a m e r i c a n c o n s e r v at o r y t h e at e r
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director Heather Kitchen, Executive Director
presents
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
by john ford
directed by carey perloff
american conservatory theater
june 5–july 6, 2008
WORDS ON PLAYS
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
michael paller
resident dramaturg
margot melcon
publications & literary associate
ariel franklin-hudson
publications & literary intern
Words on Plays is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
a.c.t. is supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San
Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, the National Endowment for the
Arts, which believes that a
great nation deserves great
art, and the donors of The
Next Generation Campaign.
© 2008 American Conservatory theater, a nonprofit organization. All rights reserved.
Annabella, by costume designer Candice Donnelly
table of contents
.
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
8.
The Carnal and the Cerebral
by Jessica Werner Zack
3. About the Playwright
by Michael Paller
6. What Would John Ford Do?
by Michael Paller
20. Sources, References, and Contexts for ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
by Ariel Franklin-Hudson
29. The World of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
by Michael Paller and Ariel Franklin-Hudson
36. Historical Timeline
42. “Duets for Hair and Gut”: An Interview with Composer/Performer
Bonfire Madigan Shive
by Elizabeth Brodersen
47. The Meaning of the Word “Baroque” in Music
by Friederich Blume
49. A Western Historical Perspective on the Incest Taboo
by Carly Cioffi
56. William Harvey
58. Questions to Consider
59. For Further Information . . .
Bonaventura, a friar, by costume designer Candice Donnelly
characters, cast, and synopsis of
’tis pity she’s a whore
characters and cast
bonaventura, a friar
giovanni, son of Florio
vasques, servant to Soranzo
grimaldi, a Roman gentleman
florio, citizen of Parma
donado, citizen of Parma
soranzo, a nobleman
annabella, daugher to Florio
putana, tutoress to Annabella
bergetto, nephew of Donado
poggio, servant to Bergetto
richardetto, a supposed physician
philotis, niece of Richardetto
hippolita, wife of Richardetto
a cardinal, nuncio to the Pope
ensemble
Steven Anthony Jones
Michael Hayden
Anthony Fusco
Jud Williford
Robert Sicular
Warren David Keith
Michael Earle Fajardo
René Augesen
Sharon Lockwood
Gregory Wallace
Stephen Barker Turner
James Carpenter
Kelsey Venter
Susan Gibney
Jack Willis
Rod Gnapp, Kevin Rolston, Amanda Sykes
the setting
Parma, Italy, early 17th century.
synopsis
A
ct i, scene 1. The Friar and Giovanni discuss Giovanni’s incestuous passion for
his sister, Annabella. Giovanni uses logic to argue his case, claiming that his love is
beyond his control and that he and Annabella are fated to be together. The Friar warns
Giovanni that his desire is blasphemous as well as sinful and advises him to repent in fasting and prayer. Giovanni agrees to try, but still believes that he is fated to love his sister.
scene ii. Vasques, a servant of Annabella’s suitor Soranzo, picks a fight with Grimaldi,
another of Annabella’s suitors. Grimaldi refuses to fight at first, because dueling with
someone of a lower social class is dishonorable, but Vasques pushes him until he engages.
1
Annabella and Giovanni’s father, Florio, and Donado, another citizen of Parma, break up
the fight. While Florio, Donado, Grimaldi, and Vasques talk, Annabella and her tutoress,
Putana, watch from above. Once the men exit, Annabella and Putana discuss Annabella’s
suitors. Putana prefers Soranzo, but Annabella is not interested in any of them.
Another suitor of Annabella, Bergetto, enters with his servant Poggio. Putana remarks
that Bergetto is rich—his wealthy uncle Donado has made Bergetto his heir—but a fool,
and Bergetto and Poggio leave. Giovanni enters, below; Annabella at first glance does not
recognize him, but she finds him more interesting than any of her other suitors. Putana
points out that the attractive young man is Annabella’s own brother, and Annabella wonders that he looks so changed since she last saw him. She says that they should descend to
speak with him, and the ladies exit. Giovanni complains that the Friar’s prescribed remedy
of prayer and fasting has failed to rid him of his passion for Annabella. He decides to tell
her how he feels. When Annabella and Putana re-enter, Giovanni sends Putana away.
Once they are alone, Giovanni confesses his love to Annabella. Annabella thinks he is
teasing her, but, once she realizes that he is in earnest, she is shocked and briefly horrified. Giovanni claims that the church has given him permission to love her, and Annabella
capitulates, admitting that she is just as much in love with Giovanni as he is with her. They
exchange vows—“love me or kill me”—and embrace.
scene iii. Florio and Donado discuss Annabella’s potential marriage to Bergetto.
Florio tells Donado that he will not force Annabella to marry against her will, and that
the ultimate choice of husband is hers. After Florio leaves, Bergetto and Poggio enter.
Bergetto is more interested in gossip than he is in wooing Annabella; in fact, he prefers
Parmesan cheese to Annabella. Donado is dismayed by Bergetto’s foolishness and decides
that Bergetto should send Annabella a courtly letter and a jewel, instead of attempting to
woo her in person. Bergetto agrees, and they all exit.

A
ct ii, scene i. Giovanni and Annabella enter from their bedchamber, where they
have just consummated their relationship. Giovanni observes that Annabella will be
expected to marry, but Annabella refuses. All other suitors are hateful to her, and she vows
that she will remain faithful to Giovanni. Giovanni leaves and Putana enters; Putana condones the incest, declaring, “If a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take anybody,
father or brother, all is one.”
Florio enters with Richardetto, who is disguised as a doctor, and Richardetto’s niece
Philotis. Richardetto introduces Philotis to Annabella. Florio requests private conference
with Annabella—presumably to discuss her marriage prospects—and the group exits.
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore set model, by scenic designer Walt Spangler
scene ii. Soranzo enters, reading a book and contemplating his desire for Annabella.
He is interrupted by Vasques, who enters with Soranzo’s former mistress, the widow
Hippolita. Soranzo promised to marry Hippolita if her husband should die, but now that
her husband is presumed dead, Soranzo has rejected her to court Annabella. Hippolita
berates him, demanding that he honor his vow to her, but Soranzo remains unmoved.
After he exits, Hippolita enlists Vasques’s help in her plan for revenge against his master.
Secretly, however, Vasques plans to remain true to Soranzo.
scene iii. Richardetto explains to Philotis that he has returned to Parma in disguise,
posing as a doctor, in order to take revenge on his unfaithful wife—Hippolita, who believes
he is dead—and her lover, Soranzo. Grimaldi appears, begging Richardetto’s help in winning Annabella; Richardetto tells Grimaldi that Soranzo is the only thing standing in
the way of Annabella’s love, and talks Grimaldi into challenging Soranzo to a duel with a
poisoned sword.
scene iv. Donado, Bergetto, and Poggio discuss Bergetto’s love letter to Annabella.
Poggio reads Bergetto’s letter aloud, revealing that it is hardly a work of courtly genius.

Donado, furious and frustrated, forbids them to read or deliver the letter, and Bergetto and
Poggio go off to see a fantastic horse “with the head in his tail.”
scene v. The Friar chastises Giovanni for committing incest, saying that Giovanni’s
actions will bring him eternal damnation. Giovanni, however, declares that he will prove
his love both “fit and good.” The Friar condemns Giovanni, saying that he is “too far sold
to hell,” and urges him to persuade Annabella to marry another man. When Giovanni
refuses, the Friar asks permission to talk with Annabella. Giovanni agrees, as he is certain
that Annabella cannot be swayed from her love for him.
scene vi. Florio, Donado, Annabella, and Putana enter. Donado gives Annabella
Bergetto’s letter. Bergetto and Poggio enter; Bergetto’s head is bandaged, because he was
bested in a fight and went to Richardetto for medical assistance. At Richardetto’s house,
Bergetto met and fell in love with Philotis. He is not upset when Donado informs him
that Annabella has refused him, and Donado, Bergetto, and Poggio exit, generally content,
as Giovanni enters. Florio remarks that he is pleased that Annabella refused Bergetto,
because he preferred Soranzo all along. After
he leaves, Giovanni jealously asks Annabella
to return Bergetto’s jewel.
A

ct iii, scene i. Bergetto tells Poggio
that he will woo Philotis whether or
not his uncle approves, and “beget a race of
wise men and constables.”
scene ii. Florio offers Annabella to
Soranzo and leaves the two of them alone
to settle the engagement. Soranzo swears he
loves Annabella, but Annabella tells him that
she intends to remain unmarried and “live
and die a maid.” Soranzo continues to woo,
and Annabella continues to resist; finally, she
tells him that if she ever discovers that she
must marry, she will marry Soranzo. As he
agrees to this confusing promise, Annabella
swoons. Florio sends for a doctor, and everyone exits.
Soranzo and Hippolita, by costume designer Candice Donnelly
scene iii. Putana tells Giovanni that Annabella is not sick, but pregnant. To protect her
reputation, she must be kept away from the doctor.
scene iv. Luckily, Richardetto is not really a doctor, and Annabella convinces him that
she has had an adverse reaction to eating melons. Richardetto and Florio, however, are
concerned that Annabella’s sickness means that she must be married quickly—they believe
that young women have a “quickness in their blood” that can only be tamed by sex and can
get out of control if they are not married in a timely fashion. Giovanni brings the Friar to
see Annabella, and Florio urges the Friar to persuade Annabella to marry Soranzo.
scene v. Richardetto gives Grimaldi poison to put on his sword. They plan for
Grimaldi to kill Soranzo on his way to the Friar’s cell to marry Annabella. Grimaldi leaves
and Richardetto prepares to marry Philotis to Bergetto immediately, and in disguise, so
that Donado cannot stop the marriage.
scene vi. in Annabella’s chamber, the Friar tells her about the horrors of hell that
await her if she continues her incestuous relationship with Giovanni. With fire and brimstone, he urges her to forsake Giovanni and
marry Soranzo. Annabella agrees, repentant.
Florio, Giovanni, and Soranzo come in, and
Florio betroths Annabella to Soranzo while
Giovanni looks on.
scene vii. Grimaldi lies in wait for
Soranzo. Bergetto and Philotis enter, disguised, on their way to the Friar’s cell to be
married. Grimaldi stabs Bergetto by mistake,
killing him, and runs away.
scene viii. Vasques informs Hippolita
of Soranzo’s impending wedding, and the
two continue to plot Hippolita’s revenge on
Soranzo—Vasques, of course, falsely.
scene ix. On testimony from the police,
Florio, Donado, and Richardetto determine
that Grimaldi was Bergetto’s murderer,
and that he has sought protection from
the Cardinal. Donado, Poggio, Florio, and
Richardetto go to see the Cardinal and
demand justice. At the Cardinal’s, Grimaldi
confesses that he actually intended to kill

Soranzo, and apologizes for killing Bergetto by mistake. The Cardinal pardons him,
declaring that Grimaldi is a nobleman and protected by the church and will return to
Rome unpunished. Donado and Florio are horrified by the Cardinal’s failure to enact
justice. Richardetto says nothing about supplying Grimaldi with the poison.
A

ct iv, scene i. At Annabella and Soranzo’s wedding feast, Giovanni refuses to drink
a toast to Annabella’s marriage. Before this can become an issue, however, Hippolita
arrives, disguised, and performs a masque to celebrate the wedding. When the masque is
over, she reveals herself and toasts the newlyweds. She intends to offer Soranzo a poisoned
cup, but Vasques switches the cups to poison Hippolita instead. As she dies, Hippolita
curses Soranzo and his marriage.
scene ii. Richardetto laments his wife’s premature death, but he is certain that Soranzo
will suffer, as well, even without any further action from Richardetto. He says that he
has heard rumors of fights between Annabella and Soranzo, and that she “slightens his
love, and he abandons hers.” Since things
in Parma seem to be taking a turn for the
worse, he orders Philotis to enter a convent
in Cremona, where she will be safe from violence and sexual corruption.
scene iii. Soranzo has discovered
Annabella’s pregnancy and confronts her,
calling her “strumpet” and “whore.” He
demands that she tell him the name of her
lover, but she refuses. She is neither repentant
nor apologetic; her lover, she says, is noble
and angelic, and she married Soranzo for
honor and convenience, not for love. Vasques
enters and intervenes before Soranzo can
kill Annabella. He tells Soranzo that he will
find out the name of Annabella’s lover and
counsels him to plot revenge. Soranzo apologizes to Annabella and begs her forgiveness.
Annabella repents and goes into her chamber.
Soranzo and Vasques discuss vengeance, and
Soranzo follows Annabella.
Cardinal, by costume designer Candice Donnelly
Putana enters, crying: Soranzo has hit her, and she is worried about Annabella. Vasques
convinces Putana that Soranzo will forgive Annabella if he knows the name of her lover.
Putana confesses that Giovanni is the man. Banditti enter; Vasques gags Putana and orders
the Banditti to take her away and torture and blind her.
A
ct v, scene i. Annabella, imprisoned in her chamber in Soranzo’s house, begs for
someone to hear her confession. The Friar appears, passing below her window, and
she gives him a letter to bring to Giovanni. “Bid him read it and repent,” she says, and
asks the Friar to warn Giovanni that Soranzo has discovered the truth and Giovanni’s life
is therefore in danger.
scene ii. Soranzo and Vasques plot revenge against Annabella and Giovanni: they plan
to have the Banditti stage an ambush.
scene iii. Giovanni soliloquizes about his love for Annabella; the Friar enters and gives
him Annabella’s letter—written in her blood—warning Giovanni that their secret has been
discovered. Vasques enters, invites Giovanni to a birthday party for Soranzo, and leaves.
The Friar warns Giovanni not to attend the party, but Giovanni insists that he will go.
The Friar tells Giovanni, “The wildness of thy fate draws to an end,” and decides to leave
Parma before more tragedy ensues.
scene iv. Soranzo and Vasques put the finishing touches on their revenge plot and
prepare to welcome their guests. Giovanni enters, and Soranzo sends him to her chamber
to “get her forth.” Giovanni exits, and the rest of the guests arrive.
scene v. Together, Giovanni and Annabella discuss their situation. Annabella, sensing
their impending doom, refuses to make love to Giovanni and begs him to find a way to
save himself. Mad with jealousy and frustration, and realizing that he can never be with
Annabella in this world, Giovanni stabs her, killing her and their unborn child.
scene vi. Soranzo and Vasques enter with the party guests. When Giovanni reveals
Annabella’s bloody corpse, Florio dies in shock. Giovanni kills Soranzo and fights the
Banditti. Vasques wounds Giovanni, and Giovanni dies. Richardetto reveals his true identity. Instead of punishing Vasques for plotting Giovanni’s murder, the Cardinal banishes
him and blames Putana, condemning her to death by burning. He then confiscates all
of Florio’s property for the church, and closes the play by condemning Annabella as a
“whore.”

