others are whole-hearted in their rebellion; but all of them win something of our esteem through their force of personality. Yet in these plays there is sometimes a hint, sometimes a manifest demonstration, that an act of revenge, or of self-aggrandizement, is evil. Kyd's Hieronimo has to pay for his revenge by his own death; Tamburlaine is stricken down at the moment of his greatest blasphemy; Marston's Antonio, having satisfied his father's ghost, enters a monastery; Richard III must experience remorse when his full course of crime is done; Hamlet must die along with Claudius; Macbeth's overthrow is an occasion for national rejoicing; the good Duke who comes to power at the end of The Revenger's Tragedy orders Vindice's execution; Vittoria at her death cries:

                    My greatest sin lay in my blood:
Now my blood pays for it.

Even the dramatists farthest from orthodoxy, Marlowe and Chapman, are aware of the vanity of ambition's prize, the sinking in the scale of being that revenge entails: in them there is a vein of scepticism that runs deep, but they are far from a mere overturning of Christian precepts.

In the tragedies of the time we are also made aware of the nobility of certain characters who straightforwardly exemplify the Christian virtues, from the faithful wife Olympia in Tamburlaine to the saintly Isabella in The White Devil. On the ethical plane, in fact, these plays are more confused than in their cosmology. It is a psychological commonplace that the human mind is capable of holding contrary ideas concerning the nature of a person or thing: in their cosmology the tragic writers exemplify this, never altogether parting company with the Christian scheme though presenting a picture of the world in which it is hardly manifested. But in their notion of virtue there is not so much complexity as blurring. Tamburlaine is implicitly condemned for his violence and the absurdity of his pretensions, while a minor figure like Olympia is wholly praised. Yet Marlowe can share Tamburlaine's aspirations and delight with him in his dreams of power and sensuality, at the same time honouring him for his love of Zenocrate. Shakespeare is not without a sympathetic understanding of Edmund's and Iago's egoism, he can raise awkward questions concerning Macbeth's degree of responsibility; yet there is no doubt that Cordelia, when he remembers her, is his true saint. Indeed, part of the fascination which these Jacobean tragedies hold for us lies in their shifting attitudes. We have the sense of being in a world like the one we have felt on our own pulses—where there is an uncertainty in the basis for judgment, where an ever-resurgent scepticism coexists with an inherited scheme of values. In that world the rebel can exercise a peculiar power over us, can never be quite denied our sympathy, yet can never firmly hold our approval.

But this kind of tragic writing had a comparatively short life in the seventeenth-century theatre. The major plays of Shakespeare, Chapman, Webster and Tourneur came in a very few years at the beginning of the century, and Middleton's The Changeling (c. 1622) has the appearance of a survival into a changed dramatic world. In general, the tragedy of the later Jacobean and the Caroline years gives us something of the impression that Professor Danby associates with Antony and Cleopatra,³ an impression of a deliberate exercise in which there is only fugitive contact with the dramatist's perception of the nature of things. This mere cultivation of the dreadful, carried out with greater or less ingenuity, is illustrated at its best in Shirley's The Cardinal, one of the most skilful pieces of pseudo-tragedy in the Caroline theatre. Shirley knew his predecessors well and in particular had learned much from Shakespeare and Webster: his blank verse, though it tends to diffuseness, is smooth and eloquent; his characters are conceived with an eye to a striking theatrical effect and with some psychological understanding; his plot, though it runs too easily to violence, has a continuous interest. Yet one cannot feel that this play has much existence outside the theatre for which it was written. Shirley wanted to write a successful tragedy, one that might bear comparison with earlier work, but there was no impulse in him to illustrate general fact. The usually crude statement ‘He wrote from books and not from life’ is applicable enough to Shirley. English tragedy, in fact, from about 1620 to the outbreak of the Civil War was, apart from Ford, to be distinguished from Fletcherian tragi-comedy only in the special character of its thrill.

