"To embrace love is to embrace danger"

I attempted this essay under timed conditions and it received 28/30 marks, equivalent to A*. I would have needed to reference more Blake poems and explore for AO2 for ‘Tis Pity to have earned full marks.

“To embrace love is to embrace danger”

In the light of this view, discuss writers’ treatment of love

                Despite living and writing in different centuries, Blake being a late 18^th century Romantic poet, while Ford bordered between 17^th century Carolinian and Jacobean literature, both writers witnessed the sexual regulation of the Church, which taught that to embrace one’s own sexuality and explore love outside of marriage was sinful. In Blake’s time, this led to people turning towards prostitution, and thereby spreading venereal and deadly diseases like a plague that swept through the streets of London, which is a theme that runs throughout his poetry collection, The Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Ford explicitly links love and death together through the iconic image of the slain Annabella’s heart speared by her brother Giovanni’s dagger. Critics have fittingly described the play as “Romeo and Juliet meets Quentin Tarantino”, where scenes starring passionate lovers are followed by unforgivingly violent scenes of gore, encapsulating the link between “violent content and sexual themes” of “Renaissance drama”, as critic McKay has noted. In both Blake’s poems and Ford’s play, lovers embrace their desires for one another, and in doing so render themselves guilty of their own destruction.

                When linking love and danger together, Blake often uses flower symbolism to denote love and its fragility. This is explored in what critic Northrop Frye called the “antitypes” of Innocence and Experience, in this case “The Blossom” and “The Sick Rose”. In The Blossom, the gap between the two sestets symbolises the time in which a sexual act has taken place between the “Merry Merry Sparrow” and the “Pretty Pretty Robin”, the repetition of these adjectives unifying the birds together as symbols of nature, but also demonstrating the ignorant innocent nature of the speaker in generalising the two birds through this repetition. The red breast of the robin has been interpreted as a broken heart, thus suggesting that while the sparrow is left to be “Merry Merry” from their sexual experience, the robin is left “sobbing sobbing” having been used for the sparrow’s own pleasure. The rigid rhyme scheme of ABCAAC in each sestet demonstrates how nature remains indifferent to the robin’s own vulnerability, while the monologue form also indicates nature is impersonal, contrary to the romantic convention of nature taught in paganism, and in Romantic poetry. Blake thereby transcends his genre to highlight the dangers associated with embracing love within the natural world. In his Proverbs of Hell, Blake wrote:

                Excess of joy weeps

                Excess of sorrow laughs.

This is in line with the belief of Levi-Strauss that “contraries are interdependent by the very fact of their opposition”, thus the excesses of emotion created from sexual experience demonstrate a need for both innocence and experience, lest someone like the robin is left vulnerable to the dangers of love. Blake instructs his reader that unless they dwell in both contrary states, in embracing love, they also embrace danger.

                The antitype to The Blossom, “The Sick Rose” also presents the vulnerability of love through the symbolism of the “Rose”, which in medieval literature represented chastity and virginity, thereby associating itself with Innocence. But unlike The Blossom, The Sick Rose faces different dangers in embracing its love for the “invisible worm”; its own decay and demise. At the time the poem was written, prostitution was on the rise, and with it syphilis. Sexual love was considered shameful, which was enshrined by laws and rules brought into power by organised religion and the State and the Monarchy, which for different purposes is bluntly stated in The Chimney Sweeper in Experience as his parents have “gone to praise God & his Priest & King”. Love is forced to be associated with destructive forces. These “destructive forces” are symbolised in the poem through the metaphor of the invisible worm, which critics have assigned to the Christian teaching that “the devil lurks unseen as a master of disguise”, linking sexuality back to religious regulation. As critic Freedman notes, “the sin of organised religion is to prevent people from seeing things as they are by training them in the fallacy of received wisdom.” The shame associated with embracing love is encompassed in the juxtaposition of “crimson joy”, while the ABCB rhyme scheme links “joy” and “destroy” together, suggesting that a once positive sexual experience ultimately leads to the rose’s own destruction, while also suggesting that the rose, in embracing a love that was deemed “sinful” by Blake’s contemporary society, is not innocent of its own destruction. The momentum following “sick” to “destroy” through the anapaestic metre also creates the sense that the rose’s circumstances are inescapable, cementing the focus that as organised religion preached conventional beliefs surrounding sexuality, embracing love outside of marriage was embracing danger, which Blake, being an avid supporter of free love and a polygamist, believed to be unjust. As critic Dykstra notes, “In Blake’s poems institutions and their subjects uphold cruel and unjust social systems.” This “unjust social system” was one that linked love to danger.

