Includes Spoilers
'Tis Pity She's a Whore was the second Renaissance play I read in my warmup for this Shakespeare project, and only the second Renaissance play I've ever read by someone other than Shakespeare. So, as per custom, here is my list of probably naive thoughts and questions about the play.
What is the tone of this thing? Taking my cue from the goofy title, I went into this play expecting a comic farce. From remarks on GoodReads, I know I am not alone in this. This makes me unsure if the play has an evenness-of-mood problem, or if I just read it wrong.
Let's see if I can articulate that better. Through the first acts, I found myself arranging the action according to the model of a comedy. I noticed servants who were smarter and funnier than their masters, a Love That Could Not Be, and a complicated list of grievances based on who was sleeping with whom, and came to the obvious expectations: Our incestuous siblings would somehow turn out to be unrelated, Hippolita and Dr. Rick would reconcile, Putana would end up with Vasques, Soranzo would end up embarassed but a little wiser. Bergetto would be, I don't know, sold to the circus or something.
This opens up quite a few questions.
1. If the play had been titled Ye Tragicalle Downfall of Two Wretched Siblings, or whatever, would I have "misread" it this way?
1a. For instance, would I have initially responded to Putana as a corrupt influence on Annabella, rather than as just jolly and amusingly blunt-spoken? Instead of a stock comic character, the strutting, stupid, cowardly braggart, would Bergetto come across as something darker and disturbing? A mildly retarded and mildly sadistic lout?
1b. And, if I had gone in expecting tragedy, would my gut reaction to the play as a whole have been more favorable?
2. Or, does it go beyond the title. Did Mr. Ford actually set this up (intentionally or unintentionally) with a comic foundation, and then push the action toward grim tragedy?
2a. If so, is that "bad" -- he doesn't get the formula right?
2b. Is it "good" -- he subverts expectations, defeats cliche, and keeps us engaged in a story the endpoint of which is not obvious?
3. Wouldn't these tone issues be worked out in performance, anyway?
3a. But on the other hand, doesn't everything pretty much get worked out in performance?
3b. But on the other other hand, if you go too far down that road you end up deciding that the script isn't important at all, which is clearly nonsense....
Is there an excuse for the ending?
1. Of the three components that make up the ending, the Cardinal's dispensing of justice seems the most logical and organic to the play. Interestingly, it also seems pretty half-assed. Grimaldi's murder is ignored, the banditti get off scot-free, the incestuous sister's corpse is to be burnt in ignomy but not the brother's, and nothing is to be done one way or the other about the blinding of Putana. Does this intentionally represent a corrupt or incompetant system of justice, or is it just sloppy writing?
2. We've just watched the central characters of the play kill each other with sharp metal sticks. Why is it a good time to hear Vasques tell his life story?
3. Was there ever a character as ineffectual as Dr. Rick? He's bent on revenge, but his sole contribution to the action is providing the poison that ends up killing his niece's boyfriend. Otherwise, he just kind of slouches around and watches. The play ends with him revealing his disguise, and getting hardly any reaction at all. Why did he even bother to show up for this play?
Do we have a central character here? Vasques is an interesting figure. In my imagination, he's akin to a Shakespearian happy villain, but it's more complicated than that because his bad doings are all in support of ostensible public good. He supports his master, prevents a murder, exposes a incestuous relationship, slays a dangerous madman. His methods, however, leave something to be desired.
The star-crossed lovers at the play's center are much less interesting. Their behavior is so extreme, and their concerns are so one-dimensional, that they seem more like plot devices than people. Annabella gets a few good lines in III.2, but nothing to write home about.
Are all these people necessary? For a fairly small list of characters, it has more than its share who don't pull much weight. Philotis might as well be her uncle's sock puppet. Dr. Rick himself really doesn't do much, except to brood -- when you've got a cuckolded husband and his wife both seeking revenge on her lover, you kind of expect that to go somewhere, but it kind of fizzles here. Grimaldi just thrusts his sword at the wrong guys a couple of times, and then vanishes after Act III. If all three of them were editted out, we might not notice.