One cannot give a simple explanation of this change of temper in tragic writing. Partly it comes, perhaps, from the splitting of the theatrical audience into two separate sections from the second decade of the century: neither the populace of the public theatres—for which few important plays were written—nor the sophisticates of the private theatres constituted an appropriate audience for plays of great range of thought, dangerous in their implications. And a struggle was beginning in English society which was ultimately to lead to war. It was not merely a struggle between King and Parliament for political power, though indeed the very notion of such a struggle implied an oversetting of Tudor political orthodoxy. It was also, as Sir Herbert Grierson has called it, a ‘metaphysical’ struggle,⁴ in which the forces of puritanism were establishing their hold on a great mass of the people while at court the Laudians and the Romanists found themselves speaking with similar tongues. The drama was inevitably on the side opposed to puritanism, and the intimate relations between the private theatres and the court strengthened the players and the playwrights in their adherence to the court party. It is not that they write partisan or propagandist plays, as was to happen in the Restoration theatre: they are indeed quite capable of criticizing the ways of courts, of injecting into their plays sceptical utterances of all sorts. But these thrusts and moments of impatience do not become the dominating impulse in a play. The total effect of the tragedies and tragi-comedies of the time is one of a theatrical excitement which does not reverberate into the universe's dark places. Moreover, I think we must recognize in seventeenth-century English drama a simple exhaustion of the tragic spirit. Shakespeare himself did not continue to write tragedy to the end of his career. He seems to have felt a psychological need for a different approach to the world, and he found it in the final romances. These are serious plays in which the Christian ethical scheme is severely exalted, though perhaps there is rather less of Christian cosmology in them than is generally assumed. They are complicated, because they contain all sorts of echoes of the tragedies, whose world Shakespeare could not at a stroke relinquish, but they are emblematic of a striving towards simplicity, a way of looking at things that will forego at least some of the tragic antitheses. The gods are more personal now, direct manifestations of a Providence that has rewards for its own. Webster's tragedies are later than Shakespeare's, and Middleton's later still, but the tragic impulse does not remain long with either of them. By the end of James's reign the drama had ceased to make hardly endurable demands on the minds of its public.

It was in such a state of affairs that Ford set up as an independent dramatist. Earlier he had been associated with Dekker, in whose work Christian feeling is invariably strong, and Ford's own share in The Witch of Edmonton, The Sun's Darling and, we may believe, The Spanish Gipsy is by no means incompatible with his writing of Christes Bloodie Sweat. But we have noted in his non-dramatic writings a wide-spreading interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama: Kyd and Marlowe, Shakespeare and Chapman, all left their casual imprint on his prose and verse. He had, moreover, in Fames Memoriall and Honor Trivmphant, shown his preoccupation with the love of woman and beauty, a preoccupation which he perhaps over-strenuously disowned in Christes Bloodie Sweat:

Loue is no god, as some of wicked times
(Led with the dreaming dotage of their folly)
Haue set him foorth in their lasciuious rimes,
Bewitch'd with errors, and conceits vnholy:
          It is a raging blood affections blind,
          Which boiles both in the body and the mind.

In Honor Trivmphant he displayed a liking for paradox, and in The Golden Meane and A Line of Life his stoicism is presented with little reference to the Christian scheme. A man in whom these contrary impulses could flourish, and who had responded freely to the tragic writing of his youth, should not surprise us if he manages to re-create in one play, perhaps the first that he wrote independently,⁵ the Jacobean tragic spirit. This indeed is his achievement in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

Because it is a re-creation we shall find something of strain in it. Ford goes out of his way to shock his audience. Giovanni must not merely rebel, as Bussy d'Ambois does: he must proclaim himself atheist. His love must be not merely illicit, but incestuous. Not only must he kill Annabella, but he must make his last entry on the stage bearing her heart on the end of his dagger. The Jacobean writers had indeed cultivated the horrible and the shocking, needing to jolt an audience accustomed to tragedy, to prevent them from merely recognizing in disaster an old dramatic acquaintance. But there is something ‘operatic’, something in the Fletcherian mode, in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Though when he wrote it he was around forty years of age, Ford shows something of a mere desire to make our flesh creep. That needs to be said, but the criticism does not dispose of the play. The blemish is almost inevitable when a dramatist is working in circumstances of special difficulty, is aware that his audience is hardly to be made to share his view of things. This is indeed frequent in drama, from the Electra of Euripides to the plays of Mr Sartre and the films of Mr Luis Buñuel.

