Second Glance: Wretched Creatures

It’s entirely unlikely that John Ford's 1630ish tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore should still be my most beloved Renaissance drama. I know this play inside out; it helped define the most intellectually focused parts of my life. Plays which, in their first readings struck me dumb with pain or awe—King Lear and Othello in particular—have not held up. Even those terrible, truly pathetic lines at Lear's conclusion (“Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him much / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer”) can now only elicit a grave nod of recognition; they don't move me. Yet not so with Ford’s play, which should long ago have been done to death for me. My tenth reading of 'Tis Pity made me (again!) weep like a child.Ford imagines the tragedy of star-crossed young lovers in much bloodier terms than Shakespeare did. Recently returned from his university studies, Giovanni confesses to his former tutor Bonaventura that he is in love with his younger sister, Annabella. She reciprocates, but their father has already made plans for her: marriage to Lord Soranzo, who she initially rejects but soon marries to hide the fact that her brother has impregnated her. The deception is soon discovered, however, and Soranzo organizes a banquet during which he plans to have the besotted siblings murdered in revenge for horning him. Giovanni pre-empts him and enters the banquet with Annabella’s heart impaled on his dagger; then the blood bath really begins, and as in all good revenge tragedies from the period, almost everyone ends up dead.I know every line in 'Tis Pity, every portent leading to its bloody, brutal conclusion. But I was, nonetheless, surprised during my most recent revisiting to realize that I no longer saw this primarily as the “wretched woeful woman's tragedy” that Annabella tells us it is. It certainly is Annabella's tragedy, but it's not hers alone. It's a children's tragedy, Giovanni's and Annabella's together. 'Tis Pity is the tragedy of two children playing at adulthood; it is the bloody story of two kids incapable of understanding the social and political currents roiling dangerously around them. They never have a chance of either happiness or survival, not as Giovanni thinks, because of “fate,” but because they are simply too young and too innocent of reality's sharp edges to play and win.Ford's play begins with Giovanni, recently returned from the university, debating with his confessor, Friar Bonaventura. Giovanni approaches the terrible problem of being in love with his own sister in purely intellectual terms:

FRIAR Dispute no more in this, for know, young man,These are no school-points; nice philosophyMay tolerate unlikely arguments,But Heaven admits no jest; wits that presumedOn wit too much, by striving how to proveThere was no God, with foolish grounds of art,Discovered first the nearest way to Hell;And filled the world with devilish atheism.Such questions, youth, are fond; far better ’tis,To bless the sun, than reason why it shines;Yet he thou talk’st of is above the sun—No more! I may not hear it.

Giovanni has been discussing the issue as though it’s just another tricky rhetorical puzzle he practiced solving at school; but he’s also been frank and forthcoming with his trouble, has “unclasped my burdened soul,” wanting only to know “Must I not do what all men else may—love?”Bonaventura concedes “Yes, you may love;” but he cannot condone Giovanni’s love because its object is simply too closely connected to him. The young lover, of course, has an answer:

GIOVANNI Say that we had one father, say one womb(Curse to my joys) gave both us life and birth;Are we not therefore each to other boundSo much the more by nature; by the linksOf blood, of reason? nay, if you will have't,Even of religion, to be ever one:One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?

Bonaventura doesn't dismiss Giovanni here as a “foolish madman” only because he has broken one of the most forbidden of all taboos, incest. The friar condemns the young man for using his rhetorical gifts to justify a love that cannot possibly survive in the real world; moreover, he plays with it and flaunts it like a boy would a shiny new toy. Giovanni sees the solution to the problem of incest as easily solved by mere words. He doesn't yet live in the physical, sexual world of which he dreams and therefore has only a child's vague notion of what it looks and feels like, and what price he’ll pay for engaging in it.There would be no tragedy, of course, if Annabella did not reciprocate. While she sits at the centre of a clutch of suitors willing to shed one another's blood to win her, her father, Florio, “would not for my wealth, my daughter’s love / Should cause the spilling of one drop of blood.” More to the point, Florio's already promised her to rich, young gallant Soranzo.Annabella's tutoress, Putana, rather delights in all these fisticuffs and imagines her young charge does too:

PUTANA How like you this, child? Here’s threatening, challenging, quarrelling, and fighting, on every side, and all is for your sake; you had need look to yourself, charge, you’ll be stol'n away sleeping else shortly.ANNABELLA But, tutoress, such a life gives no contentTo me, my thoughts are fixed on other ends;Would you would leave me.PUTANA Leave you? No marvel else; leave me no leaving, charge; this is love outright. Indeed I blame you not; you have choice fit for the best lady in Italy.

