Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.     

“PERKIN WARBECK” by John Ford (first published 1634; probably written in the 1620s)

            As I have noted before, one of my pastimes is reading Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline plays written by playwrights other than Shakespeare. So you can find postings on this blog about George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, the anonymous Arden of Feversham, John Marston’s The Malcontent, Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity she’s a Whore.  As I said in an earlier posting, “the attractions of these plays for me are obvious. They are short enough to be read at a sitting or two, and no matter how convoluted, bombastic or melodramatic they (all of them) can get, they are written in a robust language that can rise to poetic heights.” But while my interest in John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck embraces these attractions, I have another reason for looking at this play. In my last “Something Old” posting, I discussed Josephine Tey’s detective novel The Daughter of Time, which set out to prove (quite convincingly) that Richard III was a much maligned king, caricatured by Tudor propaganda and turned into a monster by William Shakespeare’s enjoyable melodramatic play. As is now widely understood, the man who succeeded to (or usurped) the throne after Richard III’s death, Henry Tudor (Henry VII), was a far more murderous person than Richard. 

                                                     (Portait of John Ford)

            Henry was a very canny organiser and administrator, but in the early years of his reign, he set about diligently eliminating (i.e. having executed) anybody of royal lineage who had a stronger claim to the throne than he had. Henry’s own claim to the throne was very feeble indeed. Yet there were many pretenders to his throne. One of them was Perkin Warbeck, raised in Europe, who claimed to be Richard Duke of York, one of the “Princes in the Tower” who had, according to legend, been murdered on the orders of Richard III. Perkin Warbeck was accepted in a number of European courts as the legitimate heir to the English throne. John Ford’s play chronicles the life and death of Perkin Warbeck when he came to Britain and asserted his claim. Perkin Warbeck (or to give its full title as shown on his first publication The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck – A Strange Truth) was first performed in the 1620s and first published in 1634, over 130 years after the (1490s) events it depicts. John Ford was aware that chronicle history plays were rare since the time of Shakespeare. As he says in his prologue “Studies of this nature have been of late / So out of fashion, so unfollow’d…”. His prologue also tells us there is in his play no “unnecessary mirth forc’d, to endear / a multitude”. So groundlings begone, watch carefully and be serious.

            Throughout the play, King Henry VII of England is depicted as a wise and thoughtful king and it is taken for granted that Perkin Warbeck is an impostor.  In other words, this is a play with an apparently Tudor bias. John Ford took his historical detail from a history of the reign of Henry VII written by the Elizabethan (and obviously pro-Tudor) sage Francis Bacon; and from a popular history written by Thomas Gainsford. Bear in mind that even in Caroline England (the reign of the Stuart Charles I) playwrights could not write negative things about the Tudor dynasty, given that the Stuarts were related to the Tudors and it was the last Tudor monarch (the childless Elizabeth 1) who had invited a Stuart to succeed her. What is intriguing about the play, however, is how ambiguous it is in its sympathies

            To give a simplified synopsis, Perkin Warbeck himself does not appear on stage in Act One. Instead we have King Henry at his court congratulating himself on having brought to an end the civil wars (the “Wars of the Roses”) as he boasts “The rent face / And bleeding wounds of England’s slaughter’d people / Have been by us, as by the best physician, / At last both thoroughly cur’d and set in safety…” (Act One, Scene One). He is advised that Perkin Warbeck has landed in Scotland and hears how this impostor has been accepted as genuine by some people. Henry sets to work activating his spies to see who might be supporters of the pretender. Meanwhile at the Scottish court of King James IV, a courtier is hoping that he will be able to marry Lady Katherine Gordon, but he is rebuffed by the lady’s father.