the carnal and the cerebral
An Interview with Director Carey Perloff about ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
by jessica werner zack
“What if it were not in religion sin to make our love a God, and worship it?”
—Giovanni, in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
The Baroque world may be different from the Renaissance world,
at once more grandiose and more ordinary, more like our own.
—Art critic Holland Cotter
D
uring an interview in her office a few days before the first rehearsal of ’Tis Pity She’s
a Whore at a.c.t., Carey Perloff was brimming with enthusiasm for John Ford’s “surprisingly modern” Caroline revenge drama. An inveterate reader and researcher, Perloff
had, during the months spent casting the production and refining the sets and costumes
with designers, read extensively on sundry subjects germane to understanding this complex
play in the 21st century: Freud on incest and taboo; Antonia Fraser and other scholars on
Baroque life and literature; art historians on Mannerist and Naturalist painters, including
Caravaggio, Pontormo, and Zurbarán; medical histories of William Harvey’s “discovery”
of pulmonary circulation; literary criticism of the Jacobean and Caroline dramatists. The
subjects ranged far and wide in her quest to more fully understand Ford’s still-shocking
exploration of an outlaw obsession between a brother and sister in 17th-century Parma.
In an in-depth conversation about what most interested her as she explored these
themes, Perloff likened the social context in which Ford wrote, and situated his tormented
lovers, to “our own culture of ambiguity and ambivalence,” in which we, too, long for certitude in the midst of uncertainty.

i understand tom stoppard is somehow responsible for your interest in this wild play?
Yes, it’s an interesting story. We were doing [Stoppard’s] The Real Thing a few years ago,
with René [Augesen] and Marco [Barricelli]. Tom has woven wonderful scenes from ’Tis
Pity into that play: René’s character, an actress named Annie, plays Annabella in a production of ’Tis Pity and falls in love with the young actor playing Giovanni, which wreaks
havoc on Annie’s marriage. So we took a couple days off rehearsal and worked on ’Tis Pity
and discovered that we just loved this play-within-the-play. René and I kept looking at each
other and thinking,
We should have actually done both these
plays in rep! It would
have been so difficult, but so interesting.
René is astonishingly
capable with language,
and although she has
played a huge range
of roles at a.c.t., she
hasn’t had a chance to
do much Shakespeare
or this kind of classical material, which she
is eminently trained
to do. So I committed to her that we
would tackle ’Tis Pity
together, eventually.
for an audience
that is likely to
be less familiar
Mary Magdalene Carried by Angels, by Simon Vouet (1590–1649). © Musée des BeauxArts et d'Archéologie, Besançon, France / Lauros / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library.
with the
jacobean period
than with the elizabethan, what would you say distinguishes this
play from the better-known shakespearean tragedies?
The Baroque—as a period, an aesthetic, a world view—is really an avenue into understanding this play. ’Tis Pity is much closer to Baroque painting and music than to Elizabethan
culture. Caravaggio’s paintings, for instance, are a good example of this wildly different
mindset. They are only 25 years after high Renaissance, yet startling in that they evince a
totally different way of looking at the world. Incredibly dramatic colors, visceral appeal,
complicated staging and gesture—this is not Raphael territory; it’s a new kind of visceral
melodrama.


We have to realize that after the long reign of Elizabeth i [1558–1603], which saw the
rise in the use of the English language, real antagonism with Rome, and separation from
the Catholic church, James i [1603–25] took the throne, and suddenly an entirely different
coterie came into power. English culture went through a huge upheaval.
The Elizabethan viewpoint of humanity, or morality, was exceptionally ordered and
lines of authority were still clear. They still believed in the monarchy. And in the patriarchy. And in the church. And even though there are examples of duplicitous churchmen
in Shakespeare, and people who have to be disavowed, there is a sense in those plays that
what one strives for is order, and that the greatest horror possible is a total breakdown in
the social order. Shakespeare’s tragedies play on that fear of disorder, and they tend to suggest in the end that order can be restored.
By the time you get to the Jacobeans, there isn’t a clear sense of hierarchy anymore
and it is no longer expected that order can or will be restored. With no clear compass or
guidepost or authority figure to trust, it is no longer possible to return to a neutral mean.
’Tis Pity asks the question: What happens in a culture in which everything feels toxic/
contaminated? In which it is incredibly hard to trust the organs of authority: the state, the
church, the police, the church, family? If none of those traditionally ordering entities is
ultimately sacred, then what happens?
This is also such an urban play, which is different from many Shakespeare plays.
Shakespeare’s Italian plays are not urban, and the urban plays of the period are comedies.
It is unusual to have an urban tragedy, although it is true of some of Marlowe and some of
Webster. Marlowe was in fact stabbed and killed in a London tavern; people were killed
on the street all the time. It is very interesting to me that this is a play about a city that
feels very much like early 17th-century London, which was a very violent, duplicitous, and
dangerous place to be.
I’m excited about this play in part because it feels very modern. Maybe that’s because
we are also a culture of ambiguity and ambivalence, and we, too, long for something that
we also don’t see being restored. I think people will be surprised that nobody in the play is
quite what they seem, and that’s what saves it from being a pat revenge drama. It’s actually
a surprisingly contradictory play. Except possibly the Cardinal, you can’t mark who the
villains of the play are, and that makes it fascinating.
critics over the years have questioned how much sympathy ford
shows for giovanni and annabella. has this been on your mind,
since their incestuous relationship is at the heart of the play?
You do have to keep reminding yourself when you read the play, Oh my god, that’s her
brother and this is completely taboo! Annabella and Giovanni share the same sense of
humor and wit and intelligence, and Ford gives them really gorgeous language—all of
which reinforces why the word “natural” is used in the play so much and why it’s possible
for Giovanni to use that word about his love for his sister. In a skewed and violent world in
which you can’t trust anybody, it somehow seems natural that the person Giovanni trusts is
his closest blood relation. In a very dangerous world, being together, in each other’s arms,
is how they feel safe. There is a completeness in that to them. And we get seduced into
their way of thinking, their longing.
their connection makes me think of the platonic ideal, this longing not just for a peaceable social order, but also for a higher
truth, this belief that they were once one.
That’s right, and you can’t get beyond the sense that, for people who share blood, who
shared a womb, everything about them is bonded. In that case, of course they should bond
themselves, because it is the truest thing they can do. It’s odd, yet compelling. This play
really looks at how little it takes to cross that line when the longing is that great, the taboo
is also that great, and when you live in this private zone in which there is nobody else in
the world you feel understands you.
do you see ’Tis pity as relating to or being in dialogue with romeo and juliet ?
Marlowe was actually a bigger influence [than Shakespeare] on Ford, and I recently reread
Tamburlaine in this context. But, yes, ’Tis Pity is absolutely and recognizably in dialogue
with Romeo and Juliet. It starts out with a brawl in the street. You see the setup between
warring families. The Italian notion of vendetta is a theme, in which revenge is repeated
endlessly and honor is paramount. You have Putana, who is the flip side of the nurse in
Romeo and Juliet—she’s not exactly warm and comforting—and the Friar as go-between.
People have read ’Tis Pity for centuries as a darker version of Romeo and Juliet, although I
think Giovanni is a much more interesting character than Romeo.
You have to really think with Giovanni, Who is this man? He is modeled on Faust,
so he is a very smart, Jesuit-educated intellectual and logician. On the other hand, he is
completely passionate. It is not an intellectual passion he has for his sister. The collision of
the carnal and the cerebral is very intriguing.

In some ways, the more interesting question comparing Romeo and Juliet with ’Tis Pity
is, What about Annabella? I don’t know the answer yet, but it’s very complicated. She can
be rather passive, and then all of a sudden outrageous, complicated, wicked, and funny, like
Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. She is a very textured heroine.
there has been a lot of discussion over the years about the risk
a.c.t. took in producing the duchess of malfi , one of the company’s
famous, or infamous, jacobean productions. do you feel you are
taking on any risk in producing ’Tis pity ?
Look, you’re in trouble as soon as you take on the Jacobeans (laugh). We courted trouble
when we did Edward II, too [in 2000]. Even the title of this play makes people turn away!
Advertising has ben a challenge because certain spaces have refused our ads because of the
title of the play—as if the word “whore” were a four-letter word! When, really, the real
tragedy and truth of the play is, “’Tis Pity She’s a Woman!” The label “whore” is placed on
Annabella once she’s considered used and degraded, while Giovanni, the instigator of their
sexual relationship, doesn’t get labeled as such.
There is no way to do the Jacobeans and not court some controversy. This play is very
sexual and very violent. Yet, the shocking elements are transgressive because, as in The
Duchess of Malfi, the real scandal of the play is the way it portrays the church. ’Tis Pity
is wildly anticlerical; the real villain is the Cardinal, who, unfortunately, offers no moral
solace, nor moral compass.

you’ve mentioned being intrigued to discover in your research
that the human circulatory system was in effect discovered at
the same time ford wrote this play.
It’s interesting to me because, in contrast to the Elizabethan, Shakespearean sense [in
Humorism] that the goal is to neutralize and bring imbalanced humors back into alignment, William Harvey’s Jacobean discovery that inside this frame of ours is this pumping
fluid and that the heart is actually a muscle sending the blood to circulate and recirculate
helps explain why things get extreme, why tempers and passions flare. Order cannot always
be restored, and it is no longer possible to always return to a neutral mean. Life is too
complicated, the world is skewed, corrupt, and decadent. In this violent world where you
can’t trust anybody, of course it’s natural that the person you trust is the only other person
who came from your mother’s womb. That is where blood is shared, and where blood is
shared there is consanguinity. And that is a kind of completeness. In that framework, of
course she is the one.
about the playwright
by michael paller
J
ohn ford was baptized on April 17, 1586. The second son of a prosperous Devonshire
landowner, he may have briefly attended Exeter College, Oxford, before coming to
London in 1602, when he was admitted to the Middle Temple, one of the prestigious
London law schools of the Inns of Court. He was expelled in 1606 for not paying his bills
(a common infraction among the members) and was readmitted two years later. In 1617, he
was involved in a dispute about the propriety of wearing hats in the hallways. He remained
at the Middle Temple for many years. Indeed, it is not certain that he ever left—in 1638,
just before he disappeared from history, he was the subject of a commendatory poem
addressed to “Master John ford, of the middle Temple.” Men did not have to be law
students or lawyers to reside at the Inns
of Court, and there is no evidence that
Ford was admitted to the bar or ever
practiced law. Both, however, are possibilities.
What is certain is that the Inns of
Court produced a population of welleducated and enthusiastic theatergoers.
These young men were mostly wealthy
and aristocratic; in time, they would be
the principal patrons of the so-called
private theaters, the indoor Blackfriars
and Cockpit principal among them. In
addition to studying law, the students
were also taught music, dancing, and
the other “graces,” which were mainly
practiced through the performance
of plays during the Christmas revels.
Members also wrote their own plays
to mark special occasions, such as royal
visits and births and marriages within
their own aristocratic circles.
Florio, by costume designer Candice Donnelly


