Tis Pity She's a Whore II

There isn't a big variety of pictures that correlate with this play. There is nothing related to the author at all, no tourist sites, no movie stills. Just modern theater productions, and I didn't see anything among those that really grabbed me.
IV, ii. 27-8 RICHARDETTO:
"Your chaste and single life shall crown your birth;
Who dies a virgin lives a saint on earth."

My enthusiasm started to grow thin around the last scene of Act IV. I think perhaps this was because what I was taking to be comedy was beginning to be muted, and the trappings of tragedy were beginning to be asserted without my understanding of the characters having been properly prepared to wrestle with what that implied.

V, ii 24-5 SORANZO (the nobleman who was to be Annabella's legal intended):
"Revenge is all the ambition I aspire:
To that I'll climb or fall; my blood's on fire."

These lines drew a laugh.

Most of the characters in this tragedy go to their deaths unrepetant and apparently unconscious of any error or imprudence in the various poor choices they have made. Annabella wavers a little in the end and makes some gestures in the direction of becoming a respectable person but, as she has gotten pregnant just as she is about to be handed off to Soranzo, Giovanni resolves the situation by murdering her (out of excessive love), at which he calls out "Go thou, white in thy soul, to fill a throne/of innocence and sanctity in Heaven." The meaning of this, I take it, is that because there was genuine love between them, that makes it all OK; her soul remains unstained.

V, vi. 43-5; 47-50 GIOVANNI:
"...Father, no.
For nine months' space in secret I enjoy'd
Sweet Annabella's sheets...
Soranzo, thou know'st this; thy paler cheek
Bears the confounding print of thy disgrace,
For her too fruitful womb too soon bewray'd
The happy passage of our stol'n delights..."

All the outrageousness aside, this writer, Ford, had an easy and quite advanced poetic style. Such thoughts as he had did not become confused in a tangle of words and half-baked thoughts and images. It's a good read, especially I think to someone who is younger and unencumbered and to whom getting a grasp on these genres and developments in literary history would still be of use in the rounding of his mind.

I am going on vacation for a week, so if there is anyone who is a regular or semi-regular reader, there probably won't be any new posts until I get back.

John Ford--'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633)--Part 1 I know I said the other day that I didn't like to make rankings, but if the number of items coming to mind to be considered is small enough I don't mind doing a list. So here go the Best Titles in the History of Literature:

1. Tis Pity She's a Whore

2. Just Give Me the Damn Ball--Keyshawn Johnson

3. Tyrannic Love--John Dryden

4. Love in a Tub--Sir George Etheredge

5. (tie) Success is a Choice--Rick Pitino

Surviving at the Top--Donald Trump

When I was reading this, I was thinking to myself, it's sure been a long time since I've read a good comedy about incest. Of course the play is supposed to be a tragedy, and forms an important part of the tradition and all that, but I have to say I found it on the first reading to be too absurd to take seriously as a tragedy, and very often veering on laugh-out-loud funny. Having discovered frequently when seeing a play I have read acted that I understood nothing of what was going on, I should probably see a production of it. Fortunately it appears to be a quite popular revival nowadays, and has the bonus of almost always featuring a pretty young actress in the lead role (this is contrast to the dark years between 1661 and 1894 when the play was apparently not revived a single time).

"Heaven admits no jest" the friar announces in the play's fourth line. Giovanni, the male lead, isn't hiding anything either, as he riotously argues with the holy man:

"Shall then, for that I am her brother born,

My joys be ever banish'd from her bed?"

Far from backing down at this insolence, the friar continues to dish out good advice:

"Beg heaven to cleanse the leprosy of lust

That rots thy soul, acknowledge what thou art,

A wretch, a worm, a nothing..."

In Scene ii the girls come in, and happily the bawdiness is no less rife. Giovanni discovers that his sister/lover is being married off, but he does not take the news docilely, and amps up the sexy talk:

"Such lips would tempt a saint; such hands as those

Would make an anchorite lascivious."