The main action of the play concerns the love of Giovanni and Annabella, a brother and sister. In the first scene Giovanni is confessing his love to the Friar Bonaventura, who is horrified and counsels prayer and fasting. Giovanni is already in a mood to challenge the Church's teaching, yet he agrees to try what the Friar recommends. Next we meet him still consumed with passion, and he brings himself to tell Annabella of his condition. She reveals her own love for him, and for a time they live in secret joy, their relationship known only to the Friar and Annabella's gross servant Putana. Then Annabella is pregnant, and she agrees to marry her suitor Soranzo. He discovers her condition, and attempts to find out the identity of her lover. He treats her brutally, but the secret is safe with her, and she jeers at him and exults in her love—wanting to drive him to the point of killing her. Then, through a trick of Soranzo's servant Vasques, Putana is made to reveal that Giovanni is his sister's lover. Soranzo, planning revenge, invites all the city's nobles to a feast. Giovanni comes early, and Soranzo allows him to visit Annabella. The lovers realize their end must be near: Giovanni kills Annabella, and then comes among the assembly at the feast, proclaiming his love and the murder he has done, and displaying his sister's heart on his dagger. He kills Soranzo and is himself killed by a troupe of banditti whom Soranzo has hired for the achievement of his revenge. The father of the lovers dies of grief and horror, and the Cardinal, who is conveniently present, moralizes the play's ending.

There are two subordinate actions. Soranzo has formerly seduced Hippolita, the wife of Richardetto: she tries to win the help of Vasques, Soranzo's servant, in order to revenge herself on Soranzo; Vasques, however, is loyal to his master, and Hippolita dies by her own poison. Her husband Richardetto is believed to be dead, but he returns to the city in a physician's disguise, accompanied by his niece Philotis: he too plans Soranzo's death, but this leads only to the accidental killing of the comic Bergetto, a suitor of Annabella who has transferred his affections to Philotis. I have already commented on Ford's use of crude comedy to set off the high passion of his chief characters, but the subordinate actions in this play involving Hippolita and Richardetto have an additional function. They make us recognize the moral worthlessness of Soranzo. Otherwise our sympathy might have gone to him, the convenient husband, and away from Giovanni and Annabella. As it is, we care not one jot for his deception, and our sympathy remains with the brother-and-sister lovers. This firm separation of our sympathy from Soranzo is finally ensured when, in V, iv, he permits Giovanni to visit Annabella once more, so that Giovanni may be killed fresh from the committing of sin. Those critics, incidentally, who take Hamlet literally in the prayer-scene should note the effect of this similar passage in Ford's play. Miss Sargeaunt is surely justified in her view that Maeterlinck, in his version of 'Tis Pity, was wrong to excise the Hippolita plot.⁶ And, though the Bergetto affair is crude, we shall not enter fully into Ford's world unless we see his motive for introducing it, the contrast between the intensity and the reluctance of Giovanni's love and the casualness and easy pleasure of Bergetto's.

What, however, are we to make of the incest-story? In the opening speech of the play the Friar forbids the wanton exploration of heaven's decrees:

Dispute no more in this; for know, young man,
These are no school-points; nice philosophy
May tolerate unlikely arguments,
But Heaven admits no jest; wits that presum'd
On wit too much, by striving how to prove
There was no God with foolish grounds of art,
Discover'd first the nearest way to hell,
And fill'd the world with devilish atheism.
Such questions, youth, are fond: far better 'tis
To bless the sun than reason why it shines;
Yet He thou talk'st of is above the sun.
No more! I may not hear it.

(I, i.)