Unlike his wealthier colleagues, Ford seemingly had no independent income. He was
bequeathed £10 when his father died in 1610 and another £20, in exchange for some property, when his elder brother died in 1616. In the manuscript of a prose work called The Line
of Life (1620), he wrote of “the poverty of my uncomforted studies” and of being far beneath
“the happiness of thriving fortunes.” By 1628, when he wrote The Lover’s Melancholy, he
implied in the epilogue that he did not write for money and assumed the pose of a gentleman amateur. If his financial fortunes did indeed change in the intervening years, we do
not know how. It is possible that he married a woman with an income, but no evidence of
Ford’s having a wife or children has been found.
By 1620, he had written several prose works and a long religious poem; the following
year, when he was 34, the first play with which his name is associated appeared, The Witch
of Edmonton, a collaborative effort written with Thomas Dekker and William Rowley.
Ford wrote at least seven plays between 1621 and 1624, all in collaboration with, in different
combinations, Dekker, Rowley, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. In The Witch of
Edmonton one can see, in the sections Ford is thought to have contributed, a deep interest
in temptation, sin, and redemption and in women who nobly bear a tragic fate—themes
which dominate his later, independently written plays, including ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
Following what is thought to be his last collaborative effort (The Bristow Merchant, with
Dekker in 1624), Ford vanishes from sight. Some scholars think he may have spent the next
four years doing legal work, perhaps managing estates. It is not hard to guess the reason for
Ford’s disappearance from the London stage: just after James i died in March 1625, London
was hit by one of the worst outbursts of the plague since the 14th century, which closed the
city’s theaters until the end of November. By the end of the year, more than 35,000 people
had died in London, among them John Fletcher, the leading playwright of Shakespeare’s
former company, the King’s Men. The plague created chaos among the theater companies.
With the London theaters closed, their only income lay in touring the provinces, never a
profitable venture. The result was bankruptcy for every company but the well-run, well-off
King’s Men.
Ford may have left London during these years, perhaps returning to Devonshire, where
he might have earned enough money at other pursuits to write at his leisure when he
resumed his playwriting career in 1628. By then, new acting companies had emerged from
the remnants of the old; the only serious rivals to the still-surviving King’s Men were
Queen Henrietta’s Men, sponsored by the wife of the new monarch, Charles i. The plays
that Ford would write on his own beginning in 1628 would be for either of these companies. As far as is known, he wrote 11 plays independently; eight have survived. The dates of
the first performances are not known for all the plays, but the recent critical consensus is:
The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), The Broken Heart (1629), ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1630), Beauty
in a Trance (performed at court in November 1630, its date of composition unknown),
Love’s Sacrifice (1631), Perkin Warbeck (1632), The Fancies Chaste and Noble (c. 1635), and The
Lady’s Trial (1638). In the 20th century another play, The Queen, was attributed to Ford, but
the date of its premiere is unknown. There is also conjecture that ’Tis Pity was the first of
the plays he wrote on his own.
The Lover’s Melancholy and The Broken Heart were written for the King’s Men and performed at the outdoor Globe Theatre and the indoor Blackfriars, suggesting that, despite
their courtly setting, themes, and relative lack of action, Ford had learned from Dekker,
Middleton, and his other collaborators how to satisfy the diverse audience of the Globe as
well as that of the generally more-educated, upper-class patrons of the Blackfriars (where
the price of admission was roughly six times that of the outdoor theaters). Ford then left
the King’s Men and wrote for Queen Henrietta’s Men, who performed at another indoor
theater, the Cockpit, also known as the Phoenix. After The Lady’s Trial, Ford disappears
again, this time for good.
The Puritan faction that seized control of the government officially closed the theaters
in 1642, and for 18 years the only theater produced in England was illegal and surreptitious.
Although the theater’s place in English cultural life was restored by Charles ii in 1660,
Ford’s plays were rarely seen. ’Tis Pity, for example, was revived a couple of times during
that decade and then went unproduced in public theaters until 1940—among other things,
the incest theme of ’Tis Pity was unappealing in the Victorian era (close relationships
between brothers and sisters interested Ford; they occur not only in ’Tis Pity but also in
the earlier The Broken Heart and the later Love’s Sacrifice). As the scholar Marion Lomax
has written, “Ford’s work is accessible and invites us to take issue with it. His own attitude
to his characters is often ambiguous, so that whether he is a moralist or a decadent libertine, an unequivocal supporter of patriarchy or a challenger of gender restrictions is still
a matter of opinion.” The opinions are wide ranging. To critic Ronald Huebert, “a poet
[who] chooses witchcraft, melancholy, masochism, misogyny, and incest as major themes
must have a taste for the bizarre.” Perhaps. It may also be that it was through the depiction of people—ordinary and not—in extreme situations that Ford could best express his
reaction to a dark, and darkening, world. What is indisputable is that Ford created a series
of memorable characters, especially women who, beset by a terrible fate, meet it with fortitude and grace.

what would john ford do?
by michael paller
I
n 1629, a year before ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore probably was presented for the first time by
the Queen’s Men, the bishop of Bath and Wells wrote:
Fornication violates the good order that should be between single persons
through unruly lusts; adultery adds thereto a confusion of families, and takes
away the distinction of heirs and inheritance; but incest moreover abolishes the
reverence which is engraved by nature, to forbid that persons whom nature has
made so near should one uncover the other’s shame.

We do not know what prompted the bishop to sermonize on incest; it was not common in Stuart England, and studies of the court records of the time show that “ordinary
people,” meaning mostly the rural poor, had no horror of it (perhaps that was the problem).
In Ford’s England, there were no secular laws against incest; it was punishable only in
ecclesiastical courts.
By the 17th century, one common contemporary argument against incest viewed it as
a danger to society at large, a threat to moral, religious, and civil order. This is interesting
because, while incest may be the subject in ’Tis Pity that catches and holds our attention,
Ford is also concerned with another threat to social order, which obsesses more characters
in the play than does incest: the unquenchable thirst for personal vengeance. Of these two
forces that propel the action of ’Tis Pity, which is more threatening to society? It may be
that, in the abstract, Giovanni and Annabella’s love for each other threatens the social order
by defying one of its strongest taboos, but in the particular, it is Giovanni’s violence and
megalomania that lead to the couple’s tragic end. The blood lust at large in Ford’s Parma,
on the other hand, leads to the murders of five characters.
Indeed, if we look at the play from one angle—Giovanni and Annabella’s—it may
appear to demand rebellion against a repressive patriarchal social order. Turn the play a
degree or two, however, and now it is a plea for order in a society in which there is no reliable judicial force or authority. Where is the judiciary in this play? Nowhere to be found.
Who are the authority figures? First, there is Giovanni and Annabella’s father, Florio. He
claims that Annabella is free to marry whomever she wishes; then, a few scenes later, he
arranges for her to marry Soranzo, a man she does not love, so that Florio may unite his
upper-middle-class family with an aristocratic name. Looming over Florio—indeed, over
the entire play—is the Cardinal, appointed by the pope and thus God’s representative in
Parma. How does God’s representative act? He protects the murderer Grimaldi because
he is a nobleman, sentences the innocent Putana to be burned to death, and confiscates
Florio’s property for the use of the church. Authority in ’Tis Pity, where it exists at all, is
arbitrary and corrupt. No wonder that the two siblings, and everyone else with a grudge
and a sword, feel free to defy it.
If Ford was like most artists, his portrayal of a world caught in the tension of these two
powerful forces reflects to some degree his feelings about the society he inhabited. We do
not know how Ford (or his audience) felt about incest or, for that matter, corruption; he
left nothing about himself behind but his work. We do know, however, something about
the religious and intellectual trends of his time and his likely, if not certain, connection to
them.
Ford’s work shows familiarity and sympathy with the cult of neo-Platonic love that surrounded King Charles i’s wife, Queen Henrietta. The basis of her love cult was threefold:
first, that the highest, purest form of love was love of God; second, that men and women
could use their will to either worship God
or to set their sights lower and seek love in
the material world; and third, that physical
love needed to be controlled by reason and
moral law, not dictated by passion.
Ford was also influenced by another
contemporary philosophy, neo-Stoic
Christianity. The neo-Stoics believed that
there were no good passions, but passions
controlled by reason could be acceptable.
As a man educated at the law school of the
Inns of Court and probably also at Oxford,
Ford would have read Montaigne, who,
in an essay called “Moderation,” recalled
Thomas Aquinas’s argument against incest:
“[I]f conjugal love is whole and perfect
. . . and you add to it also that which is
due to kinship, there is no doubt that this
increase will carry such a husband beyond
the barriers of reason.” Kinship, then,
combined with conjugal love, would be an
Richardetto, by costume designer Candice Donnelly

uncontrollable passion. The neo-Stoics also said that we must examine the moral implications of our actions to be certain we are not rationalizing away an immoral act. Hence
Giovanni’s debates with the Friar as he attempts to justify his love for his sister.
In 1613, Ford wrote a 64-page poem called “Christ’s Bloody Sweat,” in which he details,
among other things, the punishments awaiting those who give in to their passions:
Here shall the wantons for a downy bed,
Be racked on pallets of still-burning steele:
Here shall the glutton, that hath daily fed,
On choice of dainty diet, hourly feed
Worse meat than toads, & beyond time be drenched
In flames of fire, that never shall be quenched. . . .
The drunkard that would never be contented
With drinking up whole flagons at a breath,
Shall be denied (as he with thirst is stung)
A drop of water for to cool his tongue.

Seventeen years later, Ford gave almost exactly the same words to the Friar when he
admonishes Annabella to repent in Act iii of ’Tis Pity.
We can at least hazard a guess, then, as to how Ford may have felt about the incestuous
couple. Modern audiences are likely to feel some degree of sympathy for Annabella and
Giovanni; we have been conditioned to cheer for those who rebel against the established
order in the matter of love. We find Faustian figures (and Giovanni is very much in that
mode), who challenge the social order and even God, compelling, but Ford, who wrote
approvingly of Platonic love in several plays and composed pamphlets suffused with the
ideas of the neo-Stoics, was perhaps less sanguine about an act that his religion and philosophy considered so sinful.
We have no direct evidence about what Ford felt about that other threat to social order,
personal vengeance—although, as someone who apparently trained as a lawyer, it would
be unusual for him to be in favor of it. London was a dangerous city, where death was ever
present and violence a common occurrence. It may be that Ford was reacting to the reality
of his day; it is also possible, and perhaps more likely, that he was creating a metaphor for
the corruption of the courts of James i (1603–25), his son Charles i (1625–49), and, under
their influence, the judiciary.
James was notorious for giving peerages, power, and other privileges to personal favorites and running up huge debts. For years, James ruled without Parliament as an autocrat,
and the consensus over who governed England—so certain in Elizabeth’s day—completely
broke down.
Charles carried on his father’s feuds with Parliament over foreign policy, taxation, and
religion (the heavily Puritan Parliament distrusted the Anglican church, of which Charles
was the head, and despised its “popish” rituals). He dissolved Parliament in 1626 and
ruled without it for the next 11 years. A war with France broke out (one with Spain was
still going on), and to finance it, Charles imposed on the aristocracy a forced loan to the
government. His judges declared it illegal. In response, Charles arrested the chief justice
and several influential aristocrats who refused to contribute. Who was ruling England? To
whom could one appeal for justice?
Corruption spread into the justice system, as well. In one instance, a nobleman allegedly
burned to death the offspring of an affair with his sister and avoided punishment by giving
a gift of land to the lord chief justice, who happened to be Ford’s great-uncle. The outlines
of a society very much like the Parma of ’Tis Pity begin to emerge. What did Ford think of
it? Knowing nothing of his personal opinions (as is the case with Shakespeare), we cannot
say for certain. That his play still challenges and moves us 378 years after it was written is
perhaps all we need to know.

sources, references, and contexts for
’tis pity she’s a whore
by ariel franklin-hudson
L
ike most of his contemporary playwrights, John Ford had a habit of referencing other
plays of the period. While Ford’s sources for the ’Tis Pity story are somewhat uncertain, the play’s thematic sources can be tracked directly to Shakespeare and Marlowe—not
to mention a wide variety of other Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and playwrights. Ford
certainly wasn’t alone in this: Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Thomas
Dekker, and John Fletcher, to name just a few, were also in the habit of alluding to previous plays, which made sense in a theatrical world as closely knit as theirs. There were no
copyright laws, and their audiences were the kind of habitual theatergoers who appreciated either the familiar—the common groundling audience—or intelligent allusions and
the rewriting of tropes—the better-educated coterie audience who frequented
the indoor theaters. In the introduction
to ’Tis Pity in the Norton Anthology of
English Renaissance Drama, Katharine
Eisaman Maus calls ’Tis Pity “derivative,”
and notes that Ford’s “retrospection and
assimilation produce a remarkably powerful play.” Of Ford’s sources material,
Maus writes:

Shakespearean-style love tragedy is
perhaps the most obvious influence:
Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and
Desdemona, and above all Romeo
and Juliet are the patterns for ’Tis
Pity’s recklessly visionary erotic
solipsists. Ford models his herovillain Giovanni on the Marlovian
overreacher—particularly Doctor
Faustus—in his contempt for rules,
Philotis, by costume designer Candice Donnelly
his combination of intellectual sophistication with sophomoric folly, his belief
in ineluctable destiny, and above all his preference for earthly satisfactions over
heavenly rewards. The sharply observed urban world of Ford’s Parma, Italy,
owes much to Middleton’s caustic city satires. In the last act of ’Tis Pity, the
competitive spiral of violence so familiar in Renaissance revenge tragedies culminates in a bloody denouement as elaborate and shocking as anything in Titus
Andronicus, The Spanish Tragedy, or The Revenger’s Tragedy.
love tragedy
In his introduction to the Revels edition of the play, Derek Roper writes:
As many critics have noted, ’Tis Pity is like a rewriting of Romeo and Juliet in
darker colours. Love within the family is far more shocking, more hopelessly
star-crossed, than love between feuding families. For Juliet’s earthy but loving
nurse we have the cynical and careless Putana. For the testy commands of Old
Capulet we have the concealed control of Florio. For the decent County Paris
we have Soranzo. For Mercutio we have Bergetto. For Prince Escalus we have
the Cardinal. The social world of Romeo and Juliet is basically an ordered world;
that of ’Tis Pity is one of disorder, self-seeking and hypocrisy, where joy and
innocence reside only in an idiot, and we know what kindness and goodness
are by the way they are feigned.
The connections between Romeo and Juliet and ’Tis Pity are established almost immediately. The second scene of the play is a fight between warring factions (albeit in this case
Annabella’s suitors), broken up by an authority; moments later, Putana and Annabella echo
Juliet and her Nurse as they discuss Annabella’s marriage prospects. Putana is as bawdy
and talkative as the Nurse, and Annabella is just as fond and frustrated as Juliet. Juliet
thinks of marriage as “an honor that I dream not of” and Annabella’s “thoughts are fixed
on other ends.”
When Annabella sees Giovanni, however, her tune changes: “But see, Putana, see;
what blessed shape / Of some celestial creature now appears?” Like Juliet, Annabella is
uninterested in men until she sees the man that she was destined to love, and her language
echoes the “love at first sight” rhetoric all over Renaissance drama. Giovanni’s flattery in
the courtship scene that follows also echoes romantic rhetoric. When he tells her, “Such
lips would tempt a saint,” he calls to mind the famous courtship of Romeo and Juliet, yet
again: “Have not saint lips, and holy palmers too?”