            In Act Two King James of Scotland welcomes Perkin Warbeck to his court, accepting him as the true king of England as he has been endorsed by the kings of France and Bohemia. Perkin Warbeck is at once depicted as courteous, well-spoken, aristocratic - in a word, kingly. He gives a detailed account of himself (full forty lines of speech!) and later in this Act, King James declares: “How like a king ‘a looks! Lords, but observe / The confidence of his aspect. Dross cannot / Cleave to so pure a metal. Royal youth. / Plantagenet undoubted.” (Act Two, Scene Three). Some of the Scots courtiers are a little more sceptical, noting how fluent and persuasive a person Perkin Warbeck is: “[He] courts the ladies / As if his strength of language chain’d attention / By power of prerogative.” (Act Two, Scene Three). To the chagrin of the suitor who hoped to marry Lady Katherine Gordon, King James gives the lady in marriage to Perkin Warbeck, hoping thus to seal an alliance of Scotland and England. Meanwhile in England, King Henry is ferreting out people who might betray him. He sends Sir William Stanley to execution once Stanley has admitted his guilt. Hearing that King James has accepted Perkin Warbeck as king, Henry moves to secure the border with Scotland and sends an army off to quell an uprising in Cornwall. He also begins to consider ways of winning King James over to his side.

            Offstage, the Cornish uprising is easily defeated in Act Three and King Henry righteously orders the surviving ring-leaders to be executed – but the playwright also shows the king mourning for those who have been misled into rebellion. He now parleys with the Spanish ambassador, plotting a way to make peace with King James at the expense of Perkin Warbeck. As this is going on, Perkin Warbeck raises a force to invade the north of England, with the help of King James. Before he leaves for the war, he says a fond farewell to his wife Lady Katherine Gordon who, it is clear, loves him deeply. But the planned invasion does not go well. King James attempts to besiege Durham, but is quickly made aware that very few people are rallying to Perkin Warbeck’s cause. From the ramparts of Durham, the Bishop of Durham ridicules Warbeck. He says that Warbeck is of lowly birth and chastises King James for having been deceived by him: “You rend the face of peace and break a league / With a confederate king that courts your amity, / For whom too? For a vagabond, a straggler, / Not noted in the world by birth or name, / An obscure peasant, by the rage of hell / Loos’d from his chains to set great kings at strife. / What nobleman, what common man of note, / What ordinary subject hath come in, / Since first you footed in our territories, / To only feign a welcome? Children laugh at / Your proclamations, and the wiser pity / So great a potentate’s abuse by one / Who juggles merely with the fawns and youth / Of an instructed compliment.” (Act Three, Scene Four). What with this and with news of King Henry’s victory in Cornwall, King James gradually gives up the siege and begins to lose faith in Perkin Warbeck.

            So in Act Four, as Henry’s forces now invade Scotland, King James no longer includes Perkin Warbeck in his court. Warbeck laments his demotion, but still thinks that people in England will rally to him and he plans to take a force to the English west coast. King James negotiates with the Spanish emissary, who says that all of Europe wants peace between England and Scotland. King Henry has sent a message saying that his daughter Margaret can settle the bond between the two countries by marrying into Scots royalty. King James agrees to this, but even as he sends Perkin Warbeck away, he still sees Warbeck is a noble person and he does not want him harmed. He says “No blood of innocents shall buy by peace. / For Warbeck, as you nick him, came to me / Commended by the states of Christendom, / A prince, though in distress. His fair demeanour, / Lovely behaviour, unappalled spirit / Spoke him not as base in blood, however clouded.”  (Act Four, Scene Three). When Warbeck lands in England the second time, attempting to encourage his small band of supporters, he still speaks to his wife Katherine as if great numbers will rally to him: “After so many storms as wind and seas / Have threaten’d to our weather-beaten ships, / At last, sweet fairest, we are safe arriv’d / On our dear mother earth, ingrateful only / To heaven and us in yielding sustenance / To sly usurpers of our throne and right. / These general acclamations are an omen / Of happy process to their welcome lord. / They flock in troops, and from all parts with wings / of duty to lay their hearts before us.”  (Act Four, Scene Four) In the same scene he declares that there is “divinity of royal birth” that will overcome any opposition.

