'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Initially, the primary appeal (to its original 17th century audience as well as to our own) of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore is the shock value of it.  Once this appeal is satisfied, however, the play does still have more to offer.

At the start of the play, Giovanni, our protagonist, confesses his intense love for his own sister to the Friar, his tutor and mentor.  What is striking about Giovanni's character at first is his sensitivity.  We feel certain of the genuine nature of his feelings, the earnestness of his appeals to the Friar.  Giovanni believes in the truth of his own arguments, which are based on a principle not unlike the primary one of the Metaphysical poets: the idea that earthly love is the closest we can come to knowing heavenly love, and therefore the closest we can come to knowing God.  Giovanni is not a deliberate blasphemer.  His love for his sister, so his argument goes, adds the familial love of brother and sister to the romantic love of intense passion, thus taking the degree of feeling to an unprecendented height.  The Friar can only respond that incest is wrong because God abhors it and by saying that Giovanni will surely be damned for his sins.  It's the equivalent of a parent telling a child because I said so as sole answer to the question why.  Such reasoning often stops the child: an authority figure is an authority figure, after all, and the threat of punishment remains a powerful sway.  Not for Giovanni, though, whose passion represents the kind of intense depth of feeling that Renaissance dramatists sought to instill in their characters.

At the same time that we develop a sympathy for Giovanni, we have to question the legitimacy of his enterprise, knowing as we do that ill fates are certain to befall both him and and his sister, whose feelings are equal to (or almost equal to?) Giovanni's own.  By drawing us toward an incestuous pair of lovers, whose power to evoke sympathy is rivalled only by their power to evoke horror and disgust, Ford brilliantly leads us in to an examination of the incest taboo, one of the most universally shared taboos in all of human history (and in prehistory, no doubt).  Without going into the discussion here, let us say that it is impossible to read (or, I imagine, to witness) this play without going over the arguments in your own head.  What Ford gives us is the awful -- the truly grisly -- fate of his characters as admonition against breaking the taboo.  This is what happens to you, he seems to be saying, if you engage in this sort of behavior.  So the shock value of the play eventually gives way to a very conventional take on morality.  That's certainly the only way to get it past the censors, but I also doubt that Ford ever had any intentions of truly questioning the universal moral sensitivities of civilized cultures.  With Renaissance dramatists, I generally assume that their primary motivation in writing a particular play is to bring as many bodies into the theatre as they possibly can.  They do that by offering lyrical insights into characters whose depths of feeling transcend everyday experience, transcend mere morality.

Though 'Tis Pity offers few speeches of great grace or depth, Giovanni does present to us a compelling and dynamic character.  By the end of the play, we have born witness to a sense of moral ruination so complete that we can only agree with Brian Morris (editor of the New Mermaids edition of the text) that Giovanni has become a full-bore psychopath as a result of the alienation engendered by his actions.  Passion gives way to insanity, and we lose our sympathy for Giovanni.  Thus Giovanni comes closer, in the end, to Tamburlane or Macbeth than he does to Romeo.  Perhaps this is the cost of his particular crime: for Annabella, the cost is her life, for Giovanni, his sanity and his moral bearing.  'Tis Pity does not attain the sophistication of Shakespearean language, but it does boast a complexity of character and theme. The action of the play is straightforward and brisk.  It's hard to believe that Ford could get away with this sort of thing in the 17th century, so near to the inaugural of the Puritan interregnum, but maybe this play is exactly why the Puritans shut the theatres down.  In any case, the moral message ends up being a pat one, after all.  This is not the kind of behavior you should be engaging in if you want to lead a fruitful or a happy life.