Maus notes: “In the early scenes of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, incest seems not scandalously alien but impossible to differentiate from ordinary sexual desire.” In other words,
Ford’s allusions to Romeo and Juliet (and other lovers like them) paint Annabella and
Giovanni’s romance in a strangely positive light. Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed, but
ultimately their romance is right; their tragedy comes not from their own errors (Tybalt’s
murder notwithstanding), but from the fates. Equating Annabella and Giovanni with
Romeo and Juliet indicates that their romance is just as doomed but it also suggests that
their romance is just as romantic, just as fated, even as it violates almost every standard of
virtue and decency.
Giovanni’s courtship of Annabella, however, also echoes Richard iii’s courtship of Lady
Anne, which complicates the issue. Maus again: “In a play full of significant borrowings
and echoes, it is no accident that Giovanni’s courtship of Annabella replays the scene from
Richard III in which Richard manipulates and bullies Lady Anne, whose husband and
father-in-law Richard has just killed, into marrying him.”
giovanni: Here.
Offers his dagger to her.
annabella: What to do?
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.

gloucester: Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword;
Which if thou please to hide in this true bosom.
And let the soul forth that adoreth thee,
I lay it naked to the deadly stroke,
And humbly beg the death upon my knee.
He lays his breast open: she offers at it with his sword. . . .
Take up the sword again, or take up me.
lady anne: Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death,
I will not be the executioner.
Equating Giovanni and Annabella with Richard and Lady Anne suggests that Giovanni
is significantly more villainous than Romeo, motivated by lust and desire, and perfectly
willing to lie to Annabella to get what he wants. When Annabella is equated with Juliet,
she and Giovanni are equally responsible for their ill-fated romance, but when she is
equated with Lady Anne, she becomes a victim of Giovanni’s conniving lust.
As in Romeo and Juliet, the lovers have two confidants: Putana (or the Nurse) and the
Friar. Another interesting moment occurs when Putana brings Giovanni the news of
Annabella’s pregnancy, echoing the Nurse telling Juliet that Romeo has murdered Tybalt:
putana: O sir, we are all undone, quite undone, utterly undone, and shamed
forever; your sister, O your sister!
giovanni: What of her? For heaven’s sake speak, how does she?
putana: O that ever I was born to see this day!
giovanni: She is dead, ha, is she?
putana. Dead! No, she’s quick; ’tis worse, she is with child. You know what you
have done, heaven forgive ‘ee! ’Tis too late to repent, now heaven help us!
nurse: Ah weraday, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!
We are undone, lady, we are undone.
Alack the day, he’s gone, he’s killed, he’s dead.
juliet: Can heaven be so envious?
nurse: Romeo can,
Though heaven cannot. O Romeo, Romeo,
Whoever would have thought it? Romeo!
juliet: What devil art thou that dost torment me thus?
This torture should be roared in dismal hell.
Hath Romeo slain himself? . . .
nurse: Tybalt is gone and Romeo banished.
Romeo that killed him—he is banished.
Later, when the Nurse finds Juliet “dead” on her wedding morning, she cries “O, well-aday, that ever I was born!” which Putana also echoes when she tells Giovanni of Annabella’s
pregnancy. Annabella’s pregnancy is structurally equivalent to Tybalt’s murder—the point
in the play where romance can no longer triumph over fate, and the lovers begin to have
to face consequences. The allusion also suggests, however, that pregnancy out of wedlock
and incest are equivalent to murder and death.
There are not many characters in the canon of Renaissance drama who have extramarital sex and get pregnant out of wedlock. Romeo and Juliet are married before they
have sex, and the Friar presides over their marriage, legitimizing it. Annabella and
Giovanni exchange vows much like Romeo and Juliet do, but their marriage has no witnesses, and would not be legal even if it did. Annabella is actually guilty of the sins that so
many women in Shakespeare are accused of, which makes her violent scene with Soranzo

in Act iv—which echoes a similar scene in Othello—complicated and troubling. Both
Soranzo and Othello accuse their wives of adultery, and they use similar insults, language,
and violence:
soranzo: Come, strumpet, famous whore! Were every drop
Of blood that runs in thy adulterous veins
A life, this sword—dost see’t?—should in one blow
Confound them all. Harlot, rare, notable harlot,
That with thy brazen face maintain’st thy sin,
Was there no man in Parma to be bawd
To your loose cunning whoredom else but I?
Must your hot itch and pleurisy of lust,
The heyday of your luxury, be fed
Up to a surfeit, and could none but I
Be picked out to be cloak to your close tricks,
Your belly-sports? Now I must be the dad
To all that gallimaufry that’s stuffed
In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb?
Why must I?

othello: Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,
Made to write “whore” upon? What committed?
Committed? O thou public commoner,
I should make very forges of my cheeks,
That would to cinders burn up modesty,
Did I but speak thy deeds. What committed?
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;
The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
Is hush’d within the hollow mine of earth
And will not hear’t. What committed?
Impudent strumpet!
Ford’s allusion to Othello is not surprising, given that Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
did the same thing in The Maid’s Tragedy a few years earlier. The strumpet scene in Othello
was famous, and it was logical to allude to it in another scene in which the husband confronts his adulterous wife. The difference is that Annabella is guilty, and Soranzo is right,
where in Othello Desdemona is innocent and Othello is wrong. The allusion to Shakespeare’s
tragedy makes it even more difficult for an audience to figure out whom to support, because
Annabella and Soranzo are shadowed by the ghosts of Desdemona and Othello.
Annabella is a difficult character to pin down by allusion; sometimes she appears to be
Giovanni’s victim; at others she appears to have as much agency as Juliet. She is neither
a virginal heroine nor a villainous whore—like most women in Renaissance drama—and
she embodies elements of both archetypes. She loves her brother, but she repents her sins;
yet she ultimately submits to death out of love just as much as shame. In short, Annabella
does not fit any typical Jacobean/Caroline mold, and may, in fact, have been an entirely
new kind of female character.
giovanni and faustus
Giovanni, on the other hand, is modeled on a very specific Renaissance type. The Renaissance
was a period of rapidly increasing social mobility and personal ambition, a widening sphere
of knowledge, and burgeoning new questions. Katharine Maus and David Bevington, in the
general introduction to the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama, write:
Both medieval and classical drama provide another paradigm: a protagonist
with a surplus of what would, in smaller doses or in different circumstances, be
considered a form of excellence. This virtue, in such extraordinary measure, or
so divorced from normal inhibitions, veers out of social bounds, creating disaster for the hero, the people around him, or both. . . . For instance, Giovanni is
described as “a miracle of wit,” an extraordinary success as a student, and yet
his restless intelligence inclines him to question conventional moral restrictions
and leads him into a disastrous affair with his sister.
Giovanni, like Marlowe’s Faustus and Tamburlaine before him, is extremely inquisitive,
and that inquisitive intelligence and lack of “conventional moral restrictions” leads him to
extreme hubris. Hubris is the classic tragic flaw, and it would have been immediately recognizable to Renaissance audiences. As soon as Giovanni begins to question religion and
morality and rationalize his sins—not even five minutes into the play—the audience would
have known him for what he was: Faustian, flawed, and destined to end badly.
Giovanni questions conventional morality immediately:
giovanni. Shall a peevish sound,
A customary form, from man to man,
Of brother and of sister, be a bar
’Twixt my perpetual happiness and me?

He rationalizes his love, and while he knows that it is a sin, he also says that if the Friar’s
cure does not work, he will “swear my fate’s my god” and reject God and tradition in favor
of his “fated” passion. The next time we see him, he sounds even more like Faustus:
giovanni: Lost, I am lost; my fates have doomed my death;
The more I strive, I love, the more I love,
The less I hope; I see my ruin, certain.
What judgment or endeavors could apply
To my incurable and restless wounds
I throughly have examined, but in vain,
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 starved
My veins with daily fasts; what wit or art
Could counsel, I have practiced. 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.

faustus: Now, Faustus, must thou needs be damned,
And canst thou not be saved.
What boots it then to think of God or heaven?
Away with such vain fancies, and despair!
Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub.
Now go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute.
Why waverest thou? Oh, something soundeth in mine ears:
“Abjure this magic, turn to God again!”
Ay, and Faustus will turn to God again.
To God? He loves thee not.
The God thou servest is thine own appetite
Wherin is fixed the love of Beelzebub.
To him I’ll built an altar and a church,
And offer lukewarm blood of newborn babes.
Faustus is significantly more obvious in his anti-God and antireligion sentiment than
Giovanni, but the impulse and rhetoric are similar: both Giovanni and Faustus know they
have sinned (or are about to sin) and refuse to recognize any potential for redemption.
God, heaven, and prayer are “vain fancies” or “dreams and old men’s tales,” and Faustus and
Giovanni embrace their fates— Beelzebub and incest, respectively.
By the end of the play, Giovanni believes that the fates are his to control: “Why, I hold
Fate / Clasped in my fist, and could command the course / Of time’s eternal motion,” he
tells Annabella just before he kills her, echoing Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: “I hold the Fates
bound fast in iron chains, / And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about.” Giovanni’s
hubris grows as the play goes on; the more he sins, the more he revels in his sins. He is not
an unsympathetic character, but he is deeply flawed, and his flaw is typical; he embodies
the “Marlovian overreacher,” representing a society that deeply fears the violation of religion and morality and the mindset able to rationalize that violation. Derek Roper writes:
On the stage any figure of youth, energy, and passion, pleading only to be
allowed to love, must win some sympathy. . . . But sympathy is checked, not
only by our realisation of what Giovanni demands, but by the way the text
defines him. Like Marlowe’s Faustus he is a brilliant scholar, yet as with
Faustus his speech signals this as an unsound brilliance, corrupted by passion
and pride. . . . It is because his sexual preference constitutes such a challenge to
every aspect of authority that Giovanni has to borrow the rebellious eloquence
of Tamburlaine and Faustus to defend it.
revenge tragedy
In her introduction to Oxford World’s Classics anthology Four Revenge Tragedies,
Katharine Maus defines revenge tragedy as featuring a protagonist who “prosecutes a crime
in a private capacity, taking matters into his own hands because the institutions by which
criminals are made to pay for their offences are either systematically defective or unable
to cope with some particularity of the situation.” Some of the primary characteristics of
revenge tragedy include:
“Defectiveness of the status quo,” or a world in which crime is not atypical.
There must be crime in order for revenge to be necessary; frequently these
crimes are sexual, personal, and familial. In ’Tis Pity all of the crimes that
necessitate revenge involve adultery and broken vows: Hippolita’s affair with
Soranzo, Soranzo’s failure to keep his promise to Hippolita, Annabella’s failure
to remain “faithful” to either Giovanni or Soranzo.

A corrupt or nonexistent judicial system that makes it necessary for the
revengers to take justice into their own hands.
An initial scene or speech retrospectively describing the original transgression. This is true of Hippolita’s transgression and the secondary revenge plot
among Hippolita, Richardetto, and Soranzo. Giovanni and Annabella’s transgressions, however, occur over the course of the play and fail to follow most of
the conventions of revenge tragedy plot lines.
Remains of the dead, preserved and cherished by the revenger. Perhaps
the most famous example is found in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), in which
Vindice, the principle revenger, treasures and talks to the skull of his dead girlfriend, who was raped by the corrupt Duke and committed suicide to preserve
her honor. Vindice revenges himself on the Duke by dressing the skull up as
a young woman, disguising himself as a procurer, and presenting the “young
woman” to the Duke for his pleasure—after, naturally, poisoning the skull’s
painted lips, which in turn poison the Duke. Annabella’s heart serves a similar
role for Giovanni: representative of both his crime and his revenge.
A bloody denouement in which revengers and criminals die in graphic and
poetic ways. There are often several phases of death, some taking place earlier
in the play in preparation for the final showdown, which is typically elaborately
set up by the revengers. Often, however, at least in the cases of The Revenger’s
Tragedy and ’Tis Pity, there turn out to be more revengers and revenge plots
than the principal revenger anticipated.