            The inevitable happens in Act Five. Perkin Warbeck’s small army is easily defeated by Henry VII’s much larger army, Warbeck is on the run for fear of being handed over to Henry by turncoat supporters, and Katherine is taken to Henry’s court with promises of safe conduct. When Perkin Warbeck, captured and under guard, is finally brought before King Henry, he still declares his belief that he is the true and legitimate king. After he leaves the stage, King Henry says “Was ever such an impudence in forgery? / The custom, sure, of being styl’d a king / Hath fastened in his thought that he is such…” (Act Five, Scene Two). Henry’s verdict is that Perkin Warbeck sincerely believes he is royalty because he has, since childhood, been fed on fantasies in European courts, and especially by the Duchess of Burgundy. Warbeck is put in the stocks and offered the option of having his life spared if (like another less credible pretender called Lambert Simnel) he publicly renounces his claim to the throne. Steadfast to the end, he refuses to do this, and is executed. King Henry speaks the last words of the play: “Perkin, we are inform’d, is arm’d to die. / In that we honor him. Our lords shall follow / To see the execution. And from thence / We gather this fit use: that ‘public states, / As our particular bodies, taste most good / In health when purged of corrupted blood’ ”(Act Five, Scene Three) Or, to put more brutally, what his closing maxim Henry says is that he, as king, has the right to put to death anyone who challenges his legitimacy to the throne.

            In very general terms, the play could be seen as championing Henry VII’s wise statecraft; his benevolence when he allows some of Warbeck’s peasant followers go free and orders that they not be pursued; the courteous way he accepts Perkin Warbeck’s wife Lady Katherine into his court; and the chance he gives Warbeck the possibility of saving his life by declaring the he is not the true king.

            Yet here the ambiguity creeps in. As a character, King Henry is basically flat and less interesting than Perkin Warbeck. He gives orders, he makes decisions, he praises himself and his moments of clemency seem perfunctory. Note, too, he has no intimate love. The eponymous character is far more interesting, far more persuasive as a speaker and there is no suggestion that he does not truly believe that he really is the legitimate king. He is not consciously a fraud. Despite John Ford’s opening statement that the play would have no “unnecessary mirth forc’d, to endear / a multitude” there is comedy in the way Warbeck’s leading advisors are always characterised as inept, stupid, often semi-coherent in the three or four scenes in which they appear, and ultimately lacking in any real courage or strategy. The clear implication is that Perkin Warbeck, a man of integrity, has been led astray by fools unworthy of him. Perkin Warbeck’s nobility, aristocratic bearing and - dare one say – glamour make him a sympathetic character.

            In spite of everything; in spite of the fact that he is about to be executed, Perkin Warbeck is still given a sort of victory by the steadfast love of his wife Katherine. In face of the mockery of one of Henry’s courtiers, Katherine asserts her profound love of her husband, and Perkin Warbeck says “Spite of tyranny / We reign in our affections, blessed woman! / Read in my destiny the wrack of honor; / Point out, in my contempt of death, to memory / Some miserable happiness, since herein, / Even when I fell, I stood enthron’d a monarch / Of one chaste wife’s troth, pure and uncorrupted. / Fair angel of perfection, immortality / Shall raise thy name up to an adoration, / Court every rich opinion of true merit, / And saint it in the calendar of virtue, / When I am turn’d into the selfsame dust / Of which I was first form’d” (Act Five, Scene Three). Earlier, Ford has presented in the play two love scenes in which Perkin Warbeck has to say a fond farewell to his loving wife. The scenes are sentimental, “pathetic” almost in the manner of a Beaumont and Fletcher play but effective. They allow us to see more intimate feeling in the pretender than there is in the cold, pragmatic Tudor King. While the play champions Henry’s right to rule, Ford is telling us that in many ways the pretender was the more noble character. You could say that Ford’s brain was with Henry VII, but his heart was with Perkin Warbeck.

            In his essay on John Ford, T.S.Eliot said that the play Perkin Warbeck was “almost flawless” and was “one of the very best historical plays outside of the works of Shakespeare.” In this case, I’m inclined to agree with Old Possum.

 

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“’TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE” by John Ford (probably first performed in 1629; first published in 1633)

As you may have noticed before on this blog, one of my pastimes is reading Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline plays written by playwrights other than Shakespeare. Hence, on this blog, you can find postings on George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, the anonymous Arden of Feversham, John Marston’s The Malcontent, Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. The attractions of these plays for me are obvious. They are short enough to be read at a sitting or two, and no matter how convoluted, bombastic or melodramatic they (all of them) can get, they are written in a robust language that (more frequently in some than in others) can rise to poetic heights.

So on a recent holiday, as I basked in a folding chair on the black sands of a beach on the North Island’s west coast, I took out a copy of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and read it with considerable pleasure. It was the first time I had encountered the play since seeing an execrable film version of it in the early 1970s – of which more later.

In my usual pedantic way, I begin with a few words on the author.

