Ford's stagecraft,’Tis Pity She's a Whore,and Mason's The Turk

John Ford's best-known play may not have been written until the Caroline era, when it was first printed, but as commentators have noted ’Tis Pity She's a Whore (1621–31) is a quintessentially Jacobean play, and not only for its ‘tragedy of blood’ subject matter. ¹ Ford habitually used and reused material from the works of numerous forebears. To take one example, Love's Sacrifice (1632): the Revels editor establishes links principally with William Shakespeare's Othello (1604) and Romeo and Juliet (1595) and Philip Massinger's The Duke of Milan (1621), but also identifies echoes of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1613–14) and The White Devil (1612), Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women (c. 1621) and his collaboration with William Rowley, The Changeling (1622), John Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1600), Massinger's The Roman Actor (1626), ‘and other plays of the period’. ² Across the Ford canon, as Lisa Hopkins has documented, we find plentiful evidence of the playwright's immersion in the English theatre, which underwrites ’Tis Pity She's a Whore's ‘extraordinarily Jacobean character’. ³ Two plays in particular appear to have made a lasting impression on Ford, namely Romeo and Juliet and Othello, and they contributed significantly to the composition of ’Tis Pity She's a Whore. ⁴ To the catalogue of plays mostly well known and much appreciated today may be added another, at the other end of the spectrum, a little-known play in the repertory of an obscure children's troupe operating earlier in the century; this play too, I will propose, was a significant influence on ’Tis Pity She's a Whore in particular and may also be a source for a particular feature of the playwright's dramaturgy more generally. ⁵

His literary production aside, little is known of Ford's life, but given that he is recorded as entering the Middle Temple in late 1602, he may well have seen on the stage John Mason's The Turk, a tragedy written for the short-lived Whitefriars company, which was active for some nine months in 1607–08 and (as far as its brief lifespan and small repertory scholars have established indicates) concentrated on comedy – with a particular specialism in bawdy jokes. ⁶ This indoor theatre was located in an area ‘notorious for its brothels’, and only a street away from the Inns of Court; ‘the liberty of the Whitefriars shared a gate with the Inner Temple, and law students undoubtedly dominated the audience’. ⁷ Ford was expelled for non-payment of his buttery bill in Hilary Term 1605/6 but readmitted in June 1608. ⁸ It is thus highly probable that he frequented the Whitefriars theatre. In this period, as Martin White points out, though ‘not yet a dramatist himself, Ford was evidently mixing with playwrights, producing commendatory verses for Barnaby Barnes's Four Books of Office’, published in 1606. ⁹ If plays such as Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1600) and George Chapman's Bussy D’Ambois (c. 1604) – both written for children's companies – are among the candidates for Ford's sources for ’Tis Pity She's a Whore, so too, conceivably, is Mason's play. ¹⁰ If he never saw The Turk on stage, he may have encountered it in print: first issued in 1610, a second quarto appeared in 1632. ¹¹ While there is no record of the play being revived, the possibility that it was ought not to be discounted: the parallel traced in what follows is notably theatrical in nature, rather than ‘literary’ as such. But since it is also feasible that Ford knew the play only in print – and, if so, it was Q2 rather Q1 that he had access to – there are potential dating implications, since 1632 is towards the upper end of the range for Ford's play, which traditionally scholars have provisionally allocated to the years 1629–33. Overall, however, the balance of probability is that Ford knew the play in some form before it was reissued in 1632. Indeed, as some scholars have speculated, he may well have written ’Tis Pity She's a Whore considerably earlier than its Caroline printing, before Charles ascended the throne. ¹²

That ’Tis Pity She's a Whore evokes Romeo and Juliet has long been established; as Hopkins puts it, Ford's play is ‘in many ways a sinister rewriting’ of Shakespeare's. ¹³ The parallels may be briefly rehearsed here. The most obvious, of course, is Ford's reworking of the romance between the two lovers. As has often been remarked, Giovanni's wooing of his sister Annabella recalls Romeo's overtures to Juliet, though other Shakespearean influences have also been noted. ¹⁴ But the possible influence of Romeo and Juliet extends beyond the subversive repurposing of the love story. Shakespeare's play opens with a quarrel between the servants of the Capulets and Montagues, which is then broken up by the entrance first of members of the watch, and then of Prince Escalus himself. When the stage is cleared of all but Montague, his wife, and Benvolio, Romeo enters, melancholic, explaining that he is ‘Out of her favour where I am in love’ (1.1.161). ¹⁵ As with the use of the balcony and main stage to symbolise both the lovers’ separation and transgression, and the dialogue between Romeo and Friar Laurence, this scene points to a correspondence with Ford's play, which (reversing the sequence) opens with Giovanni's exchange with his tutor, the Friar, and then depicts the quarrel between Grimaldi and Vasquez. Similarly, elements of Othello have been identified in the gestation of this domestic tragedy. Ford's use of Othello is evident elsewhere, notably in Love's Sacrifice; in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore, among other features, the killing of Desdemona is echoed in the death of Annabella at the hands of her lover-brother, Giovanni. ¹⁶

