’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: Representing the Incestuous Body

Abstract

In this speech from Ford’s mid-seventeenth-century play ’ Tis Pity She’s a Whore there are a number of gaps between what is presented on stage and what might be called the ‘meanings’ of what is happening in relation to cultural contexts. 1 The story so far is that Soranzo is one of Annabella’s suitors. She agrees to marry him because she is pregnant with her brother’s child. Soranzo has discovered Annabella’s pregnancy, but he does not know that the father is Giovanni. This exchange, therefore, draws our attention to several aspects of the play. Firstly, Soranzo’s questioning dramatises the impossibility of knowing about incest from the evidence of the pregnant body; for the body does not of itself disclose the identity of the child’s father, let alone the nature of the relationship between the two parents. Secondly, the conversation alerts us to the marital and legal structures governing the body, especially the female body, as the reference to a curse suggests the religious strictures which regulated sexual behaviour. Thirdly, and more generally, Annabella’s body is subject to violent handling. The dialogue calls attention to the physical body, and its sexual significance is displayed to the theatre audience. Additionally, the idea of ripping up Annabella’s heart to discover the name of the child’s father there reminds the audience of the earlier incestuous exchange of vows between Annabella and her lover/brother Giovanni, while simultaneously echoing the rhetoric used in a lovers’ exchange of hearts. The audience are in possession of these facts, but they also watch scene after scene in which the knowledge of incest is denied, concealed or re-read through the linguistic and dramatic structures of the text. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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