John Ford (c.1586 - c.1640) trained as a lawyer, did not begin any sort of literary career until he was well into his 30s and did not begin writing plays until he was about 50 (in other words, he began writing plays at the age when William Shakespeare ended his writing career and died). Even then, he apparently spent some years in the 1620s writing plays in collaboration with the prolific hack Thomas Dekker.

According to Keith Sturgess’s introduction to his Penguin edition of Three Plays by John Ford, there are seven or eight plays by Ford alone which survive. Four of his plays (including ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore) were published first in the one year 1633-34 and were apparently seen through the press by Ford himself, which means there are few controversies about their texts. This year was not, however, the year when the plays were first written or performed. It is probable that ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore was first performed in 1629. Anyway, it is clear that Ford was mainly a Caroline playwright, flourishing in the two decades before the civil war and the Puritans shut down the theatres.

So to the play itself.

Popular in Ford’s own time, and revived in the Restoration period, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore basically disappeared from the published canon and was not regularly performed again until the mid-20^th century. The reason is obvious. Its central subject is incest.

In Parma, in Italy, Giovanni is madly, passionately, carnally, wilfully and incorrigibly in love with his sister Annabella. He cannot be argued out of his passion by his confessor Friar Bonaventura. Bonaventura presents all the arguments against the perversity of incest, counsels Giovanni to fast and pray, and threatens him with hellfire. Giovanni persists, claiming that erotic love alone is his moral criterion and it trumps all other arguments. It is clear that Annabella (encouraged by her lewd – and appropriately named – maid Putana) reciprocates Giovanni’s love and is a willing partner in incest. They sleep together a number of times. As Giovanni says to Annabella at the beginning of Act Two:

“Come, Annabella, no more Sister now,
But Love, a name more gracious; do not blush,
Beauty’s sweet wonder, but be proud to know
That yielding thou hast conquer’d, and inflamed
A heart, whose tribute is thy brother’s life.” [Act Two, Scene 1]

Speaking to Annabella, the lewd maid Putana encourages incest thus:

“Nay, what a paradise of joy have you past under! why, now I commend thee, charge. Fear nothing, sweet-heart; what though he be your brother? your brother’s a man, I hope; and I say still, if a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take any body, father or brother, all is one.” [Act Two, Scene 1]

Going once again to Friar Bonaventura, Giovanni refuses to repent of the carnal delights he has enjoyed with his sister. Thus the essence of Acts One and Two as I understand them.

But in Act Three comes the inevitable climax. Annabella is now pregnant to her brother. What to do? Earlier in the play, Giovanni had already suggested that, for respectability’s sake, Annabella could marry somebody else while continuing to be his mistress. Now the need to marry and provide a pretext for her pregnancy becomes urgent.

As we have known since the beginning of the play, Florio, the father of Giovanni and Annabella, is already seeking a suitable husband for Annabella. There are two chiefs suitors. One is a nitwit called Bergetto, who provides the play’s (forced) comic relief by his inept wooing, which greatly embarrasses his uncle, the level-headed Donado. Bergetto is so inept that at one stage his idea of paying court is to tell Annabella that he loves her almost as much as Parmesan cheese. Annabella definitively rejects clownish Bergetto at the end of Act Two and later Bergetto is killed in a brawl with a third possible suitor called Grimaldi. The more serious suitor is the stern and wealthy nobleman Soranzo. In Act Three, the pregnant Annabella visits Friar Bonaventura and, unlike her brother, seems now to repent sincerely of her incest. She follows the friar’s advice that it is her duty to marry, to be a good wife and to raise her child. She has already confessed that if she were to marry anyone, it would be Soranzo.

So she chooses to marry Soranzo.

But she is not aware that there are strings attached to Soranzo. For years he had had as his mistress a married woman called Hippolita. Now Hippolita’s husband is dead and Hippolita has expected Soranzo to marry her. Knowing that Soranzo is about to marry Annabella, Hippolita plans to poison him. Her plan is thwarted by Soranzo’s loyal servant Vasques, who tricks her into drinking her own poison in a spectacular wedding-feast scene (Act Four, Scene 1) where Hippolita dies in front of all the guests assembled for the nuptials of Soranzo and Annabella. It is at this point that the play descends into sensational melodrama. I agree with T. S. Eliot, in his 1932 essay on John Ford, that “The subplot of Hippolita is tedious, and her death superfluous.” The tedium is extended by a further element of the subplot in which we discover (yawn!) that Hippolita’s husband Richardetto is not really dead and has business of his own to attend to and fiddle-dee-dee and who cares?