There is ample evidence that Ford was familiar with both Shakespearean plays and the following discussion does not seek to challenge that consensus. Rather, what is proposed is that Ford's recall and use of Romeo and Juliet and Othello was augmented by – and perhaps in part refracted by or filtered through – his knowledge of Mason's The Turk, for which a case of indebtedness to Othello certainly and Romeo and Juliet possibly might also be made. ¹⁷ In the quest for sources and echoes, scholars have naturally (and with good reason) turned to Shakespeare. But the broader picture demonstrates once more that Ford was an avid consumer of drama from across the spectrum. Distinguishing between thematic parallels scholars have established and stagecraft images offers a useful distinction that brings Mason's play into focus.

As Sonia Massai points out, the ‘peculiar use of the upper stage is one of the most distinctive features of Ford's dramaturgy’, not only in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore but also Perkin Warbeck (1633) and The Lady's Trial (1638); Keith Sturgess, whose work she cites, identifies Troilus and Cressida as a plausible influence on the first of these plays. ¹⁸ The scenes in question are 1.2 and 5.1, but it is in 1.2 – where Anabella and Puttana enter above, mid-scene, following the opening stage direction, ‘Enter Grimaldi and Vasquez ready to fight’ (1.2.0 SD) – that a Shakespearean echo has been detected. In Troilus and Cressida, also in 1.2 (here at the beginning of the scene), a similar scenario unfolds, with the entrance of Cressida and her servant, Alexander. However, the parallel is not as clear-cut as we might suppose. The quarto (1609) and folio texts do not in fact specify the area of the stage used: it is modern editors who add ‘[above]’ to the direction ‘Enter Cressida and her man’ (2.1.0 SD). ¹⁹ While the scenario is thematically comparable – Cressida and the servant Alexander converse, and then a succession of characters (Aeneas, Antenor, Hector, Paris, Helenus, and Troilus, followed by soldiers) enter and then exit – the actual staging comparison depends on modern editors placing Cressida and Alexander ‘above’, and designating the other participants in the scene as ‘[passing by below]’ or ‘[passing over the stage]’. This staging is not impossible, or unlikely, but these modern editorial interventions are essential if the Ford connection is to stand. As they enter, Cressida asks, ‘Who were those went by?’ (1.2.1), and a dialogue of some 30 lines ensues, before they are joined by Pandarus, and then after another 130 lines the procession commences. Clearly these three characters occupy the same area of the stage, and it is likely that if or when the play was performed in improvised or temporary spaces on tour, where an upper stage may not have been available, then they (also) appeared ‘below’, and commented on the procession while on the same plane, though aside from the other characters. The text allows for either (and may have been designed precisely for such flexibility, though it is possible that any such stage direction has simply dropped out in the course of the transmission process), but for its role as an inspiration for Ford to be sustained the use of the upper stage mandated by modern editors is key, rather than evidence from the earliest witnesses. Use of the upper stage here is undeniably the better option in terms of stagecraft and dramatic effect, but we lack the textual evidence to assert unequivocally that this was in fact how it was done.

Conversely, with Romeo and Juliet specific stage directions indicating either a ‘window’ (Q1) or employing the term ‘aloft’ (Q2–4, F), as well as numerous implicit directions or references to movement between stage spaces in the dialogue, confirm the use of the upper stage enshrined in the post-17th-century theatre tradition – and may be taken to reflect earliest practice. ²⁰ However, this parallel, too, is principally thematic in nature. Obviously, the play shares with Ford's a plot based on illicit love, but it is precisely this plot element rather than the play's stagecraft that links it definitively with ’Tis Pity She's a Whore. The stagecraft in Romeo and Juliet is suggestive, but no more than that; it offers a Petrarchan image, or emblem, of two lovers, one above and the other below, rather than a firm parallel as such. Similarly, it is chiefly the theme of transgressive desire and its tragic outcome (and murder of the heroine) rather than confirmation of use of the upper stage (for example, ‘Brabantio at a window’) that justifies critics in tracing Ford's play back to Othello. ²¹