Is this a public service announcement? Almost everybody in this play, one way or the other, displays interest in some form of socially unsanctioned sexuality. And they pretty much all get stabbed for it in the end. Is this a crude morality tale?
Or is this good old fashioned tittilation disguised as a morality tale?
So why DOES Giovanni kill Annabella, anyway? The reasoning behind his whole grim march into the birthday party trap kind of eludes me. Why not, say, sneak out the back entrance while everybody at the party is distracted by desert, catch a ship to Venice, and live as husband and wife? Ford must have hoped we'd see Giovanni's behavior as plausible and logical, but it seems pretty arbitrary and plot-driven, to me.
Is all the action-by-proxy significant? Vasques fights a duel for Soranzo. Donaldo pitches woo for Benetto. Hippolita tries to get Vasques to kill Soranzo. The Friar delivers Annabella's note to Giovanni. The Cardinal is seldom a Cardinal; he's the Papal Nuncio. Vasques does Soranzo's detective work for him. Thugs are called in to do the wet work. Philotis, to stretch the point, retires from the world to assuage Dr. Rick's world-weariness. Significant?
Is there anything behind that elephant? The more articulate of the comments on GoodReads articles tend to advance an argument that "People get so hung up on the incest and the violence that they don't see that the play is really [x, y, and z]." My response to this is: give me a goddam break. We've got a brother and sister lolling about in post-coital bliss, talking about how awesome it was!! If audiences and readers of whatever period have a hard time "seeing past this," this is hardly their fault. They've been presented with one of the most taboo images imaginable, and that's going to grab their attention. Whatever else Ford might have been hoping to accomplish with this play, he for better or worse wrote scene II:1 and thereby made this a play about the brother and sister who screw. The rest might as well be silence.
'Tis Pity She's a Whore was the second Renaissance play I read in my warmup for this Shakespeare project, and only the second Renaissance play I've ever read by someone other than Shakespeare. So, as per custom, here is my list of probably naive thoughts and questions about the play.
What is the tone of this thing? Taking my cue from the goofy title, I went into this play expecting a comic farce. From remarks on GoodReads, I know I am not alone in this. This makes me unsure if the play has an evenness-of-mood problem, or if I just read it wrong.
Let's see if I can articulate that better. Through the first acts, I found myself arranging the action according to the model of a comedy. I noticed servants who were smarter and funnier than their masters, a Love That Could Not Be, and a complicated list of grievances based on who was sleeping with whom, and came to the obvious expectations: Our incestuous siblings would somehow turn out to be unrelated, Hippolita and Dr. Rick would reconcile, Putana would end up with Vasques, Soranzo would end up embarassed but a little wiser. Bergetto would be, I don't know, sold to the circus or something.
This opens up quite a few questions.
1. If the play had been titled Ye Tragicalle Downfall of Two Wretched Siblings, or whatever, would I have "misread" it this way?
1a. For instance, would I have initially responded to Putana as a corrupt influence on Annabella, rather than as just jolly and amusingly blunt-spoken? Instead of a stock comic character, the strutting, stupid, cowardly braggart, would Bergetto come across as something darker and disturbing? A mildly retarded and mildly sadistic lout?
1b. And, if I had gone in expecting tragedy, would my gut reaction to the play as a whole have been more favorable?
2. Or, does it go beyond the title. Did Mr. Ford actually set this up (intentionally or unintentionally) with a comic foundation, and then push the action toward grim tragedy?
2a. If so, is that "bad" -- he doesn't get the formula right?
2b. Is it "good" -- he subverts expectations, defeats cliche, and keeps us engaged in a story the endpoint of which is not obvious?
3. Wouldn't these tone issues be worked out in performance, anyway?
3a. But on the other hand, doesn't everything pretty much get worked out in performance?
3b. But on the other other hand, if you go too far down that road you end up deciding that the script isn't important at all, which is clearly nonsense....
Is there an excuse for the ending?