Annabella’s choices include Grimaldi, “a very well-timber’d fellow” who, because he’s a soldier, unfortunately probably has “some privy maim or other, that mars [his] standing upright;” Soranzo, on the other hand, is “wise, and what is more, rich; and what is more than that, kind; and what is more than all this, a nobleman,” but has had a disastrous love affair with a married woman whose husband has ended up dead; and then there’s Bergetto, a “brave old ape in a silken coat.” Annabella is repelled by all the idiots who “haunt” her.As Putana concludes her vulgar blazon of all Annabella’s unwanted lovers, Giovanni walks in:

ANNABELLA But see, Putana, see: what blessed shapeOf some celestial creature now appears!What man is he, that with such sad aspectWalks careless of himself?

When Annabella realizes that the “woeful thing / Wrapped up in grief” who “beats his breast, and wipes his eyes / Drowned all in tears” is her brother, she becomes full of “heaviness and fear.” But she also runs straight to him.Engaged in private conversation with his sister, Giovanni not only brandishes his shiny rhetorical gewgaws at her, he also twists the Friar’s advice and admonitions to make it seem as though the Church condones incest!

ANNABELLA You are my brother Giovanni.GIOVANNI You,My sister Annabella; I know this:And could afford you instance why to loveSo much the more for this; to which intentWise nature first in your creation meantTo make you mine: else’t had been sin and foulTo share one beauty to a double soul.Nearness in birth and blood, doth but persuadeA nearer nearness in affection.I have ask’d counsel of the holy Church,Who tells me I may love you, and ’tis justThat since I may, I should; and will, yes will:Must I now live, or die?

None of his philosophical twists and turns are required, however, because as Annabella confesses, Giovanni “hast won / The field, and never fought; what thou has urged, / My captive heart had long ago resolved.”Giovanni and Annabella shortly exchange vows, the kind of spontaneous and solemn promises exchanged by children promising to be best friends forever:

ANNABELLA On my knees, (she kneels)Brother, even by our mother’s dust, I charge you,Do not betray me to your mirth or hate;Love me, or kill me, brother.GIOVANNI On my knees, (he kneels)Sister, even by my mother’s dust I charge you,Do not betray me to your mirth or hate;Love me, or kill me, sister.ANNABELLA You mean good sooth then?GIOVANNI In good troth I do,And so do you I hope: say, I’m in earnest.ANNABELLA I’ll swear it.

What follows is a brief period of romantic joy; brief, of course, because Annabella inevitably becomes pregnant. This is the turning point in the play, the point at which Annabella and Giovanni begin to diverge in their desires or, more precisely, in their sense of the rightness of acting upon their desires. Faced with the physical realities of pregnancy and the social reprisals that must result if it becomes known that her brother is the baby’s father, Annabella begins to leave childhood behind. She begins to see that she really is not free to choose, and that there will be consequences for herself and others for trying to do so.The Friar continues counselling him, but Giovanni is too clever, too certain, too happy to take it seriously. Giovanni has no prospects for love or marriage except for Annabella; more importantly, he is the only real option for her; all her other suitors are too obviously absurd, dangerous, foolish, or disgusting. The bleakness of Annabella’s prospects is amplified by Ford’s relative silence on the issue of incest: the only characters who speak forcefully against it are the Friar and the Cardinal, the latter a grasping, corrupt cleric who shelters a murderer and uses the final slaughter scene to justify confiscating all the dead men’s property to the Church! Faced with the threat of “eternal slaughter to [his] soul,” Giovanni rejects the Friar’s warning, assuming he simply can’t understand because his “age o’errules” him:

GIOVANNI It is a principle (which you have taughtWhen I was yet your scholar) that the frameAnd composition of the mind doth followThe frame and composition of the body.So where the body’s furniture is beauty,The mind’s must needs be virtue, which allowed,Virtue itself is reason but refined,And love the quintessence of that. This provesMy sister’s beauty, being rarely fair,Is rarely virtuous; chiefly in her love,And chiefly in that love, her love to me.If hers to me, then so is mine to her;Since in like causes are effects alike.