                While Blake portrays the relationship between “The Prolific” and “The Devouring” from his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” in his poetry collection, and Ford presents a similar dynamic in ‘Tis Pity in the relationship between Giovanni and Annabella, in which they embrace the danger of their incestuous love. Many feminist interpretations have arisen from Ford’s presentation of the female characters, Annabella in particular. Marion Lomax argues that, “Women associated with dangerous sexual passions are controlled through mutilation of their bodies.” The most important example of this “mutilation” is the metaphoric symbol of Annabella’s heart stabbed by Giovanni’s dagger. The themes of love and death are explicitly tied together as Giovanni proclaims in heroic rhyming couplet:

                “Thus die, and die by me, and by my hand

                Revenge is mine, honour doth love command”

The verb “command” denotes Giovanni’s control over Annabella, in that her body, as critic Silverstone notes, “is literally anatomised in an extreme manifestation of the metaphorical attempts to control desire”, and this accompanied by the repetitive stresses on “die”, as well as the stress through iambic pentameter on “love” concretises this link between love and danger. Annabella passively accepts her death as she turns to a higher power, not to seek revenge as others have done within the genre of the Renaissance Revenge Tragedy, but to:

                “Forgive him, Heaven; and me my sins,

                Farewell brother, unkind, unkind!”

Although the repetition of “unkind” suggests some discourse to her brother’s actions, Annabella prioritises seeking forgiveness from “Heaven” for both Giovanni and herself, while the stress on “sins” highlights her guilt of her actions. Like Annabella, Ford is viewed by critic Gauer as someone for whom “Desire can only lead to Death. Such are the two poles of life.” In her presentation as a “traditionalist” and “within her limits a realist”, as Farr postulates, Annabella in embracing her sinful and shamed love also embraces her own death.

                While Annabella embraces the dangers of her love to Giovanni out of passivity, Giovanni does so out of arrogance and pride through his portrayal as the tragic hero. Cyrus Hoy draws comparison to the presentation of Giovanni with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in noting, “Ford’s Giovanni is a young Faustus, dabbling in forbidden love as Marlowe’s hero has dabbled in forbidden knowledge.” As the Catholic Church featured prominently in the laws of England during Ford’s time, their religious doctrines against incest and adultery, while marriage was viewed as the true consummation of love, and regulated the “free love of men’s flesh”, the incest between Annabella and Giovanni becomes a societal and religious “forbidden love”, which was dangerous in that it received the condemnation of God as a judge. However, Giovanni, in his hubris of intellectual arrogance, fully embraces these dangers from his debate with the Friar in the very first scene, stating:

                “Bound so much the more by nature, by the links

                Of blood, of reason…to be ever one,

                One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?”

There is a semantic field of unity with stresses falling “Bound” “links” and the repetition of “One” in the final line, which seems contrite to emphasise Giovanni’s own delusion surrounding his idealised incestuous relationship. In his play London, Blake links love with disease as he presents the apocalyptic vision of London overtaken by “blights with plagues”, the plosive sounds creating a harsh tone of this imagery of prostitutes having syphilis passed onto their married clients, and through that to their wives and children. This results in the oxymoronic joining together of the sacraments of marriage and death in “Marriage hearse”, thereby showing how embracing love outside of marriage led to death through venereal disease. The Friar also links love with illness and decay in refuting Giovanni with:

                “Beg Heaven to cleanse the leprosy of lust

                That rots thy soul.”

“Leprosy” is used as a metaphor for sexual corruption, explicitly linking love and the contemporary danger of illness together. But while Giovanni, unlike Annabella, is more sympathetically offered the chance for forgiveness to “Beg Heaven”, his pride prevents him from doing so, and after their incestuous love has been discovered, he continues to adopt bravado in the face of danger of the revenge tragedy, he embraces his love for Annabella with pride, and his pride is what allows him to embrace the consequent danger, ultimately leading to his demise.