Let us get back to the central matter of Giovanni, Annabella and Soranzo.

Once Annabella’s pregnancy become obvious, Soranzo is aware that he has been cuckolded. In a scene of considerable violence (Act Four, Scene 3), Soranzo rages:

Now I must be the dad
To all that gallimaufry that is stuff’d
In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb! —
Why, must I?

He slaps Annabella about and drags her by her hair as he tries to get her to divulge the name of her lover. But she refuses to give it, and indeed taunts him. For the second time in the play, it is his servant Vasques who comes to Soranzo’s aid. Vasques advises Soranzo to treat Annabella more gently, and when the married couple have left the stage, Vasques quizzes Annabella’s lewd accomplice Putana. Vasques pretends to be as appreciative of salacious gossip as his fellow-servant Putana is, and easily gets her to reveal that Annabella’s brother Giovanni fathered the baby. At once, Vasques whistles up a troop of hired banditti who haul Putana away and (offstage) torture her and have her eyes put out for encouraging the crime and mortal sin of incest. (I could stretch a point and see blinding linked with incest as being an echo of Oedipus, but if it is, it is not emphasised by the playwright.)

Act Five gives us the outcome. Annabella is now completely and sincerely disgusted by her incest and has no desire to renew her love for Giovanni. This is made clear in two scenes between them. More to the point, on the occasion of their father Florio’s birthday, Vasques is arranging for Giovanni’s sin to be revealed and Giovanni to be killed. Getting wind of this, Giovanni has his last long conversation with his sister. He rebukes her for betraying their love. Then he stabs her to death, also killing the baby in her womb. At Florio’s birthday feast, he appears before the assembled party with, dripping on his dagger, the heart of Annabella, which he has ripped out of her copse. General melee, wherein both Giovanni and Soranza, the brother and the husband, are killed, and the servant Vasques is banished to his native Spain for his part in the violence.

It is left to a Cardinal to speak the play’s last words, describing Annabella and giving the play its title:

We shall have time
To talk at large of all; but never yet
Incest and murder have so strangely met.
Of one so young, so rich in nature’s store,
Who could not say, ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore? [Act Five, Scene 6]

What can one make of this melange of tragic moments, melodrama, clumsy comedy, sheer sensationalism and much robust poetic dialogue? At the least I can say that it kept me reading and would doubtless have kept Caroline and Restoration audiences watching, but I’d be dodging my duty if I did not say something about that central matter of incest.

T. S. Eliot commends the play for not being prurient inasmuch as it deals with incest directly and openly and therefore does not indulge in the sly nudge-and-wink insinuations found in other plays by Ford. More recent commentators have taken Giovanni’s passionate declarations of love for his sister at face value, and have concluded that John Ford is morally neutral in the matter of incest.

My own reading of the play makes me reject both views.

Pace Eliot, nobody in 1629 would have written a play about incest without wanting to attract an audience by the sheer audacity of the subject – in other words, by its sensationalism. In that respect it is a prurient play. As for moral neutrality – it depends on how you read the character of Giovanni, and I read him as an intelligent, articulate and self-centred young man who borders on being a psychopath. Again and again he blames fate or destiny for his choices. In a soliloquy (Act One, Scene 2) he declares that “ ‘tis my fate that leads me on” to commit incest with his sister. He morally blackmails Annabella by telling her  “ ‘tis my destiny that you must either love or I must die” (also Act One, Scene 2). He sounds the same note elsewhere when Friar Bonventura attempts to reason with him. The argument is, in effect, that he is not responsible for his own actions – that he is compelled by forces he cannot control. This is the psychopath’s standard reasoning for doing what he knows to be vicious. More tellingly, note how in the last two acts, Giovanni brushes aside all of Annabella’s remorse and real concern for him, as if she is merely ruining his own feelings.

