I confess, I thought this was a comedy. It’s really not. I usually know something about plays before I read them, but, honestly, I picked this one because I’m obsessed with David Bowie’s Blackstar, especially the enigmatic (and utterly unrelated) ‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore. Unusually, I didn’t even scan the introduction here, so I thought this was a Taming of the Shrew deal.
I wasn’t ready for the incest.
The play opens with young Giovanni and his tutor/confessor, Friar Bonaventura, in mid-argument, which feels a very modern way to start (though I’m only 3 plays into this project, so what do I know?). Giovanni is arguing his love for his sister Annabella is beautiful, not terrible. As his tutor says to his childish arguments,
...These are no school points; nice philosophy
May tolerate unlikely arguments,
But heaven admits no jest.
To which Giovanni responds, clearly too narcissistic to listen,
It were more ease to stop the ocean
From floats and ebbs than to dissuade my vows.
I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be a play about unrequited incestuous love.” Nope. His confession is met with a similar confession from Annabella. Then I thought, “It’s going to be about unconsummated forbidden love.” Nope. After the confession, they immediately sleep together. “A play about tortured lovers in agonies of guilt over their taboo love?” Nope, they’re ecstatically in love, with no regrets...for now.
Giovanni: Come, Annabella, no more sister now,
But love, a name more gracious; do not blush,
Beauty’s sweet wonder, but be proud to know
That yielding thou hast conquered, and inflamed
A heart whose tribute is thy brother’s life.
Annabella: And mine is his. O, how these stol’n contents
Would print a modest crimson on my cheeks,
Had any but my heart’s delight prevailed.
We know this love is going to be a slow-motion disaster, but for now, Ford lets the doomed couple be deliriously happy. The one ominous note is Giovanni manipulating Annabella into swearing she’ll never marry. Their otherwise happy union is contrasted with just about every other marriage or courtship in the play.
A Dismal Crew
Before the play even starts, for example, the young window Hippolita has pushed her husband Richardetto into a dangerous voyage, hoping that he’d die, so she could marry Soranzo. Soranzo, Annabella’s principal suitor, has since debauched and ditched the young widow, saying, when confronted,
The vows, I made, if you remember well,
Were wicked and unlawful: ‘twere more sin
To keep them than to break them…
…Woman, come here no more,
Learn to repent and die, for by my honour
I hate thee and thy lust: you have been too foul.
Of course, Richardetto isn’t really dead, having returned from his voyage, disguised as a physician, with a doctor’s bag full of poison.
Finally, there are two other suitors, Grimaldi, who wants to kill his way to matrimony (whenever he shows up, he tries to murder Soranzo); and Bergetto, a buffoon Annabella is forced to tolerate because he’s her father’s best friend’s son.
It’s a dismal crew. While the happy couple trade sweet nothings, the characters you might expect their wholesome opposites are fighting duels, double and triple-crossing each other, paying obnoxiously unwelcome court, poisoning each other with wine, and stabbing each other with poisoned blades.
Marriage Ruins Everything
It all goes wrong for the couple when Annabella makes the fatal choice to break her oath to hide her inevitable out-of-wedlock pregnancy by marrying Soranzo--her other suitors now being dead or fled. Gionvanni is sullen and childish at the wedding feast, and he’s clearly at the point of revealing everything, when Hippolita dramatically crashes the wedding, obliquely confronting Soranzo and hoping to kill him, but ending up dying horribly of poison herself. The Friar (who knows all about the incest and the pregnacy says, apparently without irony,
That marriage’s seldom good,
Where the bride-banquet so begins in blood.
He’s right. Almost immediately after, Soranzo, who had only secretly been a monster to this point, shows his real colors in a terrifying domestic scene where he drags Annabella onstage and threatens her life for her trick. In spite of her having turned him down in no uncertain terms, he acts as though she had chased him. The hypocrisy is amazing, especially given his treatment of Hippolita.
Come strumpet, famous whore, Were every drop
of blood that runs in thy adulterous veins
A life, this sword (dost see it?) should in one blow
Confound them all. Harlot, rare, notable harlot,
That with thy brazen face maintainst thy sin,
Was there no man in Parma to be bawd
To your loose cunning whoredom else but I?
Must your hot itch and pleurisy of lust,
The heydey of of your luxury, be fed
Up to a surfeit, and could none but I
Be picked out to be cloak to your close tricks,
Your belly sports? Now I must be the the dad
To all that gallimaufry that’s stuffed
In thy bastard bearing womb?