Ford's own use of the upper stage suggests that the influence is at least as likely as to have come from the little-known Whitefriars play, where (‘literary’) theme and (‘theatrical’) presentation coalesce. In three of his plays what we find is the use of this space for the purpose of observation and commentary by one group of characters on another group below. In Perkin Warbeck, at the beginning of Act 2, the Countess of Crawford, Katherine, and Jane, ‘with other Ladies’, assemble to watch the entry of King James, who appears some fifteen lines into the scene, along with Huntley, Crawford, and Dalyell, on the stage below. ²² There they remain until the end of the scene; following the king's entrance with his entourage, Perkin Warbeck is presented to James IV – his first appearance in the play. Immediately after the characters below exit, the countess and Katherine praise his mien and speech respectively; this moment is the catalyst for the latter to fall in love with the stranger. In The Lady's Trial, not quite halfway through 3.1, Levidolche and Benatzi enter, apparently simultaneously: she above, on the upper stage, he below. The latter, her husband in disguise, is not recognised by the former, from whom he is estranged; inevitably, looking down she finds herself attracted to him. And in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore, in a similar moment of uncanny (non)recognition, Annabella alights on her own brother as the most desirable of the suitors who have inadvertently paraded so disastrously before (and below) her.

These three plays share a common scenario, as Massai observes. ²³ The dramatic power of this stagecraft, with its dual focus on two areas of the playing space, is obvious: it is therefore not surprising that Ford used and reused the same device. But clearly neither Romeo and Juliet nor Othello provided him with the inspiration for this device, while Troilus and Cressida is a better candidate, but for reasons of stagecraft whose provenance derives from modern editorial decisions rather than from the earliest witnesses. A much more plausible source, one which brings together both of these features – plot and stagecraft – is a play where Ford may well have found a template for the dramatically powerful second scene in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore we see replayed in The Lady's Trial and Perkin Warbeck. In the first of these plays, the second scene opens with the direction ‘Enter Grimaldi and Vasquez ready to fight’ (1.2.0 SD) – the former a suitor to Annabella, the latter servant to his rival, Soranzo – which they proceed to do after some verbal jousting, only to be interrupted by the entrance of Florio (Annabella and Giovanni's father), Donado (a citizen), and Soranzo himself. As Annabella and Puttana enter ‘above’ (1.2.32 SD), Soranzo explains that the quarrel is over Florio's daughter. The exchange of insults continues until first Grimaldi and then Florio, Donado, Soranzo, and Vasquez exit. This clearing of the lower stage allows for Puttana and Annabella to comment on the suitors’ merits, following which Bergetto (a foolish suitor) and Poggio (his man) enter, and then exit, to further, dismissive commentary from Annabella and her maidservant. This sets up the entrance of Giovanni, and his sister's initial misrecognition.

Some years previously John Mason had scripted a remarkably similar scenario for the Children of the King's Revels. The Turk is set in Florence, rather than Parma, and although the title might suggest an Ottoman sultan (invariably referred to as the ‘Great Turk’ in Western European discourse), Mulleasses is a royal heir residing at the Florentine court usurped by the evocatively named Borgias, whose own son, by way of exchange, is in Constantinople. ²⁴ The play opens with the direction ‘Enter aloft Iulia and Amada’. ²⁵ Julia, Duchess of Florence, is effectively being kept prisoner by Borgias, who is intent on taking control of the city-state and, with Mulleasses's help, conquering and uniting the whole of Italy; his daughter, Amada is Julia's companion-cum-guard. Although married, Borgias plans to kill his wife, Timoclea, clearing the way for marriage to the duchess; unbeknownst to him, Mulleasses has the same objective, notwithstanding that he is cuckolding Borgias while feigning acceptance of his daughter, Amada, to cement his political alliance with Borgias. The play begins with Amada explaining to Julia (for the audience's benefit) that two dukes, of Venice and Ferrara, are besieging Florence in contest for Julia's hand. Amada's commentary lays the ground for their appearance some 30 lines into the play: ‘Enter the Duke of Ferrara at one doore and the Duke of / Venice at another doore and meete / At the midst of the stage’ (B1v).