My book was used. The previous owner was someone named Laura Phillips who was apparently loving all the sexual innuendo, as she helpfully pointed it out in the margins on every page.

II. i. 47-9 PUTANA (tut'ress to Annabella):

"...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 anybody, father or brother, all is one."

This is insane.

II. ii 38-9 HIPPOLITA (wife to Richardetto [a supposed physician]):

"And shall the conquest of my lawful bed,

My husband's death urg'd on by his disgrace", et al.

This is what life is like at it highest levels I think.

I liked the plot of this. Since there is pretty much nothing holding back the characters from doing or saying whatever they want to anyone, and they are all glib and funny, its various scenarios largely create their own interest.

Annabella's ignored fiance comes to the doctor requesting a love potion in II. iii. For some reason I took up the idea that this was an allegory and the dose was going to produce viagra-like effects in him but I don't see what I was thinking now.

II. v. the confession scene is hilarious.

GIOVANNI: "Your age o'errules you; had you youth like mine,

You'd make her love your Heaven, and her divine."

and, after a rundown of the charms of his sister's eyes, breath, cheeks, etc:

"But father, what is else for pleasure fram'd,

Lest I offend your ears, shall go unnam'd."

III, v. GRIMALDI (a Roman gentleman, the betrothed of Annabella, before poisoning the doctor's rival in love, whom the doctor has convinced him is actually his own):

"...I know

'Tis an unnoble act, and not becomes

A soldier's valor, but in terms of love,

Where merit cannot sway, policy must."

Tingly! "Have you not sweetmeats or dainty devices for me?/You shall have enough, sweetheart." (III, v. 41-2). Bawdy! "Be rul'd; when we have done what's fit to do/Then you may kiss your fill, and bed her too."

The evil cardinal in III. ix allows us to indulge our myriad anti-Catholic prejudices. So satisfying! There is a hopeful note at the end of the scene though:

"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."

As we begin Act IV the murder count already stands at 2. The action in this act is extraordinary. Poisoned, the truly choice woman that is Hippolita expires, but she hardly goes quietly:

"...heat above hell fire!--

Yet ere I pass away--cruel, cruel flames!--

Take here my curse amongst you; may thy bed

Of marriage be a rack onto thy heart,

Burn blood and boil in vengeance--O my heart,

My flame's intolerable--mayst thou live

To father bastards, may her womb bring forth

Monsters, and die together in your sins,

Hated, scorn'd, and unpitied--O!--O!--" (dies)

On this note, the friar has some words of true wisdom to end the scene:

"I fear the event; that marriage seldom's good,

Where the bride-banquet so begins in blood."

I was hoping to knock this out in one posting, but I think I'll just do a short second one.

John Dryden--All For Love (or, The World Well Lost) (1678)

This is the last of the Cleopatra plays. As I had read this one not too many years earlier I just skimmed over it, and did not take a lot of notes. The first time I had read it, I had liked it quite a bit, thought it reminiscent of Shakespeare, on whose own Cleopatra play it was modeled, perhaps even a sparer, cleaner version of it, or, at least, was my impression. Looking over it again just after having read the Shakespeare though, as well as the Daniel and the Shaw, I did not like it quite as much. For one thing his Antony struck me as perhaps overly romantic ("One look of hers should thaw me into tears,/And I should melt, till I were lost again...If I should hear she took another love,/The news would break my heart--now I must go;/For every time I have returned, I feel/My soul more tender..."). Shakespeare's Antony, it goes without saying, is much manlier than this. For that matter, his Lepidus is manlier than this too.

The poetry of the speeches I have marked in several places as "so-so" ("And while she speaks, night steals upon the day/Unmarked of those that hear: Then she's so charming/Age buds at sight of her, and swells to youth...), "humorous" ("Even I, who hate her/With a malignant joy behold such beauty/And, while I curse, desire it") and "kind of silly" ("And then he grew familiar with her hand/Squeezed it, and worried it with ravenous kisses") .