’Tis Pity has the bloody denouement, the corrupt judicial system, the flawed status
quo, and the vast, layered, and complicated quantities of revenges and revengers of most
Jacobean and Caroline revenge tragedy, but it does not strictly conform to the genre.
The secondary plot among Hippolita, Richardetto, and Soranzo is much closer to typical
revenge tragedy, as is Vasques and Soranzo’s plot against Annabella and Giovanni—up to
and including the hiring of banditti to do the dirty work. The primary plot of ’Tis Pity,
however, is not revenge tragedy; it is romantic tragedy, a crime of passion. Giovanni’s
murder of Annabella, while it can be seen as a kind of revenge, cannot be seen as justice.
The protagonist in revenge tragedy, according to Maus, “must confront a dreadful situation
not of his own making,” and Giovanni’s dreadful situation is entirely of his own making.
Killing Annabella, in fact, is ultimately in keeping with their initial vows—“Love me, or
kill me, brother,” Annabella says in Act i, scene ii—and there is really no other way the
play could end.
the world of ’tis pity she’s a whore
by michael paller and ariel franklin-hudson
Q
ueen Elizabeth i died in the spring of 1603 and was succeeded by James vi of
Scotland (son of the contentious and Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots), who became
King James i of England. Happily for England’s players—by law, all players had to belong
to companies supported by the aristocracy—James was a major supporter of the theater
and assumed the patronage of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
Becoming the King’s Men, the troupe first performed for James at court on December 2,
1603.
james i (1603–25)
James’s ascension to the crown was generally positive for the players (at least until 1642,
when the affiliation between players and crown proved as fatal for the players as for the
king) and performances at court increased. The rest of the royal family also began to
patronize acting companies: the Admiral’s Men, for whom Marlowe had written, became
Prince Henry’s Men, and two prior companies combined to form the Queen’s Men. Royal
patronage brought some new restrictions, but it also gave the players significantly more
protection against the religious leaders, Puritans, and city fathers who constantly sought
excuses to close the theaters. The theaters may have been “vice-ridden,” but they were
protected by the crown.
James was a very different ruler from Elizabeth, and both society and theater reflected
those differences. The populace and the aristocracy had high hopes for the new king, but
his position was difficult. England’s religious struggles were still going strong, and it was
practically impossible for James to keep the peace between Protestants and Catholics (as
witnessed by the Gunpowder Plot). James was less formal than Elizabeth and more open
to a variety of advice, which was initially fairly positive. In The Oxford Illustrated History of
Tudor and Stuart Britain, Kevin Sharpe writes: “James, in complete contrast [to Elizabeth],
was willing to acknowledge and ready to tackle problems. . . . No figure or faction during
the early years of the reign needed to despair of persuading the king to advance their persons or policies.” At first, James’s court functioned “as it was meant to.” James’s informal
open-mindedness became dangerous, however, when the personal invaded the political:
[T]he King’s capriciousness and sexual infatuations with attractive young men
were forces for instability. . . . [H]is obsession with George Villiers, elevated

to be duke of Buckingham, led James to allow one figure to acquire a virtual
monopoly of patronage, which dangerously narrowed the court’s connections
to the powerful political elites of the localities. . . . The rise of an ambitious
favourite to political dominance drove courtiers and natural allies of the crown
into disaffection and opposition, exacerbated difficulties between the king and
his parliaments, and effectively destroyed his foreign policy.
Ultimately, the Jacobean court failed seriously as “a nexus of patronage and publicrelations headquarters of monarchy.” James’s personal relationships and political favoritism
gave his court a reputation for vice, sensationalism, reckless irresponsibility, and sexual
deviance that concerned the populace, the aristocracy, and society at large and carried over
into the theater of the time.

charles i (1625–49)
Both James and Charles distrusted Parliament and demanded that Parliament spend a
great deal of money paying for their personal requirements and military conquests. (Spain
and England had been at war for two years when Charles became king, and Charles and
his chief advisor, the duke of Buckingham, were largely responsible for talking James
into the war in the first place.) Parliament, in turn, had equal distaste for Charles—and
for Buckingham, who they believed exercised too much power over the king. The division between Parliament and the crown was also exacerbated by the religious division
between the Anglican Church—which generally supported the crown—and the more
radical Puritans, who supported Parliament and believed that the Anglican Church (and
by extension the crown) was still far too Catholic. This fear was helped along by the fact
that Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, was Catholic and, according to Sharpe, “provided
patronage and a centre for . . . her Catholic entourage.” English Catholics worshipped
openly at the queen’s chapel, and some prominent courtiers converted to Catholicism.
In 1626, Charles dissolved Parliament. The war with Spain continued, and a new war
with France broke out. To finance the wars, Charles demanded a forced loan from the
aristocracy. The judges declared this illegal, and Charles arrested the chief justice and
several influential aristocrats who refused to contribute. When Parliament reconvened in
1628—after Charles and England were ignominiously defeated in France—they passed the
Petition of Right, which forbade taxation without parliamentary approval, martial law in
peacetime, imprisonment without cause, and the quartering of soldiers in civilian homes.
Charles reluctantly signed the petition, because if he refused, Parliament threatened to
refuse all funding to the monarchy and government. Buckingham was assassinated in 1629,
Interior view of Bourges Cathedral, showing ornate spiral staircases. This image in part inspired the scenic design of this
production of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. © Bettmann/CORBIS.
and Parliament began to object more strenuously to the “popish practices” of the Anglican
Church. Charles ordered Parliament dissolved, again, but the House of Commons passed
three resolutions condemning his conduct before he could take any real action. Charles
refused to call Parliament back into session for the next 11 years.
Charles’s court was not corrupt in the way that James’s had been, but it was equally
troubling to Parliament and the Puritans. Sharpe writes:
More distant, less easily influenced than his father, and, unlike James, personally very happy in his marriage, Charles did not govern through favourites.
. . . For much of the 1630s, Charles’s court functioned politically as it should: to
accommodate differences and contain conflicts. Both within and outside the
court, however, were the seeds of future troubles, some sown by the king himself. Charles was sparing with his favours and affections and did not easily gain
the love, trust, and loyalty he expected. . . . And though he won respect for the
moral reforms he effected, Charles’s court became tainted by a fatal suspicion:
that the court—and perhaps the king himself—were governed by papists. . . .

The fears were misplaced; Charles was devoted to the Church of England. But
in religion as in politics, he too often failed to feel the need to explain his position until it was too late. In consequence the court which Charles constructed
as his model for the whole nation was perceived by many as the headquarters
of the popish Antichrist, to be destroyed, if need be by violent revolution.
Resentment against Charles continued to grow, and the country became more and
more divided in the face of the division in the government, until civil war finally broke out
in 1642. Charles was executed in 1649. The Puritans closed the theaters in 1642, and they
remained closed until the monarchy, in the person of Charles ii, was restored in 1660.
The Elizabethan era, which had been marked by optimism, patriotism, and the dawn
of a powerful belief in the rise of the British empire, had been replaced by the awareness
of profound corruption, of England’s decline in comparison to France and Spain, and a
creeping sense of social despair.
political unrest
In the introduction to the Revels edition of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Derek Roper writes:

Ford did not have to fetch his notions of corruption, revenge, and elaborate
deadly plots from the earlier drama or from Italy. The year before he arrived
at the Middle Temple his great-uncle, Lord Chief Justice Popham, had been
imprisoned in Essex House, next door to the Temple, by the conspirators in
the Essex rising. . . . Then came the accession of James i; the trial of Ralegh,
a travesty of justice presided over by Popham, though Ralegh’s judicial murder
was postponed until 1618; and the Gunpowder Plot. In 1606 the new earl of
Essex was married to Frances Howard; in 1613 the marriage was annulled so
that Frances could be married to James’s favourite, the earl of Somerset; Sir
Thomas Overbury, who had opposed the match, was imprisoned in the Tower,
where he died; in 1616 Somerset and his countess were convicted of having
slowly poisoned him; James himself presided over both the weddings, which
were graced by masques from the Inns of Court, and the trial, when many lurid
circumstances came to light.
the essex conspiracy
Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, was a soldier and courtier in Elizabeth’s court,
master of the horse, and later a privy councilor. Despite his rash and impudent nature,
he succeeded his stepfather, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, as Elizabeth’s favorite.
(Elizabeth did not elevate and reward her favorites as aggressively and obviously as James,
but she still had them.) Essex and Elizabeth continuously quarreled over military strategy
and government appointments—during one of their quarrels, Essex famously turned his
back on the queen and she boxed his ears—but he retained her favor until 1600. After a
failed campaign against the Irish rebels, he deserted his post to return to England and
vindicate himself to Elizabeth. The Irish campaign had been Essex’s last chance, however,
and Elizabeth deprived him off his offices and confined him to house arrest. In 1601, Essex
tried to stage a coup. It failed, and Essex was executed.
The Essex conspiracy was hardly the first attempted coup against Elizabeth, but it was
significant, in part, for its association with the theaters and Shakespeare’s Richard II. In The
Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, Christopher Haigh writes:
John Hayward published The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV,
dedicated to Essex and, it was thought, commissioned by him. It was a history of the reign of Richard ii, and for Elizabeth the political parallels were
dangerous: an incompetent monarch, a corrupt council, oppressive taxation, a
resentful aristocracy—followed by the deposition and murder of the king and
the installation of a successor. The first edition rapidly sold out, and the second
was suppressed by the Privy Council. . . . On 7 February 1601 Shakespeare’s
Richard II was revived at the Globe, paid for and attended by Essex men. . . .
On 8 February Essex staged his attempted coup.
Haigh adds that while Essex himself was a terrible conspirator, it was “a dramatic
illustration of the alienation of the aristocracy that so many had dabbled in treason—so
many, indeed, that the queen dared not punish them.” In fact, “the revolt and the attendant conspiracies cannot be dismissed as the follies of a single political misfit: the causes
were structural, and arose from the difficulty of reconciling the costs of war with necessary
patronage and political expenditure.”
the gunpowder plot
The Gunpowder Plot is, perhaps, the most famous failed attempt to overthrow the British
monarchy in history; at the very least, it is the most celebrated. From the Encyclopedia
Britannica:
[The Gunpowder Plot] (1605) [was] the conspiracy of English Roman Catholics
to blow up Parliament and King James i, his queen, and his oldest son on
November 5, 1605. The leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, together with his

four coconspirators—Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright, and Guy
Fawkes—were zealous Roman Catholics angered by James’s refusal to grant
more religious toleration to Catholics. They hoped that the confusion that would
follow the murder of the king, his ministers, and members of Parliament would
provide an opportunity for the English Catholics to take over the country.
In the spring of 1605 the conspirators rented a cellar that extended under the
palace at Westminster. There, Fawkes, who had been fighting in the Spanish
Netherlands, concealed at least 20 barrels of gunpowder. The conspirators then
separated until the meeting of Parliament.
In the interim the need for broader support persuaded Catesby to include
more conspirators. One of these, Francis Tresham, warned his Catholic
brother-in-law Lord Monteagle not to attend Parliament on November 5, and
Monteagle alerted the government to the plot. Fawkes was discovered in the
cellar on the night of November 4–5 and under torture revealed the names of
the conspirators. Catesby, Percy, and two others were killed while resisting
arrest, and the rest were tried and executed [on January 31, 1606].
The plot bitterly intensified Protestant suspicions of Catholics and led to the
rigorous enforcement of the recusancy law, which fined those who refused to
attend Anglican services. In January 1606 Parliament established November 5
as a day of public thanksgiving. The day, known as Guy Fawkes Day, is still celebrated with bonfires, fireworks, and the carrying of “guys” through the streets.

According to Haigh, James was thought to have promised toleration to English
Catholics and persecution of Catholics to English Protestants; he clearly could not keep
both promises. Elizabeth, James, and Charles were all Anglican, but they also tried to keep
a certain peace between Protestants and Catholics in England (while going to war with
Catholics outside of England). This ultimately encouraged the Puritans to doubt the monarchy. The monarchy was attacked by religion on all sides: the Catholics in the gunpowder
plot, and, ultimately, the Puritans in 1642.
subject and tone
The theater reflected the changes in the country in a variety of ways. On the one hand, a
kind of escapism crept into the writing of Jacobean playwrights, and they began to give
otherwise tragic plays happy endings. They also began to de-emphasize character—Shakespeare’s great innovation—in favor of elevated spectacle and sensationalism. In tragedy,
playwrights emphasized terror instead of pity, and the gentleness of Shakespeare’s pastoral
comedies was replaced with the acidulous lampooning of Ben Jonson’s city comedies.
These thematic shifts cannot be laid entirely at James’s door, because the theater was
already changing in the last few years of Elizabeth’s reign. According to Rowland Wymer
in Webster and Ford, “The implied distinction between ‘Elizabethan’ and ‘Jacobean’ . . . is
chronologically inexact and overemphasizes the importance of the change of monarch.” ’Tis
Pity She’s a Whore technically belongs to the Caroline period of drama—another change of
period named after the monarch (“Jacobean” for James and “Caroline” for Charles)—but
the distinction between Jacobean and Caroline drama also has less to do with the death
of James and ascension of Charles than with the plague that swept London in 1625. It was
the most severe outbreak in almost 300 years, closed the theaters from March through
November, and bankrupted every company but the King’s Men. A strong awareness of the
closeness of death is a major hallmark of the late Jacobean and Caroline plays.
The shift to indoor theaters, which began during Elizabeth’s reign but increased under
James and Charles, also played a major role in the thematic changes of drama. Spectacle,
borrowed from court masques, became significantly more popular (in part because it was
probably easier to achieve in smaller indoor theaters than in open-air arenas like the Globe).
Rarified literary allusions also became more popular, an appeal to the more educated and
wealthier audiences of the indoor theaters. The main characteristic that Jacobean and
Caroline drama had in common, however, was a sense of encroaching chaos and corruption. Sensationalism was also very popular, as if audiences needed more and more stimuli
to have an emotional response (not unlike the situation in film and television today).
The split between those who supported the monarchy and those who supported
Parliament is also significant when it comes to the themes and styles of the drama. There
was no consensus on authority, on rulership, or even—in some cases—on the law itself, and
’Tis Pity and its contemporary plays reflect this in a deep ambivalence about authority.
In ’Tis Pity, corruption and troubled authority are central. On the one hand, Giovanni
and Annabella defy traditional authority by loving someone they are not supposed to love.
On the other hand, it is notable that there is no constabulary or police force to enforce
the law in a play that is so full of violence. The only powerful representative of any kind of
law is the corrupt cardinal. In this vacuum of authority, people are free to exact their own
private, personal revenge on anyone they choose: Grimaldi, Hippolita, and Richardetto on
Soranzo, Soranzo on Giovanni, and Giovanni on Annabella and Soranzo. Vasques’s murder
of Hippolita goes unpunished, and the Cardinal ratifies Vasques’s assault on Putana even
as he confiscates the property of the relatively innocent Florio for the use of the church.
Ford’s Parma is full of chaos, disorder, and violent death because there is no authority to
enforce the law; yet at the same time, the two characters that invoke our sympathy violate
one of society’s greatest taboos.

historical timeline
Italy became important to English dramatists only when Italy was revealed as
an aspect of England.
—g. k. Hunter, from English Folly and Italian Vice (1960)
1469 Ferdinand of Aragon marries Isabella of Castile, uniting Spain.
1481 The Spanish Inquisition begins.
1485 Battle of Bosworth; Richard iii dies and Henry Tudor becomes King Henry vii of
England.
1492 Roderigo Borgia becomes Pope Alexander vi. Charles viii assumes rule of France.
1493 Pope Alexander vi appoints his son, Cesare Borgia, cardinal.
1494 Charles viii of France invades Italy and deposes the Medicis in Florence. Lodovico
of Aragon is made cardinal by Pope Alexander vi.
1495 Charles viii conquers Naples. Pope Alexander vi establishes the League of Venice
to expel the French King Charles viii from Naples. Charles viii returns to France and
Ferdinand ii reconquers Naples. Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, brokers a temporary
peace between France and Italy, foreshadowing the idea of “balance of power” politics.
1496 Ferdinand ii of Naples dies and is succeeded by Frederico iii. Philip of Burgundy
marries Juana, heiress of Spain.
1498 Charles viii dies and is succeeded by Louis xii of France.
1499 Louis xii invades Milan.