Later he admits that, were it not for revelation, there might be something in Giovanni's claims for liberty:

O ignorance in knowledge! Long ago,
How often have I warn'd thee this before!
Indeed, if we were sure there were no Deity,
Nor Heaven nor Hell, then to be led alone
By Nature's light—as were philosophers
Of elder times—might instance some defence.
But 'tis not so: then, madman, thou wilt find
That Nature is in Heaven's positions blind.

(II, v.)

This exclamation has been provoked by an argument of Giovanni's which must remind us of Ford's theses in Honor Trivmphant.⁷ Here he claims that Annabella's physical beauty implies a beauty of soul and thus a goodness in her love:

Father, in this you are uncharitable;
What I have done I'll prove both fit and good.
It is a principle which you have taught,
When I was yet your scholar, that the frame
And composition of the mind doth follow
The frame and composition of [the] body:
So, where the body's furniture is beauty,
The mind's must needs be virtue; which allow'd,
Virtue itself is reason but refin'd,
And love the quintessence of that: this proves,
My sister's beauty being rarely fair
Is rarely virtuous; chiefly in her love,
And chiefly in that love, her love to me:
If hers to me, then so is mine to her;
Since in like causes are effects alike.

(II, v.)

When the lovers meet for the last time, Annabella is repentant for her sin and anxious to be reconciled to heaven, but Giovanni cannot believe in what ‘the schoolmen’ teach:

Gio. … The schoolmen teach that all this globe of earth
Shall be consum'd to ashes in a minute.
Ann. So I have read too.
Gio.                                                            But 'twere somewhat strange
To see the waters burn: could I believe
This might be true, I could believe as well
There might be hell or heaven.
Ann.                                                            That's most certain.
Gio. A dream, a dream!

(V, v.)

Yet he attempts a compromise before the act of killing her. He hopes for her salvation and for some recognition that their incest may be distinguished from those unjustified by love:

                              If ever after-times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorr'd.

(V, v.)

Moreover, Ford repeatedly suggests here the idea of fate, which allows Giovanni no choice but to pursue his illicit love. Thus Giovanni views his situation before he has spoken to Annabella:

Lost! I am lost! my fates have doom'd my death:
The more I strive, I love; the more I love,
The less I hope: I see my ruin certain.
What judgment or endeavours could apply
To my incurable and restless wounds,
I throughly have examin'd, but in vain.
O, that it were not in religion sin
To make our love a god, and worship it!
I have even wearied Heaven with prayers, dried up
The spring of my continual tears, even starv'd
My veins with daily fasts: what wit or art
Could counsel, I have practis'd; but, alas,
I find all these but dreams, and old men's tales,
To fright unsteady youth; I'm still the same:
Or I must speak, or burst. 'Tis not, I know,
My lust, but 'tis my fate that leads me on.

(I, iii.)

Before that he has protested that he will follow the Friar's counsel of prayer and fasting, but if it fails he will know that he cannot free himself from the fate that is on him:

All this I'll do, to free me from the rod
Of vengeance; else I'll swear my fate's my god.

(I, i.)

Yet, when the Friar tries to prevent Giovanni from attending Soranzo's feast, he defies prophecy as Bussy d'Ambois did in Chapman's play when he was warned not to go to his last assignation with his mistress:

Friar. … Be rul'd, you shall not go.
Gio.                                                                                                    Not go! stood Death
Threatening his armies of confounding plagues,
With hosts of dangers hot as blazing stars,
I would be there: not go! yes, and resolve
To strike as deep in slaughter as they all;
For I will go.
          Friar.                    Go where thou wilt: I see
The wildness of thy fate draws to an end,
To a bad fearful end.

(V, iii.)

This, of course, is hubris, but Giovanni's arrogance is at times stronger still. We hear his triumphant words as he listens in the gallery while Soranzo woos Annabella, who is not yet conscious of her pregnancy:

Sor.                              Have you not will to love?
Ann. Not you.
Sor.                                        Whom then?
Ann.                                                                                That's as the fates infer.
Gio. [aside]. Of those I'm regent now.

