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The Language of Cruelty in Ford’s ’Tis P ity She7s a W hore Carol C. Rosen Though Antonin Artaud has been popularly deified as the mad martyr of the modem theater, his critical The Theater and Its Double deserves careful consideration not merely as an essen tial element in the bizarre alchemy of contemporary drama, but also as a provocative approach to orthodox dramatic theory. Indeed, Artaud’s infamous “First Manifesto” of the Theater of Cruelty culminates in an apparently traditional program to stage “an adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent with our present troubled state of mind” or other “works from the Elizabethan theater.” Notions of tradi tional revivals are shattered, however, with Artaud’s revolution ary stipulation that these “apocryphal plays” be performed not only “without regard for text,” but that they be “stripped of their text and retaining only the accouterments of period, situa tions, characters, and action.”l By offering John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore as a paradigm of his proposed theatrical epidemic (TD 28-32), Artaud provides us with a convenient pivot about which we may examine the efficacy of his approach to the Eliza bethan drama on the modem stage. Surprisingly, except for his disdain for Elizabethan verbosity, Artaud’s discussion of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is primarily a passionate affirmation of the appraisals of more reserved commentators .2 But Artaud uses the incestuous union consecrated in the course of Ford’s play as a simile for his own concept of the theater of revolt. His focus upon the excessive cruelty of Ford’s play and his emphasis upon the “paroxysm of horror, blood, and flouted laws” (TD 29) lead Artaud to his awesome analogy: If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, 356 Carol C. Rosen 357 the bringing forth, the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized. Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more pro found until extinction. (TD 30) By means of this circuitous syllogism, Artaud alludes to the cathartic value of the violated taboo in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Consequently, Paul Goodman’s facile summation of this section of Artaud’s manifesto—“And he ends with a rhapsody on Ford’s Whore, whose content seems to him to be the plague itself”3— misses the metaphoric point. Artaud’s obsession is far from rhap sodic; the aptness of Ford’s play for Artaud’s essay is demon strated by the broken taboo at its core. As Brian Morris notes in his Introduction to the New Mermaid edition of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, though plays about incest were not uncommon in the Jacobean period, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore “is the only play which makes incest its central theme, and explores to the full the nature and consequences of the relationship.’^ The content of Ford’s play is, in essence, the plague itself. Seeking to revive rather than to recall the primordial theater “whose only value is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger” (TD 89), Artaud suggests an intensely savage stage which would externalize through grotesque images, exaggerated movements, stylization, and distortion the pervading cruelty of all human acts. He wants “to break through language in order to touch life . . . to create . .. the theater” (TD 13) ; like Cocteau, he longs to substitute a vital “poetry of the theater” for the impotent “poetry in the theater.”5 But by dismissing the text of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore as benign and obtrusive, Artaud undercuts Ford’s dependence upon caustic language as dramatic texture. For it may be suggested that this crucial dramatic in stance of overwhelmingly cruel forces exemplifies Artaud’s the atrical concerns most concretely by means of its brutal language. Artaud’s base metaphor of the plague is itself anticipated in the language of ’Tis...
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