1500 The future Emperor Charles v is born to Philip of Burgundy and Juana of Spain.
Alfonso of Naples is murdered (probably by his brother-in-law, Cesare Borgia).
1501 Pope Alexander vi declares Louis xii of France to be king of Naples, and orders the
burning of all books that challenge the church. Henry vii’s eldest son, Arthur, marries
Catherine of Aragon and dies less than six months later.
1502 The Treaty of Perpetual Peace between Henry vii of England and James iv of
Scotland is sealed by James’s marriage to Henry’s elder daughter.
1503 Gonsalvo de Cordoba reconquers Naples for the Spanish.
1504 Louis xii cedes Naples to Ferdinand ii of Aragon in the Treaty of Lyon. Naples will
remain under Spanish control until 1707.
1505 Ferdinand ii of Aragon shares the rule of Spain with Juana and Philip. Maximilian i
begins the reformation of the Holy Roman Empire in a universal Habsburg monarchy.
1506 Ferdinand ii marries Germaine de Foix, niece of Louis xii of France. Philip of
Burgundy dies, and Juana’s insanity prevents her from assuming office. Niccolo Machiavelli
establishes the Florentine militia, the first nonmercenary national army in Italy.
1507 Cesare Borgia dies.
1508 Maximilian i assumes the title of Holy Roman Emperor without the consent of the
papacy. Pope Julius ii capitulates and announces that the German (Habsburg) king will
now automatically assume the title of emperor. The Spanish transport the first slaves to
the New World.
1509 Henry vii dies and is succeeded by Henry viii, who marries his brother’s widow,
Catherine of Aragon.
1511 Pope Julius ii forms a holy league to drive the French from Italy; Henry viii joins.
1514 An Anglo-French truce is declared when Henry viii’s sister Mary Tudor marries
Louis xii.
1516 Charles v becomes king of Spain after the death of Ferdinand ii.
1517 Martin Luther nails 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg Church, inaugurating the
Protestant Reformation.
1518 Peace of London between England, France, Maximilian i, and Pope Leo x.
1519 Lodovico of Aragon dies. Maximilian i dies and is succeeded by Charles v as Holy
Roman Emperor, beginning the Habsburg domination of Europe.
1520 Pope Leo x excommunicates Martin Luther.
1521 Pope Leo x confers the title of “Defender of the Faith” on Henry viii for his writing
against Luther. Machiavelli writes The Art of War.
1525 The Germans and Spanish defeat the French at Pavia, leaving Charles v master of
Italy. This is the first time muskets are used in battle.
1527 Pope Clement vii allies with the French Anti-Imperial League, and his imperial
troops sack Rome and kill thousands. Henry viii begins to negotiate with the pope for a
divorce.

1528 Plague sweeps Europe.
1530 Pope Clement vii crowns Charles v king of Italy.
1531 Pope Clement vii recognizes Henry viii as Supreme Head of the Church in
England.
1532 Machiavelli’s The Prince is published posthumously. John Calvin begins a Protestant
movement in France.
1533 Henry viii appoints Thomas Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury and marries Anne
Boleyn. Cranmer declares Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon void and his marriage
to Anne Boleyn lawful, and Pope Clement vii excommunicates Henry from the Catholic
church. Elizabeth is born to Henry and Anne Boleyn. Parliament passes the Act in
Restraint of Appeals, which prevents Catherine of Aragon from appealing to the Catholic
church, and proclaims, “This realm of England is an Empire.”
1534 Ignatius Loyola founds the Jesuit order. Act of Supremacy ends all papal jurisdiction
in England.
1535 Sir Thomas More is executed for refusing to accept Henry’s claim to be Supreme
Head of the Church.
1536 Catherine of Aragon dies; Anne Boleyn is executed; Henry viii marries Jane Seymour.
The Ten Articles Act brings strong Lutheran influences to bear on religious practice in
the Church of England.
1541 Henry viii assumes titles of king of Ireland and head of the Irish church.
1542 Pope Paul iii establishes the Inquisition in Rome.
1547 Henry viii dies and is succeeded by Edward vi, his nine-year-old son with Jane
Seymour.

1548 Mary, Queen of Scots—granddaughter of Henry viii’s sister Margaret—is betrothed
to the French dauphin at age six.
1553 Edward vi of England dies. Lady Jane Grey holds the throne for nine days and is
replaced by Mary i, daughter of Henry viii and Catherine of Aragon. Mary immediately
restores the Catholic mass.
1554 Mary marries Philip ii of Spain, reconciling England and Rome and restoring papal
jurisdiction. Lady Jane Grey is executed and Princess Elizabeth is imprisoned in the Tower
of London.
1555 The public execution of Protestant “heretics” in England begins. Two hundred eightytwo men and women are burned for heresy between 1555 and 1558, including Archbishop
Cranmer. Ironically, the Peace of Augsburg also ensures Lutheran nations equal rights with
Catholic nations.
1556 Charles v abdicates, giving Spain to Philip ii and the Holy Roman Empire to his
brother Ferdinand i.
1558 “Bloody Mary” dies and is succeeded by Elizabeth i. Mary, Queen of Scots, marries
the dauphin, who becomes King Francis ii a year later and proclaims Mary the rightful
queen of England. Scottish Calvinist theologian John Knox writes “The First Blast of the
Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.”
1559 Acts of Supremacy and Allegiance once more end papal jurisdiction in England,
declare Elizabeth Supreme Governor, and re-establish the Church of England.
1560 Francis ii of France dies and is succeeded by Charles ix with his mother, Catherine
de Medici, as regent. Mary returns to Scotland. English Puritans begin a hundred years
of increasing influence.
1563 Plague kills 20,000 people in London.
1564 The Index liborum prohibitorum of banned books is approved by Pope Pius iv. William
Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe are born.
1565 Mary, Queen of Scots, marries her cousin Lord Darnley and bears a son, James.
1567 Darnley is murdered, on orders from the earl of Bothwell, whom Mary marries.
1568 Mary loses a battle with rebellious Scottish barons and flees to England, where
Elizabeth keeps her under house arrest for 19 years.
1570 Pope Pius v excommunicates Elizabeth i. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s tutor, writes The
Scholemaster, touting education in English language and condemning Italy as decadent.
Pope Pius v establishes a holy league that includes most of the major Catholic maritime
states in the Mediterranean, intended to break Ottoman Turks’ control of the eastern
Mediterranean. Members include the Papal States, the Habsburg states of Spain, Naples,
and Sicily, the republics of Venice and Genoa, the grand duchy of Tuscany, the duchies of
Savoy, Parma, and Urbino, and the Knights of Malta. The league wins a crushing victory
over the Ottoman fleet at the battle of Lepanto off the western Greek coast.
1572 Parliament demands Mary’s execution for conspiracy against the queen; Elizabeth
refuses.

1576 James Burbage’s The Theatre—the first playhouse in London—is built.
1578 Mary’s son, James vi of Scotland, assumes the Scottish throne.
1580 Jesuit missionaries arrive in England.
1581 English Jesuit Edward Campion is executed for treason.
1583 The Throckmorton plot to assassinate Elizabeth fails. The first royal theater company
is established.
1586 Mary is implicated in the Babbington plot to assassinate Elizabeth and condemned to
death for treason. She recognizes Philip ii of Spain as her heir, encouraging a Spanish crusade against England. Pope Sixtus v offers financial support for this endeavor. Playwright
John Ford is born.
1588 The Spanish armada sails from Lisbon and is defeated by the English and bad
weather.
1589 Galileo Galilei becomes a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa.
1592 Plague kills 15,000 people in London.
1596 Blackfriar’s Theatre, built for Shakespeare’s players, is completed.
1597 The second Spanish armada is beaten back by storms.
1598 John Florio publishes A World of Words, an Italian-English dictionary.
1599 The Globe Theatre opens.
1601 The earl of Essex attempts to stage a coup against Elizabeth and is arrested, tried,
and executed.
1602 Ford goes to London and becomes a member of the Middle Temple.

1603 Elizabeth i dies and is succeeded by James vi of Scotland, who has renounced
Catholicism.
1604 The Treaty of London ends the war between England and Spain.
1605 The Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament fails.
1607 The Jamestown colony is founded in Virginia.
1609 Galileo uses his telescope to observe Jupiter’s moons circling the planet.
1610 Arabella Stuart, a Catholic pretender to the English crown, is imprisoned in the
Tower of London for marrying the powerful Lord Seymour.
1611 The King James Bible, the first fully authorized Anglican version, is published.
1615 Arabella Stuart, now insane, dies in the Tower. George Villiers, later duke of
Buckingham, emerges as James’s new favorite.
1616 Shakespeare dies.
1618 The Thirty Years’ War breaks out.
1620 Pilgrims arrive in the New World aboard the Mayflower. Ford’s name is attached to his
first play (written with Thomas Dekker and William Rowley), The Witch of Edmonton.
1623 Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham travel to Spain in an attempt to arrange
a marriage treaty with the infanta. They return humiliated and demand war with Spain.
1625 James declares war on Spain. James dies and Charles i becomes king. Charles marries the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France, but quickly falls out with France. Plague hits
London, killing more than 35,000 people.
1626 Charles declares war on France. The House of Commons attempts to impeach
Buckingham; Charles briefly dissolves Parliament.
1628 Parliament passes the Petition of Right, limiting the crown’s rights to imprison
without cause, house soldiers in civilian homes, and punish those who refuse to pay taxes.
Buckingham is assassinated.
1629 Charles charges seven members of Parliament with sedition and dissolves Parliament
for the next 11 years.
1629–33 Ford writes ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
1633 William Prynne is sentenced to lose his ears for libeling the queen. In 1637 Prynne is
sentenced to lose the stumps of his ears for libeling the bishops. Galileo is forced by the
Inquisition to recant the Copernican theory.
1638 Ford disappears from history.
1642 Charles attempts to arrest leading parliamentary critics and fails. He withdraws from
London and Civil War breaks out. The Puritan Parliament forbids stage plays and closes
English theaters.
1649 Charles i is executed. The Commonwealth of England is established, dominated by
Oliver Cromwell.
1660 The monarchy is restored with Charles ii on the throne. Theaters reopen.

“duets for hair and gut”
An Interview with ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Composer/Performer Bonfire Madigan Shive
by elizabeth brodersen
S

inger–composer–hard-core cellist Bonfire Madigan Shive is a 21st-century alchemist.
With each project she creates a potent concoction that explodes traditional definitions
of what it means to be a female artist, activist, musician, and human being in a chaotic
world. A singer-songwriter of haunting delicacy and raw, rebellious power, she has as a
composer and performer transformed the classical cello into a
contemporary instrument capable
of expressing a tremendous range
of styles and mood, in a way that
defies categorization.
Shive began playing the cello
at the age of 9 and at 16 founded
Seattle’s acclaimed underground
acoustic duo, Tattle Tale, becoming a trailblazer in the riot grrrl/
queercore/chamber punk movements of the early 1990s. While
remaining firmly rooted in the
do-it-yourself (diy) activist music
scene, she has since gone on to
create an enormous discography,
including cd releases of her own
work, film soundtracks, guest performances on countless records
and tours, and a strong internaBonfire Madigan Shive. Photo by Jasper Coolidge.
tional following that continues to
grow. Her current ensemble, the eponymous Bonfire Madigan, whose debut cd, …from
the Burnpile, was released in 1998, continues to chart on national, community, and college
radio. A fixture on the San Francisco experimental/underground music scene in the late
’90s, she now splits her time between San Francisco and New York, while composing and
performing internationally with a diverse range of artists.
Shive has also always been something of a theater animal, working with actors’ programs
in Seattle and Los Angeles in her teens while continuing to develop her unique musical
persona. She came to the attention of ’Tis Pity director Carey Perloff as a colleague of the
eclectic band of musicians that played Tom Waits’s music for The Black Rider at a.c.t. in
2004. Perloff, who has followed Shive’s composing and performing career ever since and is
committed to bringing the multidisciplinary work of Bay Area artists to the a.c.t. stage,
realized that this “baroque folk-punk diva,” as she has been described, was the perfect
choice to create visceral, transcendent music to inhabit and illuminate John Ford’s timeless
17th-century tragedy. Shive spoke to us the day after rehearsals of ’Tis Pity began in May.
you ’ve said that you ’re creating a “living score” for this production. what do you mean by that?
Most basically, it means that I’ll be playing live music, interacting with live actors, in a live
production. Which doesn’t mean that it’s all improvised; the thematic stuff is written, and
there will be some preset recorded pieces that I’ll be playing off of. But as an artist, you
hopefully get to a place with your craft where you can find yourself letting go within the
structure of the greater narrative. There are structures, themes, ideas, characters, and archetypes that are this story, but ultimately what’s exciting to me about this piece is how much
it is an ensemble work, how much it is this complex mechanism that is clicking together.
Like any moment in time—or sound, or breath—it has a past, a present, and a future, that
all exist simultaneously. Dealing with a story that was written almost 400 years ago, and
making it pulsating, fresh, and now, is really about how it all breathes together. This score
will literally be living in the moment, so that it’ll have enough fluidity and flexibility within
its structure to interact with the actors, the audience, and with the space.
I was inspired by [director] Carey [Perloff ]’s mention of the discovery of circulation at
this time in history, and by the fact that blood, the heartbeat, the womb, are part of the
consciousness of this production. [Sound designer] Jake [Rodriquez] and I are developing
together a pulsing heartbeat—we’ll see how subliminal or literal it actually turns out to
be—at different paces, which will create sound beds that are like a backbone to the production. The score will live within that soundscape. I will also be doing live looping [recording
and playing back passages while onstage] during each performance, which I do in my own
performance, and Jake will have some triggers that will play off of that. I’m really excited to
work with the cast, because I will be shaping this score within their emotional structure; in
some ways I see them all as my living Baroque ensemble, to develop this with, connected
directly to their breath, their heartbeats, the meter of which will change with their emotions in each performance.
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i understand you ’ve created a structure, with themes or motifs
for each of the characters. how did you develop those?
Ever since I first heard about this project, I’ve been drenching myself in research of the
period, reading a lot about Ford’s world and how it relates to mine. Picking up my cello
after getting the invitation to work on this project, even before anything else was moving forward, I was already sensing tones and hearing things come out. The main melody,
for Annabella, came almost immediately. I am really taken with her character. Everybody
wants her. [Annabella’s music] starts with this moving heartbeat, a kind of walking, quick,
maybe andante pace that speeds up a little bit. And there’s this pentatonic place within
the circle of fifths that I keep going back to, which lends itself to multiharmony. She has
this kind of pentatonic melody that, to me, is saying, “Please, please, see me!” There’s lust
in it, and longing, and foreboding, but there’s also a kind of surrender. And the question:
“Who can really see me?”