There is some bawdiness thrown in for the Restoration crowd ("Your Cleopatra/Dolabella's Cleopatra; every man's Cleopatra...You know she's not much used to lonely nights...ANTONY: Though heaven and earth should witness it/I'll not believe her tainted. VENTIDIUS: I'll bring you then, a witness/From hell, to prove her so...")

Octavia (Antony's wife)'s pain gets more play in this version of the story than it usually does, though there still isn't a lot of sympathy for her.

"Sure that face/Was meant for honesty; but Heaven mismatched it/And furnished treason out with nature's pomp/To make its work more easy." This makes little sense, on the part of Heaven.

Antony does show stirrings of being a genuine man later on though, when he declares "I do not know how long I can be tame" and "my justice and revenge/Will cry so loud within me, that my pity/Will not be heard for either."

Overall not as impressive as I remembered; characters are not grand or even particularly interesting. Mirrors the age I suppose. Much too soppy-romantic. Images, poetic tension better elsewhere.

Of all the figures in English literary history who have been the dominant force in their own epoch, as Dryden was in the 1670s and 80s, he is really the only one whose works don't arouse much excitement in anybody nowadays. Pope doesn't seem to be read all that much, but most of his work is at least in print, while of the twenty or so plays Dryden wrote it is difficult to find more than 2 or 3 in a common edition (Pope is also still broadly considered to be a very good poet, I think). I am also not aware of any of these plays being revived theatrically, if ever. Dryden does not, compared to the other authors of this class, including his own rough contemporary Milton, seem to have either the same quality of ideas, or the same control over such ideas and other material he does have. He was a very shaky literary dictator, often in a defensive mode in his public political and philosophical disputes, and was even suffered to be beaten up in the street by thugs on account of a book review, all of which it is hard to imagine happening, or being allowed to happen to, the likes of Milton or Samuel Johnson or Dickens.

Francis Beaumont--The Knight of the Burning Pestle (ca. 1607-08)

For most of the last 400 years Beaumont's famous collaborator, John Fletcher, received half-credit for the authorship of this play, but modern scholarship has judged it to be the work of Beaumont alone. After some anguish over this discovery, mainly at the cleverness and authority that other people in my own lifetime have managed to attain upon my own pet subjects, I am at peace with it.

There are a number of things going on in this play which make it somewhat interesting to read, and would probably make it interesting, as well as useful, to see a performance of, as a lot of the scenes and actions are difficult to visualize dramatically just in reading. The plot is a takeoff on Don Quixote, satirizing the standard romances of the day, but even bawdier, and without any inhibiting moral counterpoint. The sex jokes never stop. Indeed, the title itself can be understood in a raunchy manner: the word Burning in the argot of the time, according to the Introduction, would have been suggestive of syphilis to contemporary audiences, while Pestle can still be imagined, with a little exertion, as something naughty even with us. There is also a device of having characters who are supposedly from the audience interjecting into and influencing the course of the play, which characters being at a very crass level of culture I gathered to be a satire on theater audiences. I don't doubt but that somebody recognized as avant-garde has employed this exact device within the last fifteen years, and won the admiration of some beautiful art-girl for it.

In Beaumont's hands the English language, which had attained such heights of noble and elegant expression in the period of literary history that was starting to slow to a close when he came on the scene, retains a rougher, not quite fully tamed character:

"Father, it's true in arms I ne'er shall clasp her,
For she is stol'n away by your man Jasper." (Act II 396-7)

or

"I know the place where he my loins did swaddle.
I'll get six horse, and to each a saddle." (II 410-1)

Testing women's constancy--not necessary in every case, not desirable in any, as disaster will inevitably ensue. This is one of the top 100 lessons of life that the reader of pre-1700 literature will absorb intact just by immersion, for it is a ubiquitous plot device.