(III, ii.)

And, seeing Annabella for the last time, he reproaches her for not recognizing the mastery of fate that he believes was almost his:

Thou art a faithless sister, else thou know'st,
Malice, or any treachery beside,
Would stoop to my bent brows: why, I hold fate
Clasp'd in my fist, and could command the course
Of time's eternal motion, hadst thou been
One thought more steady than an ebbing sea.

(V, v.)

So at his last entrance he exults in his anticipation of Soranzo's revenge, his ability, as he sees it, to dominate the course of events:

Sor. But where's my brother Giovanni?
                    Enter Giovanni with a heart upon his dagger.
Gio. Here, here, Soranzo! trimm'd in reeking blood,
That triumphs over death, proud in the spoil
Of love and vengeance! Fate, or all the powers
That guide the motions of immortal souls,
Could not prevent me.

(V, vi.)

From this it is a far cry to Giovanni's earlier belief that his guilt was not his responsibility because fate had decreed it. Like Tamburlaine, he has come to believe, despite the imminence of his destruction, that he holds ‘the Fates bound fast in iron chains’. His arrogance is in sharp contrast to Annabella's passive acceptance of fate's decree as she knows her end near:

Thou, precious Time, that swiftly rid'st in post
Over the world, to finish-up the race
Of my last fate, here stay thy restless course,
And bear to ages that are yet unborn
A wretched, woful woman's tragedy! …
O, Giovanni, that hast had the spoil
Of thine own virtues and my modest fame,
Would thou hadst been less subject to those stars
That luckless reign'd at my nativity!

(V, i.)

The echo of Faustus here⁸ can hardly be accidental, and it brings with it the notion of a terrified submission. With this we can associate Richardetto's cry when he feels that the dénouement is near: ‘there is One Above begins to work’ (IV, ii).

There can be no doubt that in the planning of this play Ford had Romeo and Juliet in mind. The Friar, Giovanni's confidant, and Putana, the gross ‘tutoress’ of Annabella, manifestly correspond to Friar Lawrence and the Nurse in Shakespeare's tragedy of love. The point is significant, for Shakespeare stressed that his lovers were ‘star-crossed’, were not responsible for the catastrophe that awaited them. Ford, it is evident, sees the love of Giovanni and Annabella as an impulse that drives them to doom. Nevertheless, he sees Giovanni's growing arrogance as at once inevitable, splendid, and culpable.

To an early seventeenth-century tragic writer it is not surprising that a man's conduct should simultaneously present these different facets, and in Ford the opposition of pagan and Christian impulses is stronger than in most. Joined to his admiration for the adventurous Giovanni is the stern piety that had earlier shown itself in Christes Bloodie Sweat. Immediately before her marriage the Friar terrifies Annabella with a threat of hell, and it is in this passage that the play is closest to the poem. Here is the Friar:

Ay, you are wretched, miserably wretched,
Almost condemn'd alive. There is a place,—
List, daughter!—in a black and hollow vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,
But flaming horror of consuming fires,
A lightless sulphur, chok'd with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness: in this place
Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts
Of never-dying deaths: there damnèd souls
Roar without pity; there are gluttons fed
With toads and adders; there is burning oil
Pour'd down the drunkard's throat; the usurer
Is forc'd to sup whole draughts of molten gold;
There is the murderer for ever stabb'd,
Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton
On racks of burning steel, whiles in his soul
He feels the torment of his ranging lust.
Ann. Mercy! O, mercy!
Friar.                                                  There stand these wretched things
Who have dream'd out whole years in lawless sheets
And secret incests, cursing one another.
Then you will wish each kiss your brother gave
Had been a dagger's point; then you shall hear
How he will cry, ‘O, would my wicked sister
Had first been damn'd, when she did yield to lust!'

(III, vi.)

