’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

Abstract

The apparent inadequacies and seemingly central irrelevancy of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore for a modern audience are such as by right we may wonder why it still retains its popularity. Critics¹ have been uneasy about its place in the canon of Elizabethan plays and with T.S. Eliot some have agreed that it is not Ford’s best work.² Its most recent production by BBC television in 1980, clearly did not trust the appropriateness of the text for the twentieth-century and radically changed both plot and diction to make a highly praised television drama but something remote from Ford’s play. Its last stage production, at the RSC’s studio theatre in 1978, was praised by Michael Billington as overcoming audience indifference or even sympathy towards incest by pushing the work ‘in the direction of black comedy rather than moral melodrama’ (The Guardian, 22 July 1977). In addition Brian Morris, one of the text’s three major editors³ in recent times, has quoted anthropological evidence demonstrating modern society’s lack of interest in the drama’s central emblem. Yet all this has occurred with a play which together with Ford’s other works, caused Havelock Ellis at the turn of the century to proclaim him as the most modern of the Jacobeans.⁴ Possibly in response to this critical evaluation of Ford some of the play’s directors over the last ten years, have interestingly set the play in the early twentieth-century imposing upon it an Edwardian atmosphere of a thinly veneered outward respectability disguising a strongly diseased interior. Some academic critics⁵ have similarly continued Ellis’s line stressing Ford’s appropriateness in the company of late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century writers. Others, however, have found such an approach restrictive and have therefore attempted to gain a fuller perspective.⁶ This can be realized by a return to the text. There we find that some areas, seemingly deficient at first acquaintance, are the play’s strength. In them lies its theme and vision. Its modernity proves to be Ford’s recognition, as applicable to the 1980s as to the 1890s or the 1630s, of a sterile, self-destructive world; one which he describes through the sexual relationship of the brother and sister as impotent and ineffective members of an incestuously structured and minded society.