i’m curious how you see giovanni’s character arc from obsession
into self-destruction, particularly given the connection of your
own craft and activism to the creative potential of madness.
[The concept of madness] is already so palpable in what my work is doing. I’m able to take
the cello from this beautiful, lyrical, haunting, pure place into a completely deconstructionist one, without the use of any technology, just using this piece of wood, with these
strings. That’s because I’ve been in a more-than-20-year partnership with this instrument,
exploring the very limits of its possibilities.
This isn’t a stereotypical hero narrative. Giovanni is no kind of hero! But what I love
about Giovanni is that, by the end of the play, he is just completely committed. I’m very
interested in that place, in extreme states of consciousness, where breakdown often leads
to break through, in that relationship between madness and brilliance.
Hearing the text read yesterday, I realized that there’s something kind of minimalist
about who Annabella and Giovanni actually are in the play, even though they’re in many
ways the center of the story. But there’s this whole world bubbling around them, and I’m
thrilled to be working on these embryonic, womblike, heart-beating sounds that are interior, and then these exterior scenes of this violent Parma, with its hierarchies of power and
communication and people being murdered, being silenced—and all this is right in front
of you, all around you.
OPPOSITE Vedran Smailovic playing in the rubble of the National Library in Sarajevo in 1992. This image inspired in part the
scenic design of this production of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Photo by Mikhail Estafiev.
how has the fact that this play was written in the early 17th
century influenced you as a contemporary composer working on
this production?
It’s very exciting as a cellist to be a part of this, because so much was happening in the
world of music at that time. This period musically has always been a time that my own
work references—the transition from Renaissance into Baroque into classical, with even
some medieval/folk flavorings, eventually moving into the contemporary, popular, songwriting place I find myself in now.
This play was written at the very beginning of what would be called the Baroque era.
The viola da gamba was beginning to take on the modern cello shape, which was influenced by the shape of the Renaissance woman’s body and later would take on the “hourglass figure” we are familiar with today. There was no endpin yet, so it was held with the
knees—usually by men, of course. The instrument I’ll be performing on in this production
is actually a hybrid of the Baroque instrument and the modern cello. I’m going to be using
gut strings, which are more true to the period and will give me more resonance. In fact, I’m
calling this “Duets for Hair and Gut,” since I’ll be using a contemporary horsehair bow to
meet the guts of the strings.
Also, a lot of the places music was being played at this time were changing, so articulation was becoming more apparent. Opera was just beginning to become an art form,

and as musical compositions became more complex and dramatic, virtuosity in vocal and
instrumental performance became more and more important. Around this time, too, is
when contrapuntal polyphony began to make the transition to tonal harmonics and the
basso continuo, or repeating bass line, became prominent. That’s something I actually do
as a composer and performer: often I will loop bass lines through the cello, and then the
melodic themes and sound beds will come on top of that. My idea is to take simple, almost
folklike melodic themes and expand them to become complicated chamber passages; by
the end we have the potential for mass looping, so one person and a cello can become a
live mini soul art orchestra.
you mentioned using the “circle of fifths.” could you explain
that?
It’s a modality of writing music that was just beginning to be understood and described at
this time. The circle of fifths is a fundamental principle in music theory, and in its most
basic form, a cyclical way of moving through 12-note chordal harmony, shifting within
this structure back to your dominant. It was used in a lot of liturgical music of this period.
Harmonically, because the cello is tuned in fifths, composing within the circle of fifths
gives me an opportunity to use resonance and sustain, so that I can have open strings as
sound beds; it gives me so much room to use the hundreds of harmonics on the cello. What
that does is let me overlap themes in live performance, so harmonically things can relate
to each other in really interesting ways. For example, Annabella’s theme can lay over the
Cardinal’s militaristic, almost Wagnerian sound, or can weave together with the innocence
of Philotis, which will hopefully tie you into the story emotionally even more.

as a performer onstage with the actors, participating in the
storytelling, how do you see your own role?
I suppose you could see me as a kind of Greek chorus, the consciousness of the play—
Giovanni does talk about the Elysian Fields. But when we were talking about what my costume should be, Carey and [costume designer] Candice [Donnelly] were looking at paintings from the period of these androgynous angel/spirit figures. I think that’s more true to
what my character is. An angelic presence playing on high in the organ loft (laugh).
Ultimately, for me, it’s all about staying enamored with the mystery, which is what we’re
in a journey of unfolding and revealing together. I love that nobody gets to have the word
on whether Annabella and Giovanni’s love is right or wrong. We all get to be participants
in telling the story that asks the questions, and we are together walking, asking questions.
That’s very exciting storytelling, exciting living theater.
the meaning of the word “baroque” in music
by friederich blume
T
oday the word is mostly
held to derive etymologically from barucco or barocco,
originally meaning irregularly
round, as the shape of a pearl,
say, and then taking on the
further sense of something
unusual, that has got out of its
normal shape, eccentric, perverse, scurrile, even tasteless and
decadent. To this corresponds
the depreciatory implication
that has always clung to the
word in its application to artistic productions and which it
apparently has not yet lost in
the Romance languages. French,
Italian, and English dictionaries
still explain it first of all in this
sense. As denoting an artistic Narcissus (c.1597–99), by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. © Palazzo
Barberini, Rome, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library.
style it probably appears for the
first time in Diderot’s great Encyclopédie des sciences des arts et des métiers (1750 ff.), where in
an article by Rousseau “baroque” is applied as an adjective to architecture and is equated
with the bizarre, the exaggerated. . . . The word already occurs in the same sense around
1739–40, in the Lettres familiéres of le Président De Brosses; that it here shares the pejorative implication with “gothic” shows that, as in comparisons of this sort today, the sense
of a late manifestation of aging styles already hovers about it. The word was then used
throughout the whole 19th century in this derogatory sense in the historical and plastic arts
and literature . . . but still without acquiring any special reference to music.
It was not until Wölfflin and Riegl altered the meaning of the word to stand for a positive achievement and an independent style that it became connected, through Curt Sachs,
with music. This connection . . . appeared mainly by the roundabout way of interpreting


“baroque” as the art of Jesuitism and the Counter Reformation. For here it was easy to
find for music the spiritual basis and psychic tendencies it has in common with the other
arts. Since Weisback and Male the pictorial and plastic art of the Baroque counts to an
outstanding degree as expression, even as a “psycho-pedagogical tool,” of the church militant and the church triumphant. After the building of the great Jesuit church of Il Gesù
in Rome (1568), and in painting after Tintoretto and El Greco, a “pathos” begins to make
itself felt in the basic attitude of the artist, the impassioned excitement of which increasingly contrasts with the measured circumspection, the “ethos” of the Renaissance, even
though the forms in which it expresses itself are not newly invented but have developed
out of those of the preceding period. The clear sense of reality of the Renaissance age
gives way more and more before the inclination toward withdrawal from the realism of
life here below, toward mystic enchantment with the life beyond, toward the marvelous,
the stupendous, the supernatural. The graspable dimensions of the Renaissance work of
art are exaggerated to the boundlessly grotesque, magnified to the realm of what may only
be guessed at. The equilibrium of psychic continuity is disturbed by excessive change and
movement, by the heroic and the violent, by the erotic, the stress on the sensuous. The
virtù of genteel reserve and self-control is transformed into the drive of the affetto for
fulfillment and display. An inflamed self-consciousness, an ego-cult that verges on narcissism, a boundless urge to abandon the soul to all torments and delights, from a suicidally
contrite, agonizing consciousness of sin to ecstatic release in the celestial radiance of divine
mercy—these demand direct and comprehensible representation and develop means both
coarse and fine in order to achieve it. The overrich scale of motifs of Baroque pictorial and
plastic art in the Jesuitic spirit reaches from the athletic brutality of the hangman to the
morbid disembodiedness of his victim, as that of poetry reaches from the massive balling
of heavy word-clumps to the preciosity of a subtle esoteric play of vowel sounds. It is the
same in music, which in a few decades undergoes a tremendous broadening of its expressive capacities, its wealth of motif and figuration, its technical apparatus, and its means
for producing sound. The spirit identified with the names of Ignatius of Loyola and Pope
Paul iv thoroughly upset the measured humanitarianism of the Renaissance, replacing it
by the reckless ardor of the zealot, sensual asceticism, violent self-discipline, and mystical
self-abandonment.
Excerpted from Renaissance and Baroque Music: A Comprehensive Survey, by Friedrich Blume (translated by M. D. Herter
Norton). © 1967 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
a western historical perspective on the
incest taboo
by carly cioffi
“Go forth and multiply. It sounds like a simple rule. It should be easy to follow. But the rules human beings follow, for whatever reason, are anything but
simple.
—Robin Fox, The Red Lamp of Incest
T
here is great variation in the ways that different societies react to incest: horror,
embarrassment, indifference, and encouragement are all among them. Attitudes
toward incest vary widely from civilization to civilization, age to age, and class to class
throughout history and are still changing today. As long as it has been recorded that certain
cultures openly allow incest, there have been cultures expressing their intolerance of it.
ancient civilizations
Earliest human records give us an indication of early attitudes toward incest. The first five
books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch, tell us that all human beings are descendants of Adam and Eve; in other words, in order to propagate the human race, human
beings must have procreated through incest. Abraham and Sarah, another prominent
biblical couple, were half-siblings.
Although these early biblical examples exist, the Bible nevertheless takes a firm stance
on incest for future generations. The most explicit and outspoken is found in Leviticus
18, believed to have been written around 1440–00 b.c.e., which warns that God wants his
people to follow a strict moral code when it comes to sexual relations.
Leviticus 18 (the Bible, New International Version):
1 The lord said to Moses, 2 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘I am the
lord your God. 3 You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live,
and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing
you. Do not follow their practices. 4 You must obey my laws and be careful to
follow my decrees. I am the lord your God. 5 Keep my decrees and laws, for
the man who obeys them will live by them. I am the lord.
6 “‘No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the
lord.


7 “‘Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother.
She is your mother; do not have relations with her.
8 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonor
your father.
9 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter
or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere.
10 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your son’s daughter or your daughter’s
daughter; that would dishonor you.
11 “‘Do not have sexual relations with the daughter of your father’s wife, born
to your father; she is your sister.
12 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your father’s sister; she is your father’s
close relative.
13 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your mother’s sister, because she is your
mother’s close relative.
14 “‘Do not dishonor your father’s brother by approaching his wife to have
sexual relations; she is your aunt.
15 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your daughter-in-law. She is your son’s
wife; do not have relations with her.
16 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your brother’s wife; that would dishonor
your brother.
17 “‘Do not have sexual relations with both a woman and her daughter. Do not
have sexual relations with either her son’s daughter or her daughter’s daughter;
they are her close relatives. That is wickedness.
18 “‘Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with
her while your wife is living.
19 “‘Do not approach a woman to have sexual relations during the uncleanness
of her monthly period.
20 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your neighbor’s wife and defile yourself
with her.
21 “‘Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, for you must
not profane the name of your God. I am the lord.
22 “‘Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.
23 “‘Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A
woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it;
that is a perversion.
24 “‘Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the
nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. 25 Even the
land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 26 But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the
aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, 27 for all
these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the
land became defiled. 28 And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it
vomited out the nations that were before you.
29 “‘Everyone who does any of these detestable things—such persons must be
cut off from their people. 30 Keep my requirements and do not follow any of
the detestable customs that were practiced before you came and do not defile
yourselves with them. I am the lord your God.’”
A few things to note: only male scenarios are specified, never the reverse; very often
the prohibition of sexual relations with a relative is defined as a breach of honor against
another, e.g., “Do not have
sexual relations with your
brother’s wife; that would
dishonor your brother”;
and nothing is said about
the sexual union of cousins.
As cited in Leviticus, it
is relatively accepted that
incestuous unions were
widespread during the
Graeco-Roman period of
Egyptian history. Egyptian
law gave complete freedom to marry brothers
and sisters, and Athenian
law allowed marriage to
paternal half-sisters, while
Roman law forbade marriage with sisters and halfsisters.
Beato Serapio (1628), by Francisco de Zurbarán. © Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford,
Connecticut, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library.

