John Ford - Tis pity shes a whore

ROUTLEDGE ENGLISH TEXTS

GENERAL EDITOR JOHN DRAKAKIS

TIS PITY SHES A WHORE

John Ford

ROUTLEDGE ENGLISH TEXTS

GENERAL EDITOR JOHN DRAKAKIS

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ALEXANDER POPE: Selected Poetry and Prose ed. Robin Sowerby

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SPENCER: Selected Writings ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson

OSCAR WILDE: The Importance of Being Earnest ed. Joseph Bristow

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TIS PITY
SHES A WHORE

John Ford

Edited by Simon Barker

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.

1997 Simon Barker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-415-04947-4 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-203-13494-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17569-7 (Glassbook Format)

This edition of a play set in John Fords imaginary Parma is dedicated to the many friends I have made during frequent visits to the university in the real Italian city of Parma.

Contents

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the following people for their help with this edition. Lisa Bartlett checked the text of the play for consistency and suggested some of the footnotes. Louise Peck of the library at King Alfreds College dealt cheerfully and methodically with my many requests for inter-library loans. Talia Rodgers and her colleagues at Routledge were encouraging and patient. Most of all, I am grateful to John Drakakis for his support as editor of the series and for introducing me to John Fords extraordinary dramatic writing.

Simon Barker
Cheltenham 1996

Introduction

THE AUTHOR

Little is known of the life of the author of Tis Pity Shes a Whore beyond a few dates and some records of his education and career. He was the second son of Thomas Ford, a wealthy Devonshire landowner who had married the niece of the influential Sir John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice of England from 1592 until 1607. There is a record of John Fords baptism at Ilsington in Devon on 17 April 1586 and of a John Ford, described as a gentleman from Devon, entering Exeter College, Oxford, in March 1601. Ford was admitted to the Middle Temple in November 1602 to continue his education and gain a legal training and although he was never called to the bar, it is generally assumed that he made a career in the law and remained in London until at least 1639, when his last play was published, possibly retiring to Devon just before the period of the Civil War. Evidence that he remained a resident of the Middle Temple whilst embarking upon a secondary career as a pamphleteer, poet and dramatist includes a note of his being reprimanded in 1617 for participating in a dispute with the Temple authorities over their strict dress code. As late as 1638 he is still described as Master John Ford of the Middle Temple in the introductory material attached to his play The Fancies Chaste and Noble. An allusion to Ford by William Hemminge in his elegy On Randolphs Finger (c.1632) is often quoted as an isolated comment on his personality:

Deep In a dumpe Iacke forde alone was gott
With folded Armes and Melancholye hatt.

That we know so little about Ford may be to our advantage as twentieth-century readers since we are less likely to fall into idle biographical speculation, searching for an interpretation of his creative work in a catalogue of anecdote and authorial background. To provide a context for a study of his work it is more rewarding to examine the intellectual circle in which he moved (and with whose members he collaborated on a number of occasions), the theatre for which his dramatic writing was designed, and the general issues and debates which influenced his art. An obvious point, but one worth emphasizing, is that John Fords life spanned a period dominated by the regimes of three monarchs under whom the London to which he had come to live in the closing years of Elizabeths reign was the scene of almost unprecedented political turmoil and uncertainty which had a marked effect upon its theatres and upon the intellectual life of those who generated the plays performed in those theatres. Much of the critical writing described in the essay which concludes this volume comments on Fords pessimism and the morally disturbing nature of his plays, none of which is surprising when the historical circumstances of their production is looked at in any detail. Jacobean and Caroline London was experiencing not only the political tension at Court and in Parliament which was to lead to war and revolution in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, but also an attendant re-examination of a range of social institutions and values to do with religion, sexuality and morality which can be seen as providing subject matter for the drama of the period.

A significant feature of the process by which the theatre of Fords day was provided with a steady supply of dramatic writing was that most writers chose to collaborate with others at some stage in their careers. The attribution of lines or scenes to a particular hand in plays which were often a joint effort has been a particular preoccupation for some modern scholars, but one which reveals more of their own assumptions about cultural production than anything about the assumptions that governed dramatic writing in the late sixteenth and early seventeeth centuries. In Fords time, notions of authorship and individual creativity were rather different from those which came to prevail in subsequent periods. What may be judged by modern scholars as a deficiency in production, particularly in the case of Shakespeare, where the uneven quality of some plays is occasionally blamed on his working with lesser mortals, could well have been seen as a positive virtue at the time. Collaboration resulted in a sharing of interests and influences in a community of ideas, just as the business of enacting the final product was a responsibility shared between actors and, finally, with the plays audiences.