What ensues in The Turk is very closely echoed in the better-known sequence in Ford's play, which of course also specifies its use of the upper stage and main stage below in conjunction. Puttana's opening remark – ‘How like you this, child? Here's threatening, challenging, quarrelling and fighting on every side, and all is for your sake’ (1.2.67–9) – closely parallels the situation in the Whitefriars play, where Amada addresses Julia:

Giue your sight freedome o’re the citty walls

As the dukes enter below, Amada asks, ‘Se where they appeere: / Madame your loue, which hand for a Dukedome?’ (B1v). Just as Puttana proceeds to discuss the merits of Grimaldi and Soranzo in the face of Annabella's indifference and annoyance – ‘Pray do not talk so much’ (78), ‘Fie, how thou prat'st’ (90)’, ‘Sure the woman took her morning's draught too soon’ (107–8) – so Amada presses upon Julia the merits of one suitor over the other, the former commending the warlike Ferrara, the latter favouring the ‘calme and mild’ Venice (B1v). Like Amada, Puttana's function is to provide information (as well as an opinion) on the respective suitors whose ‘prize’ looks down from the upper stage on those below. In both scenarios the would-be combatants are interrupted. In The Turk a stage direction, ‘Sound Cornets: they stay.’, signals the entrance of Borgias (above) and the exit of Julia and Amada, and cues Venice and Ferrara to ‘stay’ their weapons (B2v); in Ford's play the fight commences but is interrupted and halted by the entry of Florio, Donado, and Soranzo (below).

If a source is sought for this sequence in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore, then Mason's The Turk is surely to be regarded as the best candidate. Ford would appear to draw directly on the dramaturgy he could have seen himself at the Whitefriars some two decades earlier or in an unrecorded revival – perhaps a recent one, if the issuing of Q2 in 1632 points to a later iteration. The sequence of rejected suitors staged at the Cockpit – Grimaldi, Soranzo, and Bergetto – echoes that of the earlier play, where Ferrara and Venice are (seemingly) displaced by Borgias, who in turn would be challenged by Mulleasses for the hand of Julia. So too is the use of the stage space. While other plays provide thematic correspondences – Romeo and Juliet and Othello both offer precedents for the dramatisation of forbidden or transgressive love matches, plays we know that Ford was familiar with – it is The Turk that suggests the clearest analogue in terms of stagecraft. Hopkins does not regard this sequence as one of the many instances where Ford draws on the emblem tradition in his plays, but the tableau effect at the Whitefriars would seem to have left a lasting impression to which Ford returned more than once, though most strikingly in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore. ²⁶ Just as Mason presents a Petrarchan emblem in the form of the suitors besieging the object of desire, looking down from the city walls – conjured through the dialogue, ‘visualised’ by the audience, for which the dual stage with balcony provides a scaffold for the imagination – so does Ford frame the parallel scenario in his ‘domesticated’ Petrarchan Parma.

Moreover, both playwrights exploit the play-world fiction of offstage space. Instead of scripting immediate re-entries of figures who are onstage, go offstage, and then reappear, Mason and Ford use the presence of other characters to delay their respective re-entrances. ²⁷ Just as Borgias exits the upper stage (his first entrance in the play, at which point Julia and Amada exit) but takes a considerable amount of time to enter below, this descent within the tiring-house being ‘covered’ by some twenty lines delivered by Ferrara and Venice, so too Annabella and Putana do not enter the lower stage immediately, following their exit from the upper stage as they pass through the ‘house’ to join Giovanni below; in the meantime, Giovanni delivers a 20-line soliloquy to ‘cover’ this movement through the ‘house’ and their re-entrance. ²⁸

Ford did not need to turn to The Turk for the theme he places at the heart of ’Tis Pity She's a Whore, though Julia – Borgias's niece – frames her uncle's desires in precisely those terms: ‘Vncle I am asham’d that any bloud of mine / Should harbor such an incest’ (E2r). Nevertheless, further evidence for the source proposed here relates to characters and plotting. George Whetstone's Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582) may well have supplied two of the names Ford uses, as Martin Wiggins has proposed, for it features a ‘Bargetto’ and a ‘Soranso’. ²⁹ But in addition to the device of the besieged lady pursued by suitors (and specifically the stagecraft common to both), Mason's play may well also have provided the inspiration for Bergetto and Poggio, in the figures of Bordello (styled in the dramatis personae as ‘an humourous trauellour’) and Pantofle, ‘his Page’ (A1v). The correspondence in their respective initials is suggestive. Both figures – absurd suitors to Annabella and Julia respectively – make their entrance into the playworld cued by another character. Compare the commentary of Borgias's servant, Eunuchus, with Puttana's. In The Turk, as Bordello and Poggio enter, Eunuchus remarks, ‘But who comes heere? oh my spruce he-letcher / That makes his boye saue him the charges of a bawdy house’ (C2v); in Ford, as the two men appear below, Puttana says: ‘But look, sweetheart, look what thing comes now. Here's another of your ciphers to fill up the number. O brave old ape in a silken coat! Observe’ (1.2.109–11). The earlier scenario is repeated in Ford's play, in terms of plot, character-type, and (to an extent) in the visual parallels afforded by the staging.