Act III, 275: "...but of all the sights that ever were in London since I was married, me thinks the little child that was so fair grown about the members was the prettiest, that and the hermaphrodite." There is a note explaining that, "Like Jonson, Beaumont is satirizing the citizens' taste for freaks". I must admit, that while the idea of actual freaks doesn't hold much fascination for me, that of freak shows always has. I looked up the passage referred to in Jonson, but I didn't think it was worth transcribing as a stand alone quote.

Interlude IV 44-45:
"Now little fish on tender stone begin to cast their bellies,
And sluggish snails, that erst were mute, do creep out of their shellies."

It is hard to imagine Shakespeare or Spenser or Donne stooping quite so low as to use 'shellies' as a rhyme for bellies, but in general Beaumont deserves some credit for doing some unusual, even odd things to try to distinguish his work amidst the rugged and pitiless ('pitilesse?') competition of the time. There is a note on this passage that "the snails were used in love divinations; they were set to crawl on the hearth, and were thought to mark in the ashes the initials of the lover's name." I have noticed some snails hanging about the threshold of my back door. I will have to keep my eyes peeled for this.

Act V, ll.194-7. More gratuitous bawdiness:
"With hey, trixy, terlery-whisking,
The world it runs on wheels,
When the young man's --- ---,
Up goes the maiden's heels."


I put these in just to prove that I am not alone in my depraved instincts.


A frequent accolade that is bestowed on the works of celebrated authors as one of the qualities separating them from those of lesser ones is that they are "ambitious". This quality as a measure of praise remains uniform across the ages but it has always seemed to me that the nature of this "ambition" as a conscious idea either changes dramatically according to the period in which it originates, or means something more expansive, as well as elusive, than the idea that is suggested by the use of the word in our time. Though it is pretty clear that, in what is traditionally called Western civilization at least, poets and singers and makers of pictures have seen themselves as belonging to a distinct class of people for most of recorded history, their idea of the significance that their art holds in a particular society, or even subsociety, as well as projecting far into the future, affects and distorts the vitality of the arts at various times, including the nature of its ambitions. In the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period in England, a time that compared to our own must be considered fairly primitive as far as the flourishing of accurate knowledge and information went, poets and dramatists found that they were able to conceive of themselves as arbiters of truth and figures in and shapers of the continuum of history, which in turn was itself generally considered to be a worthwhile and exciting process, such that their ambitions, rather than being wholly calculated and daring as we are inclined to believe great artistic achievement must be in our own time, were very much the results of an expansiveness of the artistic mind into wider terrain that the unique circumstances of the time allowed. These men, whose entire potential audience, as far as they knew, consisted of perhaps a few thousand people mostly concentrated in the square mile of the City of London, could with absolute confidence compare themselves on an equal basis with the greatest authors of antiquity, or predict immortality for their work into a future world of which I am certain Shakespeare himself could not have wholly fathomed the cross-cultural immensity and technological and scientific advancement, though perhaps he would have been able to overcome it with his strength of will and personality intact. Obviously I am trying to find some excuse for myself not being able to muster this necessary confidence and clearness of worldview to accomplish anything, but it is not working.