Giovanni is both cleverer and more convincing than his blustering tutor. His rhetorical effectiveness is born both out of the confidence and energy of youth, and because he treats it like a game; and it is a game, even for the Friar. The Friar brandishes rhetorical tricks designed to undermine his opponents; he has nothing that can actually help Giovanni overcome his feelings for his sister. He advises thinking about it all and being afraid—but thinking is part of Giovanni's problem because he can think his way around any difficulty he is confronted with. Further, he’s too young to see how theories of hell and retribution apply to one so strong and alive as himself.Things are rather more complicated for Annabella, of course, so when the Friar confers with her after learning she’s pregnant, his lecturing has some effect:

Enter the Friar in his study, sitting in a chair, Annabella kneeling and whispering to him, a table before them and wax-lights; she weeps, and wrings her hands.FRIAR I am glad to see this penance; for believe me,You have unripped a soul so foul and guilty,As I must tell you true, I marvel howThe earth hath borne you up. But weep, weep on,These tears may do you good; weep faster yet,Whilst I do read a lecture.ANNABELLA Wretched creature!FRIAR Ay, you are wretched, miserably wretched,Almost condemned alive. There is a place—List, daughter—in a black and hollow vault,Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,But flaming horror of consuming fires,A lightless sulphur, choked with smoky fogsOf an infected darkness. In this placeDwell many thousand thousand sundry sortsOf never-dying deaths: there damned soulsRoar without pity; there, are gluttons fedWith toads and adders; there, is burning oilPoured down the drunkard’s throat; the usurerIs forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold;There is the murderer for ever stabbed,Yet can he never die; there lies the wantonOn racks of burning steel, whiles in his soulHe feels the torment of his raging lust.ANNABELLA Mercy, oh mercy!

The Friar seems to be engaging in unequal rhetorical battle with a girl lacking either her brother's education or wit, but this is not the problem. It is that the unwanted babe in her belly—the “wretched creature” she exclaims at (which he thinks she means as referring to herself, and which I used to think she meant as referring to the Friar)—is forcing her to let go of her childish dream of a life with Giovanni. Pregnancy complicates Annabella’s youthful pleasures by forcing her into the very adult role of impending motherhood; the physical manifestations of this make ignoring the reality of her situation impossible.Further, when she begs the Friar for mercy, she’s asking for practical, adult advice about what to do. She hears out his rant of death and damnation and then gets to the point: “Is there no way left to redeem my miseries?” Redemption has both spiritual and material significance, and the Friar's answer is clear: she must marry Soranzo, which will guarantee both her “honour's safety,” and complete the transaction that the young lord and her father have already made. Knowing that Soranzo not only wooed a married woman, but also dropped her after her husband died because “’twere more sin / To keep [those vows] than to break them,” however, doesn’t bode well.Soranzo and Annabella wed at the beginning of the fourth act, and just two scenes later, their marriage is already in ruins. He has, of course, learned of that she is too far along for the child to be his. When first confronted by Soranzo about why she chose him to “be cloak to your close tricks, / Your belly-sports?”, and with whom, Annabella is defiant, mouthy, and sharper than he is:

SORANZO What was he called?ANNABELLA We are not come to that;Let it suffice that you shall have the gloryTo father what so brave a father got.In brief, had not this chance fall’n out as’t doth,I never had been troubled with a thoughtThat you had been a creature. But for marriage,I scarce dream yet of that.SORANZO Tell me his name.ANNABELLA Alas, alas, there’s all! Will you believe?SORANZO What?ANNABELLA You shall never know.

Soranzo does, however, soon outmanoeuvre Annabella by appealing to her emerging adulthood, which makes her more and more concerned with the well-being of others.Vasques, Soranzo`s cagey servant, instructs Soranzo to play the part of the heart-broken husband instead of the shamefully cuckolded one; it works beautifully:

SORANZO …O Annabella,Be thou assured, whatsoe’er the villain wasThat thus hath tempted thee to this disgrace,Well he might lust, but never loved like me.He doted on the picture that hung outUpon thy cheeks, to please his humorous eye;Not on the part I loved, which was thy heart,And, as I thought, thy virtues.ANNABELLA O my lord!These words wound deeper than your sword could do.