Ford has achieved an eloquence of speech that was far beyond him a dozen years earlier, when the poem was written. But in devising the Friar's words he must have remembered the vision of hell that he had personally, not dramatically, represented. We cannot doubt that, when he wrote the play, the vision still had validity for him. Here is the poem's version:

Here shall the wantons for a downy bed,
Be rackt on pallets of stil-burning steele:
Here shall the glutton, that hath dayly fed,
On choice of daintie diet, hourely feele
          Worse meat then toads, & beyond time be drencht
          In flames of fire, that neuer shalbe quencht.
Each moment shall the killer, be tormented
With stabbes, that shall not so procure his death:
The drunkard that would neuer be contented
With drinking vp whole flagons at a breath,
          Shalbe deni'd (as he with thirst is stung)
          A drop of water for to coole his tongue.
The mony-hoording Miser in his throat
Shall swallow molten lead: the spruce perfum'd
Shall smell most loathsome brimstone: he who wrote
Soule-killing rimes, shall liuing be consum'd
          By such a gnawing worme, that neuer dies,
          And heare in stead of musicke hellish cries.(9)

At the end of 'Tis Pity the situation is moralized by the Cardinal in sententious couplets, which stand in strong contrast to the last words of Giovanni, finding to the end his idea of heaven in Annabella's love:

                                                                                                                        O, I bleed fast!
Death, thou'rt a guest long look'd for; I embrace
Thee and thy wounds: O, my last minute comes!
Where'er I go, let me enjoy this grace,
Freely to view my Annabella's face.

(V, vi.)

It was at this point, understandably, that Maeterlinck ended his version of the play, but to adapt Ford in this fashion is to conceal his complexity of view. He could at times see Giovanni as not merely arrogant but wholly unscrupulous in his course of evil. When wooing Annabella, he assures her:

I have ask'd counsel of the holy church,
Who tells me I may love you.

(I, iii.)

Yet nothing that the Friar has said to him could be legitimately twisted to mean this. At this moment his wooing becomes seduction.¹⁰ Moreover, he administers to us a subtler shock when he claims that his pleasure in lying with Annabella has in no way been diminished since her marriage:

Busy opinion is an idle fool,
That, as a school-rod keeps a child in awe,
Frights th' unexperienc'd temper of the mind:
So did it me, who, ere my precious sister
Was married, thought all taste of love would die
In such a contract; but I find no change
Of pleasure in this formal law of sports.
She is still one to me, and every kiss
As sweet and as delicious as the first
I reap'd, when yet the privilege of youth
Entitled her a virgin.

(V, iii.)

The passage is primarily intended to display Giovanni's condition of hubris, as, near the point of catastrophe, he sets himself up more arrogantly against ‘Busy opinion’ and rejoices in his mastery of pleasure; but also it suggests a coarsening of the character, his deterioration into an intriguer showing itself in his delight in the skill of his deception.¹¹

Yet at the same time it is not merely Giovanni or destiny that is culpable. We have seen that the lovers hold our sympathy as no other character in the play holds it, how Ford takes pains to ensure that we shall waste no regard on Soranzo. And at one moment at least the Cardinal who moralizes the ending comes himself under a critical lash. Grimaldi has mistakenly killed the comic Bergetto and has then taken refuge with the Cardinal, who is his kinsman. When Bergetto's father Donado asks for justice, the Cardinal answers that he has received Grimaldi into the Pope's protection and will not give him up. Donado and his friend Florio protest against this ecclesiastical partiality:

Don. Is this a churchman's voice? dwells justice here?
Flo. Justice is fled to Heaven, and comes no nearer.
Soranzo!—was't for him? O, impudence!
Had he the face to speak it, and not blush?
Come, come, Donado, there's no help in this,
When cardinals think murder's not amiss.
Great men may do their wills, we must obey;
But Heaven will judge them for't another day.

(III, ix.)