Beaumont was 32 when he died, at which age many of the more ambitious would-be authors today are just getting out of writing school, and the less ambitious ones are starting to realize that they have deceived themselves about their life prospects as far as having any kind of meaningful interaction with the worlds of thought and culture goes. He was not the only author of that general time period to die young. Marlowe only lasted to 29, being famously stabbed in a bar brawl after having been involved in numerous secretive government affairs all over Europe and writing 3 or 4 of the more singular works in the language. Sir Phillip Sidney, though a generation older than Beaumont, was also 32 when he met his demise on the battlefield. Like his similiarly exciting contemporary Sir Walter Ralegh, when he was alive people ranked his poetic talent as about fifth or sixth place among his qualities, as it probably should be in any well-developed man, though he was able to fill a whole volume with verse that remains available in mass market editions and anthologies today, and this in spite of leading an extremely active and dynamic non-writing life as well as dying young. Certainly it was a younger, or perhaps more accurately a less old world at that time, and younger men have the gift both of playing up and having their exploits played up to seem as if they were greater and more significant than perhaps objectively they are. If young men can produce passable and lively art, lead dynamic activity, introduce new ideas and inventions, be dashing in large enough numbers as to keep the women of the country vividly interested in them, it is a sign that the society itself is living, and thriving. The inability of young men in recent years to do almost any of these things well, to assume any real leadership role in most western societies, has had a very powerful negative effect on the level on cultural morale and optimism in these lands. In America with our war there has been some effort to play up the greatness of the young men of the armed forces so as to rouse up the spirit of the nation, but this is strained, I think, by several handicaps, the widespread unpopularity of the government, and by extension the war, to begin with, along with a sense, perhaps untrue but pervasive nonetheless, that the young men in the army do not have much mastery of the situation, and consequently their fates, and that this is in a not insignificant way a failure of the collective intellect, not only of the members of the armed forces but of the greater society as well. There is a certain degree of pressure in all militarized nations to idealize soldiers and the military culture, but I cannot do that except when presented with individual cases of wise and inspired deliberation and judgement that would enable me to feel comfortable trusting my life as well as moral self to that person's hands in the most extreme circumstances. At Sidney's death, it is frequently said, all of England mourned. All of England, I am sure, never mourned anyone, but that part of it that did not could be written out of the story for the sake of amplifying its power, which it does beautifully and effectively; unlike most modern historians, I don't want anyone who didn't mourn Sidney acknowledged as having existed while I am reading an account of his life. The technique only works however as long as the people who are written out don't come back and read the story, which they increasingly and infuriatingly do nowadays.

Beaumont was born in the "new" manor house--it was built in the 1500s--at Grace Dieu in Leicestershire, which is not even described as a town but as the "ivy-clad ruin of an Augustinian Priory". It sounds like a pleasant place to pass a few hours. Beaumont is buried in Westminster Abbey, having gotten in early enough so that he seems not quite worthy of the honor now (especially as the churches and cemeteries where other authors of his general caliber were buried are now parking lots and high-rise apartment buildings). He did however write the charming "Ode on the Tombs in Westminster Abbey" which probably helped his cause a great deal:

"Mortality behold and fear
What a change of flesh is here!
Think how many royal bones
Sleep within this heap of stones:
Here they lie had realms and lands,
Who now want strength to stir their hands."

The Abbey is by far the most frequent spot of pilgrimage which my system would require me to visit. Among the superstars and B-listers buried there are Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson, Johnson, Chaucer, Addison, Spenser, Kipling, Newton, Darwin, Faraday, Elizabeth I, and everybody's favorite king, Henry V, who died aged 35 in the height of his greatness and has the best tomb in the building. It is difficult to really take most of this in when one is there though due to the crowds, the quantity of tombs, etc. Nonetheless it is always the first place I go when I arrive in London, though it is usually closed because my habit when I fly overseas is to go to bed when I arrive, get up around 5 or 6, go to the really iconic site in town and wander around for an hour when the crowds have dwindled, have dinner and a couple of drinks, and go back to bed. In Rome I go to the Vatican, in Paris to the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Elysee, in London to the Abbey. I am still looking for a good orientation point in New York. I like the Battery a lot in the morning, but it isn't really near anything except the financial district, which is not exactly my home turf. Grand Central Station I like too, though one passes through the train stations in the European cities without them really being the destinations themselves. I don't know. When I was a penniless 19 year old sleeping in Central Park and hoping for magic to strike me I spent a few pleasant days--so much time I had then!--just reading in the grand NYPL building on 42nd Street like I was Lenin or somebody. Maybe I'll try that next time.

Something happened last week, which I wish I could figure out, that resulted in 58 people (besides me) viewing my profile. I also got 4 comments, albeit of an inferior quality, on one of my posts. This traffic has slowed down again, however. You cannot accuse me of striking while the iron is hot.