Sophocles’s Oedipus, written around 430 b.c.e., gives evidence of an emerged taboo
against incest in Greece.
In 295 c.e., incestuous unions were explicitly forbidden by an imperial edict in Rome.
Nevertheless, the Roman emperor Caligula is rumored to have had open sexual relationships with all three of his sisters.

the middle ages
In canonical law, the early church fathers expanded and formalized the prohibitions of
Leviticus. They extended the biblical instructions to both sexes, as well as to relations
outside the immediate family (cousins).
St. Augustine (350–430 c.e.) addressed the issue of Adam and Eve. His position was
that the descendants of Adam and Eve were forced to sin in order to populate the Earth
and thereby suffered and made a sacrifice.
In the eighth century c.e., the Germanic system of thought expanded on traditional
canonic law in Western Europe and extended incest laws to outlaw intermarriages up to
and including seventh cousins.
Through the ninth–eleventh centuries, people began to have difficulty determining
how they were related after so many degrees of distance. It became especially difficult for
people to adhere to the rules in small, rural communities. Peter Damian (1007–72 c.e.), an
Italian monastic leader and church reformer, excited fears of monstrous births to support
the church’s position.
By the end of twelfth century, religious laws had been passed to exclude the in-laws of
in-laws and those related to a person’s godparents and godchildren.
At the Lateran Council of 1215, Pope Innocent iii reformed the law to allow marriages
beyond three degrees of separation. He also instituted the inquisition ex officio—whereby
partners of a suspected match could be summoned by the ecclesiastical court to defend
their union. Several royal unions were accepted as exceptions, after proving the need to
commit incest as a way to preserve royal bloodlines.
In 1225, the word “incest” was introduced into Middle English to describe the crime of
familial incest as we know it today. Prior to the introduction of the Latin term, incest had
been known in Old English as sibbleger (from sibb “kinship” + leger “to lie”).
the renaissance
The Renaissance in England saw the emergence of the patriarchal nuclear family, distinct
from the extended family living arrangements of medieval times. The modern notion of
incest as sexual relations within a small, enclosed family group originates in this period.
Parents during this period often “farmed out” their children during pre-adolescence and
adolescence to avoid dealing with their struggles for independence. Parents attempted to
cultivate psychological distance from their offspring.
It is also interesting to note that sexual curiosity was not generally discouraged in the
young. It was not uncommon for children to see their parents having intercourse.
During the reign of Henry viii, incest laws were changed several times to suit his marital needs. After Henry, Mary re-established canonical law. Then, during Elizabeth’s reign,
the laws were restored to those applicable under Henry’s rule.
In 1563, Archbishop Parker drew up a “Table of Kindred & Affinity,” which was later
added to the Book of Common Prayer.
the modern era
The mid-19th century saw the beginning of scientific interest in the incest taboo.
Anthropologists John Ferguson McLennan and Lewis Henry Morgan set out basic questions of kinship theory. They saw human beings as defining groups of kin and then forbidding marriage within the group, coining the term “exogamy”—marriage outside the group.
Building on their work, two major scientists published theories on incest in the early
1920s:
edward westermarck believed that a natural aversion to sex is present in
people who have grown up in very close proximity to each other; because that
feels natural, they make laws and customs to ensure that such aversion is carried
out by all, lest some perversion occur.
sigmund freud believed that, without a doubt, the incestuous love choice is
the first and regular one, and that only being taught that it is wrong creates
feelings of ambivalence and shame in an individual.
The Westermarck effect was clearly demonstrated by the case study of an Israeli kibbutz
made in 1958. A group of children inhabited a common living and sleeping space from the
age of one. They were not given any counseling about how to behave with one another.
They were observed in different stages of development:
Age 1 to 5: Children often hugged one another, stroked and caressed one
another, kissed, and touched each other’s genitals.
Age 7 to 12: Intercourse was never observed, but their nurse was confident that
the children often got into bed with each other, and they frequently played a

game where the boys “examined” the girls while nude. They also often lay on
top of each other and hugged and kissed in public, with no sense of shame.
Age 12 to 15: A sense of shame developed around age twelve for the girls, along
with hostility towards the boys. The girls asked to shower on their own. The
girls also began to conceal their nudity from the boys. At the same time the
girls began to develop an interest in sex, but it was never directed towards the
boys in their group.
Age 16 and over: The relationship between the males and females in the group
improved. It is thought that perhaps this was because the females found sexual
partners outside of the group (older students, young unmarried males in the
kibbutz).

As adults, it is interesting to note, not one instance occurred in which two group members chose each other for marriage or as sexual partners.
When the children in this case were brought up in close physical contact with each
other and not separated at puberty, they seemed to develop a natural aversion for one
another. What would have to happen, therefore, in a brother/sister relationship to lead
to a strong sexual reaction between them after puberty? Robin Fox in The Red Lamp of
Incest suggests, “Where siblings are brought up together but without the opportunities for
tactile, physical contact that [Westermarck describes] . . . there will have been propinquity,
but no chance to develop the negative reinforcement.” Fox goes on to say, “Propinquity, in
the sense of mere nearness, coupled with separation in the sense of no physical interaction
would . . . produce the highest incest anxiety and possibly the strongest desire of all.”
In more primitive cultures, high infant mortality rates cause there to be larger gaps
between the ages of surviving children, and girls are generally married off and leave home
before or just at puberty. In terms of human history, the first 99% of our existence was lived
in a primitive manner, which therefore makes the “problem” of incest fairly new. Today
humans become sexually mature long before they become socially mature, which leaves
them in close proximity with family members for a long period of time after puberty.
current laws pertaining to incest
Every state today has a statute defining eligibility for marriage, and each one prohibits
marriages between parents and children, sisters and brothers, uncles and nieces, and aunts
and nephews. Some prohibit all ancestor/descendant marriages, regardless of degree. Four
states extend the prohibition to marriages between parents and their adopted children.
Twenty-four states prohibit marriages between first cousins, and another seven permit
them only under special circumstances. Utah, for example, permits first cousins to marry
only provided both spouses are over age 65, or at least 55 with evidence of sterility. North
Carolina permits first cousins to marry unless they are “double first cousins” (cousins
through more than one line). Maine permits first cousins to marry only upon presentation
of a certificate of genetic counseling. The remaining nineteen states and the District of
Columbia permit first-cousin marriages without restriction.
Today, the justifications given for retaining statutory prohibitions on cousin marriage
(and debating the passage of new ones) are largely based on the fear that such unions will
cause genetic problems for the children they produce. A 2002 report in the Journal of Genetic
Counseling, however, concluded that cousins can have children together without running
much greater risk than a “normal” couple of their children having genetic abnormalities.
genetic sexual attraction
In the late 1980s, the term “genetic sexual attraction” (gsa) was coined in the United States
by Barbara Gonyo, the founder of Truth Seekers in Adoption, a Chicago-based support
group for adoptees and their newfound relatives, to describe the overwhelming and violently passionate attraction of relatives who were separated when one or both were very
young children and then re-encounter each other later in life. The emergence of gsa both
in the United States and the United Kingdom coincided with the relaxation of adoption
laws in the mid 1970s, which gave adopted children easier access to their records and led to
an increase in the number of reunions between adoptees and their blood relatives.
According to a 2003 article in The Guardian (uk):
The unexpectedly high number of reported cases of men and women struggling with sudden and terrifying emotions after a reunion has surprised and
perplexed most post-adoption agencies. So far, because of the taboos surrounding gsa and its variable and complex nature, the frequency of these cases is
almost impossible to quantify, although some agencies estimate that elements
of gsa occur in 50% of reunions[, regardless of the sufferers’ age, familial relationship, or circumstances]. Growing awareness of its potentially devastating
implications, especially in cases where relatives embark on a sexual relationship,
has prompted some organisations to warn all clients attempting to trace a relative about the phenomenon, while also training counsellors to recognize the
warning signs and to help adoptees and their families cope with the damage.

william harvey
W
illiam Harvey (1578–1657), the father of modern physiology, was the first researcher
to discovery the circulation of blood through the body. Although we take this
knowledge for granted, until Harvey’s time, people were not aware that the blood travels
through the body and is pumped through its course by the heart.
Harvey was born in England in 1578, the eldest of seven sons of a farmer. While five
of the other Harvey brothers became London merchants, William studied arts and
medicine at Cambridge University, where he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1597. He
then earned his medical degree in 1602 from the famous medical school at Padua, Italy.
Returning to London, Harvey began what became a very successful medical practice while
also working in medical research.
In 1609 Harvey was appointed to the staff of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He was elected
a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1607. Harvey’s ideas about circulation of the
blood were first publicly expressed in lectures he gave in 1616. Harvey became court physician to King James i in 1618 and then to Charles i in 1625, a post he held until Charles was
beheaded in 1649. Charles provided Harvey with deer from the royal parks for his medical
research, and Harvey remained loyal to Charles even during the Cromwellian Civil War
(1642–60), in which the Parliamentarians who fought against the King ransacked Harvey’s
rooms and destroyed many of his medical notes and papers. Harvey retired at the end of
the Civil War a widower. He lived with his various brothers and died of a stroke in 1657.
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harvey’s contribution
Harvey’s great contribution to medicine was his revolutionary discovery of the circulation
of blood. By dissecting both living and dead animals, Harvey became convinced that the
ancient Greek anatomist Galen’s ideas about blood movement must be wrong, particularly
the ideas that blood was formed in the liver and absorbed by the body, and that blood
flowed through the septum (dividing wall) of the heart. Harvey first studied the heartbeat,
establishing the existence of the pulmonary (heart-lung-heart) circulation process and noting the one-way flow of blood. When he also realized how much blood was pumped by the
heart, he realized there must be a constant amount of blood flowing through the arteries
and returning through the veins of the heart, a continuing circular flow.
harvey publishes his findings
Harvey published this radical new concept of blood circulation in 1628 in a book entitled
Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (An Anatomical Study of the
Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals). It provoked immediate controversy and
hostility from the medical community of the time, contradicting as it did the usually
unquestioned teachings of Galen. The most virulent critic, Jean Riolan, scorned Harvey as
a “circulator,” an insulting term for a traveling quack. Harvey calmly and quietly defended
his work, and although his medical practice suffered for a time, his ideas become widely
accepted by the time of his death. The discovery of capillaries by Marcello Malpighi in 1661
provided factual evidence to confirm Harvey’s theory of blood circulation.
In addition to his blood circulation research, Harvey was one of the first to study
embryology (the study of reproduction in its earliest stages) by observing the development
of the chick in the egg. He performed many dissections of mammal embryos at various
stages of formation. From these experiments Harvey was able to formulate the first new
theory of animal generation since antiquity, emphasizing the primacy of the egg, even in
mammals. Prior to Harvey’s work, it was thought that the male sperm was the primary
source of new life, and that the egg was simply an empty home, so to speak, for the sperm
to develop.
Excerpted from http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/General-Information-and-Biographies/Harvey-William.html, accessed
May 19, 2008. © 2007 Advameg, Inc.

questions to consider
1. Why do you think John Ford chose to call the play ’Tis Pity She’s aWhore? What do you
think the title means? Do you think it fits the play? Why or why not? What would you
title the play? To which of the characters do you think the title applies?
2. Giovanni and Annabella’s incestuous relationship is described as both “natural” and
“unnatural.” How can it be both at once? Do you think it is more one than the other?
Why?
3. How do you define justice? How is it different from revenge? Are any of the revenge
plots in the play justified? Is there any justice in the play? If so, where does that justice
come from?
4. Do you find yourself sympathizing with any of the characters? Does your sympathy shift
at different points from one character to another? Who is the protagonist? Who is the
antagonist? How can you tell?
5. Consider the four women in the play: Annabella, Putana, Hippolita, and Philotis. How
are they similar and different? How much freedom do they each have in their lives? What
are the consequences when they exercise that freedom and make their own choices?
6. Consider the theme of corruption in the play. What might Ford be saying about
Jacobean and Caroline England? How do the characters in the play represent and illustrate
social corruption? Do any of the characters in the play transcend their corrupt society?
How? How do the play’s themes apply to our contemporary society?
7. Compare the Friar and the Cardinal as representatives of religion and authority in the
world of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. How do they differ? Do you agree with either of them?
Why or why not? What do they say about the world of the play?

8. How is ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore like and unlike other dramas of the period in which it
was written? Does it remind you of Shakespeare? Why or why not? How is different from
Shakespeare?
9. What is the role of the music in the play? How does it further the story? What other
stories does it tell?
10. What do you think of the design for this production? How do the design elements
(sets, costumes, lighting, sound) affect your perception of the story? If you were designing
a production of this play, how would your design be different? Why?
for further information . . .
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Benson, Pamela. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman. University Park: Pennsylvania
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Student Editions. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997.
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.com/grossman/20020408.html.
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Harrison, William. “Description of Elizabethan England, 1577 (from Holinshed’s Chronicles).”
Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed. With introductions and notes. New
York: p. f. Collier, 1910.
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Moore, Tristana. “Couple Stand by Forbidden Love.” bbc News. http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/
hi/europe/6424937.stm.
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———. Seventeenth-Century Britain, 1603–1714. Folkestone: Dawson, 1980.
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University Press, 1988.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New
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Shive, Bonfire Madigan. “Cello Speak: Exploring New Languages for Madness.” Live
Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction. Edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev. New York:
Seven Stories Press, 2008.
Stavig, Mark. John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1968.
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Wymer, Roland. Webster and Ford. St. Martin’s Press, 1995.