'Tis Pity she's a Whore - Lisa Hopkins Guide Chapter One

The following are quotes lifted from “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: A Critical Guide” compiled by Lisa Hopkins. I thoroughly recommend this book if you’re studying the play, especially for the AO3 in your essays.

The Critical Backstory

In his own day, his plays attracted commendatory verses from many of his famous contemporaries…and he was by no means immediately forgotten after the Restoration

The heyday of appreciation of Ford came in the Romantic period

·         T. J. B. Spencer – “Ford suddenly rose to a high reputation in 1808.”

On Shelley and Lamb

Ford is certainly a critical influence on Mary Shelley, as is testified most obviously by her heavy reliance on him in The Fortune of Perkin Warbeck, which uses quotations from him in its chapter headings

Kenneth Brannagh’s Frankenstein adaptation – the Creature kills Elizabeth much as Giovanni had Annabella

Mary Shelley’s twentieth-century afterlife has thus become intertextually linked with Ford’s Romantic one.

The most extended and concentrated example of indebtedness to Ford comes in the work of Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron’s cast-off mistress

“It is perhaps little wonder that women like Mary Shelley and Caroline Lamb, themselves living sensitive lives marked by sexual scandal and social disjunction, in a tightly organised group linked with a quasi-incestuous nearness, should be drawn to the most sexually daring of Jacobean dramatists, and the one in whose work the difficulty of reconciling sexual and social impulses is most strongly figured.”

Criticism

Academic criticism of Ford’s plays began effectively with Langbaine in 1691 and so did controversy, which raged around him almost every time that his name was mentioned and which certainly came to the fore in the Romantic period.

Hazlitt – “I do not find much other power in the author than that of playing with edged tools and knowing the use of poisoned weapons. And what confirms me in this opinion is the comparative inefficiency of his other plays.”

Hartley Coleridge – “He delighted in the sensation of intellectual power, he found himself strong in the imagination of crime and agony; his moral sense was gratified by indignation at the dark possibilities of sin, by compassion for rate extremes of suffering.”

ALSO

“He abhorred vice – he admired virtue; but ordinary vice or modern virtue were, to him, as light wine to a dram drinker.”

Herbert J. Grierson – “he set forth deliberately the thesis that a great passion is its own justification, condones any crime.”

W. A. Neilson – “no objection lies against the introduction of the fact of incest, but the dramatist’s attitude is sympathetic.”

T. S. Eliot – “Ford handles the theme with all the seriousness of which he is capable, and he can hardly be accused here of wanton sensationalism.”

ALSO

“that which gives Ford his most certain claim to perpetuity; the distinct personal rhythm in blank verse which could be no ones’ but his alone”

R. J. Kaufmann – “Giovanni is a legitimate tragic figure”, “Ford struggles purposively with humanity’s genius for self-deprivation, with its puzzling aspiration to be the architect of its own unhappiness.”

ALSO

“the world of the play is made to act as a foil to the desperate choices of Giovanni and his sister. This is not, of course, because Ford approves of incest, but it is done to put the unthinkable within access of thought.”

H. W. Wells – “he by no means takes so uncompromising a view of Giovanni’s impiety and scepticism as Tourneur takes of the atheism of D’Amville…he even introduces a note of pure traedy into the speeches addressed to Annabella just before her death.”

Denis Gauer – “for him Desire, as manifested by woman, is absolute, and without code or landmark; it is Desire before the emergence of the Law.”

Gauer sees a Ford for whom “Desire can only lead to Death. Such are the two poles of life according to Ford”

ALSO

[on representation of social milieu in first two scenes] “Thus does Ford systematically (and even according to a strict hierarchy) introduce the three main social orders that traditionally constitute the Community: the priest, the warrior, and the merchant.”

Claudine Defaye – “It is as if, by conforming to the role of sinner assigned by religion, terrible and constraining though it be, Annabella succeeded in escaping from her own innate and  immediate torment, from a kind of existential anguish, where all issues seem blocked.”

Jennifer A. Low – “If ‘Tis Pity does offer the audience a role, it is that of the onlooker, the peeping Tom whose desires have been legitimised because commodified…”

T. B. Tomlinson – “writers like Chapman and Ford appear to be making a serious point when in fact they are only making a sentimental one…Ford is the real villain of the piece in Jacobean tragedy. He is untrustworthy.”

Donald K. Anderson –“Stavig and Sensabaugh mark the two poles of twentieth century commentary, the former arguing the dramatist’s conservatism, the latter his “unbridled individualism”. I place Ford midway between these two extremes, finding him both compassionate and condemnatory towards his characters.”

Dorothy M. Farr – “At heart Annabella is a traditionalist and because she has less imagination than Giovanni, within her limits she is a realist.”

Rowland Wymer – “The principle representative of moral orthodoxy in the play is the Friar…the full weight of traditional religious opposition to incest, whether Catholic or Protestant, are meant to be taken  seriously.”

Verna Foster – [on city comedy] “The events we see in ’Tis Pity occur in a city modelled in many respects on Stuart London, or at least on the London made familiar by dramatic convention.”