So we may remember this when the Cardinal takes it upon himself to re-establish the rule of law at the end of the play, condemning Putana to be burned and declaring, of Annabella, ‘'Tis pity she's a whore.’¹²

When in this way one analyses Ford's attitude to his characters and their actions, one may feel only that confusion now hath made his masterpiece. But this, as we have seen, is the way of Jacobean tragedy. There is no simple faith in the man who rebels or in the law against which he rebels. There is a strong sense of sin, and of the arrogance that comes on a man as he hardens in sinning; there is a sense that he has had no choice; there is a sense that his fellows are not worthy of judging him. Above all, there is a strong sense of sympathy with the man who is apart from his fellows, making his challenge, facing his end. While we are close to Giovanni, Ford keeps us remote from the cosmic scheme, at whose nature Giovanni or the Friar or the Cardinal may only guess. There is a pattern in things, which leads Giovanni from his first impulse of love for Annabella to his murder of her and his own virtual suicide, but we have only glimpses of what that pattern signifies.

In recent years we have become used to vastly differing interpretations of Shakespeare's major plays. There is a school of critics that sees Othello as winning salvation as he dies, holding Desdemona in a last embrace; there is another school that is sure of his damnation. There are those who see the world as well lost for Antony's and Cleopatra's love, and those who are impressed by the irony of Cleopatra's sensual imaginings of a heaven where Antony is waiting for her kiss or Iras's. It is not surprising, therefore, that 'Tis Pity She's a Whore has similarly lent itself to a diversity of recent interpretation. Professor Sensabaugh sees Giovanni as Ford's sympathetic portrayal of the man who follows, and must follow, his love-impulse, being crushed by a society that will not recognize his need and the inevitability of its assertion.¹³ Dr Ewing, on the other hand, is willing to dispose of the whole matter by consulting Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and by diagnosing in Giovanni a religious melancholy of the atheistic kind.¹⁴ We could not have clearer indications of the danger of interpreting seventeenth-century tragedy either in the light of modern feeling or in the light of its contemporary psychology. According to Professor Sensabaugh,

'Tis Pity She's a Whore … strikes the most decisive blow against the world's moral order. Here no subtle distinctions between whoredom and marriage arise; instead, the play makes an open problem of incest and thus queries the Christian idea of retributive justice.¹⁵

Yet we have seen that Ford, as we should indeed expect from his earlier writings, is sharply aware of sin and by no means an active unbeliever in the Christian cosmology. And Dr Ewing's simple diagnosis leaves out of account the impulse to incest that goes along with, and indeed provokes, Giovanni's religious doubts, and the reciprocal love that Annabella feels for her brother. Mr T. S. Eliot has declared Giovanni ‘almost a monster of egotism’ and Annabella ‘virtually a moral defective’.¹⁶ To that one might reply that, if the company of monsters of egotism is uncongenial, one had better not read much of seventeenth-century tragedy, and that a sinner who comes to recognize her guilt and to pray for pardon is a moral defective of an unusual kind. Miss Sargeaunt has rightly taken Mr Eliot to task for this exhibition of imperfect sympathy, which is doubtless due to his understandable dislike of the overt expression of moral and cosmic uncertainties. But even she falls into the irrelevant judgment, concerning this brother and sister, that Annabella is ‘the better man of the two’. She praises Annabella's clear-sighted recognition of her guilt in comparison with Giovanni's ‘attempts at a rational justification of their conduct’.¹⁷ But this is to give to Ford a sureness of belief that the play hardly warrants, and it runs counter to our deep involvement with Giovanni and the strong sympathy that both he and Annabella successfully demand.

Certainly we can make a distinction between them. For Giovanni we feel that ‘admiration’, in both senses, that normally constitutes part of our response to the Jacobean hero. Professor Davril expresses the wish that he had stabbed himself immediately after despatching his sister,¹⁸ but this character is not one born to acquiesce: like Macbeth, like Bussy, he can take heart from a last confrontation of his enemies, and he perhaps outgoes precedent in the enjoyment of his last triumph. The conception of the hero and the violent course of action into which he enters constitute, in fact, the surest link between this play and the tragedies of Ford's predecessors, while Annabella belongs rather with the heroines of the plays that were to come. She has a close kinship with Bianca in Love's Sacrifice, who similarly falls into an illicit love-relationship and mocks at her husband in order to provoke her own death. And Annabella's final acquiescence in the march of events is characteristic of all Ford's heroines. She has not the strong individuality that characterizes her brother: she is nearer the dramatic symbol of error and suffering quietly borne. It is of her, not of Giovanni, that Maeterlinck speaks when, in the preface to his version of the play, he declares that Ford achieves a vision of the undifferentiated human soul:

Ford est descendu plus avant dans les ténèbres de la vie intérieure et générale. Il est allé jusqu'aux régions où toutes les âmes commencent à se ressembler entre elles parce qu' elles n'empruntent plus que peu de choses aux circonstances, et qu'à measure que l'on descend ou que l'on monte (c'est tout un et il ne s'agit que de dépasser le niveau de la vie aveugle et ordinaire) on s'approche de la grande source profonde, incolore, uniforme et commune de l'âme humaine.¹⁹

In conformity with this, and in contrast to her brother, Annabella has a discretion and gravity of speech, she can give a Racine-like eloquence to the simplest words:

Brother, dear brother, know what I have been,
And know that now there's but a dining-time
'Twixt us and our confusion.

(V, v.)

She uses the term of family relationship, ‘brother’, by which she has thought of Giovanni for a longer time than their illicit love has endured; the simple reference to ‘a dining-time’ gives an immediacy, an association with a life we know, to her quiet and controlled speech²⁰; the word ‘confusion’ is restrained and generalized, yet ultimate. This is the accent of Calantha in The Broken Heart when she recalled how ‘one news straight came huddling on another Of death! and death! and death!’ If we take Ford's dramas as a whole, it is his women rather than his men that remain in our minds. Giovanni, like the play he dominates, is something of a stranger in that world. But that does not diminish either his stature or that of this last, belated Jacobean tragedy.

Notes

1. Poets on Fortune's Hill, 1952, pp. 149-50.

2. Richard II, II, iii, 144.

3. See above, p. 42.

4. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, edited by Herbert J. C. Grierson, 1921, p. lviii.

5. The dedication describes the play as ‘these first fruits of my leisure’. G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, iii, 463-4, is unconvinced by this evidence, and certainly it is not to be relied on.

6. Sargeaunt, p. 108.

7. See above.

8. ‘You stars that reigned at my nativity’ (Faustus, V, ii).

9. Two misprints are silently corrected here.

10. Oliver, p. 89, has attempted to justify his words, suggesting that ‘the Friar's failure to prove a case against him is to Giovanni equivalent to condonation’. But Giovanni had surely been taught to distinguish better than this.

11. This passage was a source of bewilderment to Jacques du Tillet in his review of the performance of Maeterlinck's version (Revue Bleue, 4^e Série, ii (1894), 633-6).

12. Mary E. Cocknower, ‘John Ford’ (Seventeenth Century Studies by Members of the Graduate School, University of Cincinnati, Princeton, 1933, pp. 211-12), has suggested that the Cardinal's prompt confiscation of ‘all the gold and jewels, or whatever, … to the pope's proper use’ (V, vi) has a satiric tinge. If so—and it seems not unlikely—this would strengthen the audience's imperfection of sympathy with the Cardinal's judgment of Annabella.

13. Sensabaugh, pp. 171-3, 186-8.

14. Ewing, pp. 71-6.

15. Sensabaugh, p. 186.

16. Selected Essays, 1932, p. 198.

17. Sargeaunt, p. 186.

18. Davril, p. 299.

19. Annabella, pp. xii-xiii. U. M. Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama, 1936, p. 228, has similarly found the secret of Ford's universality ‘in the knowledge of the ultimate oneness of the roots of human feeling and experience to which his concentration upon a few processes of the mind has led him’.

20. As noted in Gifford-Dyce, i, 198, there is a variant reading ‘dying time’. This does, of course, make good sense, but Annabella's reference, later in the same speech, to the coming banquet as ‘an harbinger of death To you and me’ strengthens the case for reading ‘dining-time’.