When she is locked up by her angry husband, the soliloquy with which Annabella opens Act Five makes her own feelings plain:
Beauty that clothes the outside of the face,
Is cursed if it be not cloth’d with grace.
Here like a turtle, (mew’d up in a cage,)
Unmated, I converse with air and walls,
And descant on my vile unhappiness.
O Giovanni, that hast had the spoil
Of thine own virtues, and my modest fame;
Would thou hadst been less subject to those stars
That luckless reign’d at my nativity!
O would the scourge, due to my black offence,
Might pass from thee, that I alone might feel
The torment of an uncontrouled flame! (Act Five, Scene 1)

She, in other words, still has some regard for her brother’s feelings and the danger he is in. But he, in his murder of her and her child, does not reciprocate such feelings. Her rejection of him is an offence to him. The clear characterisation of such an egomaniac is no endorsement of incest. And yet, as a last thought on this matter, is John Ford pulling the old Cecil B. de Mille trick of attracting an audience by the depiction of lurid vice and then preaching a moral lesson on it? (Have the exciting orgies in The Ten Commandments and then have Moses coming in to condemn them.) For all that, the conversations between Giovanni and Friar Bonaventura, and Giovanni and Annabella, are dramatically the most arresting scenes in the play.

As I feel about so many other plays of the late Jacobean and Caroline periods, there is in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore the sense that John Ford is plundering and copying theatrical tricks from earlier plays. To that extent ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is a “decadent” play. Putana’s scenes with Annabella are like the (forthright, but far less corrupt) Nurse’s scenes with Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Indeed the whole situation of Florio trying to marry off a daughter without knowing that she is already involved in a love affair echoes Romeo and Juliet, just as the scene in which Friar Bonaventura, in his cell, pronounces Annabella and Soranzo officially engaged echoes Friar Lawrence’s secret wedding of Romeo and Juliet.

Friar Bonaventura on the whole is treated as a positive character. However, in an English play written in the 1620s, you can expect at least one anti-papist dig. It happens when a Cardinal takes Grimaldi under his protection, even though Grimaldi had just killed the foolish Bergetto. Florio gets to say to Bergetto’s grieving uncle Donado:

O impudence!
Had he the face to speak it, and not blush?
Come, come, Donado, there’s no help in this,
When cardinals think murder’s not amiss:
Great men may do their wills, we must obey,
But Heaven will judge them for’t, another day. (Act Three, Scene 9)

            Of course the play, being set in Italy, assumes that Italians are tricky, devious and morally lax – but then that is a convention of the dramaturgy of the age, allowing English audiences to pretend that they didn’t share the same vices.

I could stretch a point and see a vague imitation of the “echo” scene in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy in Act Three, Scene 2, where Annabella turns down Soranzo, but their conversation is overheard by Giovanni, allowing for the sort of three-way ironical dialogue that B. and F. used. But that is it for my comments on the play itself.

It read easily. It held my attention as I sat on a folding chair over black sand and saw the Tasman breakers come crashing in. I cannot be ungrateful to a 400-year-old play which does that, can I?

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Now for that execrable film version of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore which I mentioned early in this notice.

There’s no way of escaping the fact that the main thing attracting film-makers and theatre producers to this play now is the subject of incest, and the possibilities of showing it explicitly on stage and screen. A number of films (including the Scandinavian My Sister, My Love) have been very loosely based on Ford’s play. All of them titillate audiences with the promise of “forbidden love” and then proceed to show Giovanni and Annabella bonking and fondling and rutting. The same is true of modern stage presentation. Google ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and look at the images associated with it. They are mainly theatre posters and stills of bums, boobs and bonking. Of course this would not have been possible in John Ford’s day (all female roles were played by boys or young men, remember?) and the text of the play naturally keeps all sexual intercourse offstage.

In 1971, the Italian Giuseppe Patroni Griffi directed a film version of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which was called in Italian Addio, Fratello Crudele (Farewell, Cruel Brother). Charlotte Rampling played Annabella with her usual icy demeanour, and the very minor English sex-symbol Oliver Tobias played Giovanni. Only a limited part of the dialogue (in the dubbed version I saw) belonged to John Ford, most of it being Hollywoodese. Visually, its Italian Renaissance setting was okay, but its emphasis was the “forbidden love” titillation angle. So roll on Rampling and Tobias shagging in various angles and positions against moans and seductive music. The aesthetics of a smutty magazine basically.