Faced with the real adult concerns of unwanted pregnancy, Annabella becomes increasingly unwilling to sacrifice everyone and everything to realize her own desires. I suggested earlier that 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is a tragedy of childhood, and not (only) a “wretched, woeful woman's tragedy;” it is for Annabella, of course, both. The tragedy of her childhood is that she imagines that she will be permitted to choose who to love; the tragedy of her womanhood is that she can no longer participate in the kind of heartless games of rhetorical one-upmanship that Giovanni takes such delight in.In any case, she soon realizes that Soranzo's apparent change in feelings about her “loose cunning whoredom” is a sham and that she and Giovanni are doomed. She tries to save her brother; she writes him a letter “double-lined with tears and blood,” which are the signs of true spiritual repentance. Giovanni, however, cannot accept that their affair must end, and truculently accuses her of inconstancy:

GIOVANNI What, changed so soon? Hath your new sprightly lordFound out a trick in night-games more than weCould know in our simplicity? Ha, is’t so?Or does the fit come on you, to prove treacherousTo your past vows and oaths?ANNABELLA Why should you jestAt my calamity, without all senseOf the approaching dangers you are in?GIOVANNI What danger’s half so great as thy revolt?Thou art a faithless sister...

Giovanni's silly peevishness stands in terrible contrast to Annabella's sensible concerns for his survival; he is just a boy, unwilling to let go playing his favorite game, while she is a woman on the verge of giving birth to another vulnerable, wretched creature.As the only adult in their relationship, she tries to get him to consider how they may forestall the slaughter Soranzo is planning for them:

ANNABELLA Brother, dear brother, know what I have been,And know that now there’s but a dining-time’Twixt us and our confusion. Let’s not wasteThese precious hours in vain and useless speech.Alas, these gay attires were not put onBut to some end; this sudden solemn feastWas not ordained to riot in expense;I that have now been chambered here alone,Barred of my guardian, or of any else,Am not for nothing at an instant freedTo fresh access. Be not deceived, my brother,This banquet is an harbinger of deathTo you and me; resolve yourself it is,And be prepared to welcome it.GIOVANNI Well, then;The schoolmen teach that all this globe of earthShall be consumed to ashes in a minute.

He can't help himself; Giovanni will always be a child whose first refuge is the books he was taught as a boy. Annabella can't get through to him and so speaks to him soothingly, as one does with frightened children:

ANNABELLA So I have read too.GIOVANNI But ’twere somewhat strangeTo see the waters burn; could I believeThis might be true, I could believe as wellThere might be Hell or Heaven.ANNABELLA That’s most certain.GIOVANNI A dream, a dream; else in this other worldWe should know one another.ANNABELLA So we shall.GIOVANNI Have you heard so?ANNABELLA For certain.GIOVANNI But d'ee think,That I shall see you there, you look on me?May we kiss one another, prate or laugh,Or do as we do here?

Giovanni's youth is too much for Annabella; she handles him, in this their last exchange, like the naive little boy he is.Ford's play inevitably ends in a blood bath, but it's Giovanni who unexpectedly initiates the carnage. Finally convinced that his life with Annabella must end, he ends it himself. Giovanni murders his beloved sister; her surprise is simple and entire: “O brother, by your hand?” Of course by his hand. They vowed to love or kill one another when they first confessed their mutual love; Giovanni, a boy ever true and constant to his promises, kills her because he cannot love her, and be loved by her, anymore.Giovanni reveals what he's done, and why, to everyone at the banquet and his father dies of shock. A “Monster of children,” he expresses no regret for this; he seems to care only that he successfully enacts his final revenge on Soranzo for taking Annabella away from him. A child in every way—selfish, vicious, oblivious, fragile, innocent, infinitely loving, irresistibly loveable, Giovanni never becomes aware, as most tragic protagonists eventually do, of his failure. His failure is not simply his inability to grow up and live in the world outside his imagined Elysium—he never even becomes fully aware that there’s a difference. But this failure is also what makes Ford's tragedy of childhood so powerful, for it's the only thing that keeps Giovanni distinct from all the vicious and cynical adults around him: the last thing he asks before he dies is that “Where'er I go, let me enjoy this grace, / Freely to view my Annabella's face.” Giovanni remains a “foolish madman” until the end, aching for union with his beloved and, perhaps maddest of all, believing that such union could ever have thrived on earth in the first place.This terrible innocence destroys me every time I read ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but now that I understand Giovanni and Annabella almost as children rather than young adults, it’s even more painful. It’s not only that they’re so young, so foolish, so vulnerable; it’s also that the ruthless adults around them are unwilling to either compassionate their naïveté, or spare them any of the grown-up consequences of their actions. Most of all, though, it’s Giovanni’s desperate faith at the end, not that he’ll be reunited with Annabella exactly, but that just that he’ll be able to look upon her beloved face; I can’t remember ever being that young.____Colleen Shea is a freelance writer, editor here at Open Letters, and recovering bookstore owner living in Toronto. She blogs at Jam and Idleness.