1. Of the three components that make up the ending, the Cardinal's dispensing of justice seems the most logical and organic to the play. Interestingly, it also seems pretty half-assed. Grimaldi's murder is ignored, the banditti get off scot-free, the incestuous sister's corpse is to be burnt in ignomy but not the brother's, and nothing is to be done one way or the other about the blinding of Putana. Does this intentionally represent a corrupt or incompetant system of justice, or is it just sloppy writing?
2. We've just watched the central characters of the play kill each other with sharp metal sticks. Why is it a good time to hear Vasques tell his life story?
3. Was there ever a character as ineffectual as Dr. Rick? He's bent on revenge, but his sole contribution to the action is providing the poison that ends up killing his niece's boyfriend. Otherwise, he just kind of slouches around and watches. The play ends with him revealing his disguise, and getting hardly any reaction at all. Why did he even bother to show up for this play?
Do we have a central character here? Vasques is an interesting figure. In my imagination, he's akin to a Shakespearian happy villain, but it's more complicated than that because his bad doings are all in support of ostensible public good. He supports his master, prevents a murder, exposes a incestuous relationship, slays a dangerous madman. His methods, however, leave something to be desired.
The star-crossed lovers at the play's center are much less interesting. Their behavior is so extreme, and their concerns are so one-dimensional, that they seem more like plot devices than people. Annabella gets a few good lines in III.2, but nothing to write home about.
Are all these people necessary? For a fairly small list of characters, it has more than its share who don't pull much weight. Philotis might as well be her uncle's sock puppet. Dr. Rick himself really doesn't do much, except to brood -- when you've got a cuckolded husband and his wife both seeking revenge on her lover, you kind of expect that to go somewhere, but it kind of fizzles here. Grimaldi just thrusts his sword at the wrong guys a couple of times, and then vanishes after Act III. If all three of them were editted out, we might not notice.
Is this a public service announcement? Almost everybody in this play, one way or the other, displays interest in some form of socially unsanctioned sexuality. And they pretty much all get stabbed for it in the end. Is this a crude morality tale?
Or is this good old fashioned tittilation disguised as a morality tale?
So why DOES Giovanni kill Annabella, anyway? The reasoning behind his whole grim march into the birthday party trap kind of eludes me. Why not, say, sneak out the back entrance while everybody at the party is distracted by desert, catch a ship to Venice, and live as husband and wife? Ford must have hoped we'd see Giovanni's behavior as plausible and logical, but it seems pretty arbitrary and plot-driven, to me.
Is all the action-by-proxy significant? Vasques fights a duel for Soranzo. Donaldo pitches woo for Benetto. Hippolita tries to get Vasques to kill Soranzo. The Friar delivers Annabella's note to Giovanni. The Cardinal is seldom a Cardinal; he's the Papal Nuncio. Vasques does Soranzo's detective work for him. Thugs are called in to do the wet work. Philotis, to stretch the point, retires from the world to assuage Dr. Rick's world-weariness. Significant?
Is there anything behind that elephant? The more articulate of the comments on GoodReads articles tend to advance an argument that "People get so hung up on the incest and the violence that they don't see that the play is really [x, y, and z]." My response to this is: give me a goddam break. We've got a brother and sister lolling about in post-coital bliss, talking about how awesome it was!! If audiences and readers of whatever period have a hard time "seeing past this," this is hardly their fault. They've been presented with one of the most taboo images imaginable, and that's going to grab their attention. Whatever else Ford might have been hoping to accomplish with this play, he for better or worse wrote scene II:1 and thereby made this a play about the brother and sister who screw. The rest might as well be silence.
7 comments:
You inspired me to re-read the play last night. Some comments:
1. Anyone you found dismissing the significance of the incest plot is wrong. But are you saying that understanding of the play has to end with the incest plot? English interest in incest plots lasted for 150 years or more. This was not because of a big problem with incest in England. Incest is standing in for something else.
2. Justice: corrupt, yes. And even malignant. The Catholic Italian society is fundamentally unjust, and worse. This is a standard trope - all of those English tragedies filled with horrible Italians. The Cardinal's protection of Grimaldi is our first strong signal that there's something wrong in the public sphere as well as the private.