Each of these characters, paired with a servant, is quite out of place – not only in terms of the play-world fiction, but generically so, too. Mason did not invent the foolish master/witty servant double act of course, but Poggio may be regarded as an expansion of the slighter role played by Pantofle. Both ‘masters’ are buffoonish figures who seem to have blundered into a tragedy from a comedy – the name Bordello suggests as much; and while Bordello's survival is incidental to the action going on around him (and to which he is oblivious), Bergetto's accidental killing by Grimaldi is genuinely unsettling, a comical, harmless character meeting an undeserved (and generically inappropriate) end. Indeed, it would seem that Ford has simply transformed Bordello's chance escape from death into its opposite. Where Bordello – who effectively carries the Whitefriars company's dominant repertorial investment in comedy in this play – entirely unawares, accidentally escapes death, Bergetto's end is a case of mistaken identity in the dark. Indeed, here The Turk provides another link, for in Mason's play first Eunuchus and then the Duke of Ferrara die in accidents, their killers (Ferrara and Borgias respectively) mistaking them for their real quarry. These deaths are fully in keeping with the foregrounded intrigue in the Florence-set play; in Ford's Parma, the death of the hapless Bergetto presages the background world of corruption that emerges into the light in the second half of the play.

Like Bergetto, Bordello is comically indifferent to wooing protocol; in The Turk, the character is similarly differentiated from the other suitors, resisting Eunuchus's own game as pandar to his mistress and Borgias's wife, Timoclea (in reality, he is planning Bordello's murder), declaring he has ‘made a vow not to vncase my selfe to any of that sexe’ (C3v). Both are unsuitable suitors, counterpoints to Ferrara and Venice in the earlier play and to Grimaldi and Soranzo in Ford's. In each case, these characters constitute a subplot. Bergetto and Poggio feature in seven scenes (1.2, 1.3, 2.4*, 2.6, 3.1*, 3.5, and 3.7), two of which* are given over entirely to them; following Bergetto's death, Poggio further appears in 3.9. In The Turk, Pantofle features only in 1.2, alongside his master; Bordello is then seen in 2.3, 3.1, 3.2, and 5.1. These subplots perform a structural as well as plot function. All onstage action has its offstage corollary: in effect, a subplot facilitates the continuation of the main plot, behind the scenes as it were, and vice versa. All early modern playwrights scripted dramatic narrative to this formula (the curtainless stage stipulating continuous action, even with intervals indoors). If the opening scenario of suitors below/desired suitor above in Mason's play seeded an idea Ford would use later in these three plays, it may be that ’Tis Pity She's a Whore was further indebted in its portrayal of Bergetto and Poggio; or to put this another way, it is difficult to reconcile the possibility of Ford being influenced by one element of The Turk without his also drawing on the other.

If so, other, admittedly minor, potential echoes – unnoticeable and unsupportable without this wider context – might also be included in this discussion. Thus, for example, Pantofle compares Bordello to being like ‘some needy knight would be for the losse of some rich magnificos widdow’ (C3r); Puttana, referring to Donado, remarks ‘The rich magnifico that is below with your father’ (1.2.131–2). But for Ford, The Turk provided character sketches in Bordello and Pantofle, and – above all – a scaffold, an adjustable frame he could use in ’Tis Pity She's a Whore, and briefly in Perkin Warbeck and The Lady's Trial. When The Turk was reissued in 1632, it was prefaced by an ‘Argument’ (probably not authorial) that seems to acknowledge its rather mechanical plotting, damning with faint praise the play's minor characters as ‘Instruments aptly set going to wheele vp the worke’ (A2v). Nevertheless, Mary Bly's analysis of the Children of the King's Revels suggests that Bordello was memorably bawdy, and that would seem to be borne out if Ford recollected this creation in his scripting of Bergetto. ³⁰ But regardless, it is likely that he was particularly drawn to the dramatic and theatrical possibilities presented in the opening scene on the Whitefriars stage – sufficiently so to work with and rework Mason's stagecraft. Ford's liking for emblems, which as Lisa Hopkins has shown are conspicuous throughout his non-dramatic as well as dramatic output, points to a particular skill not only in bringing together text and image but also in identifying, appropriating, and repurposing elements from across the literary canon. ³¹ In a theatre characterised by collaboration and intertextuality, Ford was the preeminent magpie of the theatre landscape.