3. Yes, Grimaldi is edited out. So is Philotis. So is the Friar. They all do something unusual for a revenge tragedy - they remove themselves from the action ("Away, Grimaldi; leave 'em!"). You're right, Giovanni could have done the same thing and choses not to. Why? I don't think anyone will find his reasons to be plausible or logical, since he's nuts.
Maybe I should say that I would put this play in the second rank of the first-tier Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan plays. It's the decadent end of the revenge tragedy tradtion. Compared to John Webster, or The Atheist's Tragedy, it seems thin. You're identifying some real weaknesses in the play.
@A.R.: I need a new blogger ID -- "The More Amateur than Amateur Reader Reader." From my perspective, the answer to your question in (1) is close to yes, that it would be unreasonable for John Ford to expect understanding of his play to get past the incest plot. It's an incest plot! It rather commands the attention! But then, 150 years of incest plots is news to me. May I ask what you see incest standing in for?
Regarding (3): OK, that brings up (and offers an answer to) a question that I neglected to include here: Is Giovanni the hero? Or is he just bonkers? If he's just bonkers, you're right, we don't need to find a logic for his behavior. But then, if there's no necessary logic for his behavior, it's harder to be interested in the play.
Maybe I should have said 200 years of incest plots, since I was going up to Tom Jones. See, for example, Richard McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature's Law, 1550-1700, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Why do you want the meaning of the play to be limited to incest? If murder is central to a story, is the story then merely about murder? Incest seems to have different functions for the two siblings. For Annabella, it is an escape from the marriage market. For Giovanni, it has something to do with power, with an assault on God's law. They're both idealizing something - what?
There is something like logic to Giovanni's actions, or he wants ther to be. That's exactly where the play begins - he wants his incest to be justified - "Are we not therefore each to other bound... by the links \ Of blood, of reason?" (I.i.)
As with the use of incest, the writer can use the bizarre behavior of the character to explore some larger idea or create a more complicated pattern of meaning. Giovanni may be nuts, but that doesn't mean that what he does is not meaningful.
I don't "want" the meaning of the play to be limited to incest. I'm merely making the unremarkable suggestion that for pretty much any audience in living memory, the explicit incestuous sexuality of the play would create such a cognitive racket that most anything else would be drowned out. But as I say, I didn't know that incest plots were more common back in the day; that being true, obviously it would be easier enough for viewers to get past the premise.
I've been thinking about the incest per se vs. incest as metaphor question, and I finally realized that it reminds me of the discussions we used to have in grad school about rape.
"Rape is about power, not about sex," somebody would announce.
"But isn't it significant that the rapist is using sex to express that power?" somebody else would counter.
Here, I would suggest that, whatever else it may represent, the fact that incest is the vehicle chosen to express it does mean that, to some extent, the play is about incest.
That said, I agree with what I take you to be suggesting, AR, that saying a work is "about" something can be problematic and limiting, but it's also really hard to have a discussion without invoking that concept. (I suppose that's partially why I tend to think of works as being about characters who embody certain themes rather than being about themes that are expressed through characters, if that makes any sense.)
At any rate, frankly, the way incest feels to me in the play is as though Ford was trying to find a sexual taboo that would be so shocking that nobody could possibly believe Giovanni's arguments attempting to portray it as virtuous and natural, thus highlighting the dangers of sophistry, like a poster child for "This is Your Brain on Specious Reasoning."
I think this is part of why the play is less successful on the aesthetic level to me: the extremity of the situation seems so heavy-handed that it can feel like propaganda. In fact, I guess that could be an interesting thing to look at--how Ford chooses to examine a moral situation where the deck is stacked very one-sidedly rather than having a balance, as so many early modern playwrights chose to do.
Jennifer - that's not what I was suggesting. I say books are "about" X and Y all the time. I think it would be nuts to talk about this play and not try to figure out what Ford is doing with the incest theme. You're getting at it when you say no one believes Giovanni's arguments. Propaganda for what?
I was responding to the original post: "The rest might as well be silence." See also: it would be "unreasonable... to get past the incest plot" and "for any audience in living memory... most anything else would be drowned out." Those are not suggestions either - those are bold claims!
...albeit rather obvious ones.
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