Words of Nuance, Words of Skill
While it’s a horrific speech, you have to admire Ford’s writing, which is fantastic throughout. It’s amazing to read out loud, as are so many parts of this play. The verse is stunning, the power of the language palpable. I realized, when I was reading it how much better and more fun to read it was than The Roaring Girl. Granted, that’s a comedy, so you would’t expect the same soaring rhetoric, but there’s still no comparison.
You can see the spit flying and feel the slaps and stings of insults and recriminations here. There are so many passages in this play that I couldn’t help but act out, to the irritation of my partner (it being very late at night). But after absorbing Margaret Cavendish’s Concerning the Reading of Plays, I’m doing my very best to get as much as I can out of every word I read this year.
Speaking of words, shout-out the word gallimaufry (hodge-podge), and to Soranzo using the word “dad” in such a passionate, overwrought speech, making it all the more unsettling.
The Strength of Her Convictions
What’s amazing, to me, is that Annabella is not only not ashamed, she throws it right back in his teeth, refusing to tell him who the father is, and even baiting him with the idea of the other man. While she doesn’t have many choices in her life, she doesn’t ever come across as weak. Listen as she goads her toxic husband, who has a sword at her throat, with descriptions of her brother, who’s she still sleeping with:
This noble creature was in every part
So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman
Who had not been human, as was I,
Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.
You! Why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or, indeed,
Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him…
...Let it suffice that you shall have the glory
To father what so brave a father got.
In brief, had this chance not fallen out as’t doth,
I never had been troubled with a thought
That you had been a creature; but for marriage,
I scarce dream yet of that.
Hoooooly shit! “If I hadn’t married you, I wouldn’t even think of you as a person, and even now I barely do.” I was so gripped just reading this scene, I couldn’t get through it fast enough...I was sure that Annabella was going to die there.
But no: Soranzo’s man Vasques calms him and later Annabella’s “tut’ress,” the unfortunately named Putana, tells him who the father is, for which betrayal she immediately has her eyes put out. Soranzo, enraged, decides to throw himself a birthday party--why not?--and invite the few surviving characters (we’re down the dregs at this point) with the idea of catching Annabella and Giovanni in the act, and hires a bunch of banditti to kill him.
Toxic Love
As you might imagine, even this massacre goes wrong. Sure, Giovanni and Annabella share one last scene in bed together. How Soranzo doesn’t catch them, that being the whole point of the party is a question, but it’s important because this is the scene where apparently the sex stops being good for Annabella, and Giovanni’s jealousy surfaces:
What, changed so soon? Hath your new sprightly lord
Found out a trick in night-games more than we
Could know in our simplicity? Ha! Is’t so?
Or does the fit come on you, to prove treacherous
To your past vows and oaths?
...You’ll now be honest, that’s resolved?
What follows is a tearful scene in which Annabella tells him she’s true to him, but that the birthday party is fishy, and that Soranzo means to kill him. His response is to give her a long, flowery goodbye speech, to urge her to ask for forgiveness so that she won’t go to hell, and then to kill her.
Giovanni: Be dark, bright sun,
And make this midday night, that thy gilt rays
May not behold a deed that will turn their splendour
More sooty than the poets feign their styx.
One other kiss, my sister.
Annabella: What means this?
Giovanni: To save thy fame and kill thee in a kiss. Stabs
Thus die, and die by me, and by my hand.
Revenge is mine, honour doth love command.
It’s unclear who he’s getting revenge on: her for marrying Soranzo, or Soranzo for plotting against them. If I were staging it, I’d probably emphasize just how selfish and narcisstic he is, and make it clear that he’s killing her as a way to make sure that no one else can have her. That line that “honour doth love command” sure makes this sound like the creepiest honor killing ever.
A True Heart
In any case, he’s come completely unhinged by now. In the next scene, he appears downstairs at the party, soaked in blood with a heart on his dagger. There’s an unintentionally (?) comic--in the gallows humor sense--bit of business in which no one believes it’s Annabella’s heart, and for a surprisingly long time everyone is so stunned that they just let Giovanni rant and get blood all over while they send someone to check. Once they’ve confirmed it, Giovanni stabs Soranzo, and then, finally, the banditti rush in to kill him in the final orgy of blood. In my staging he’d kill some of them, too, in a drawn-out, terrible fight, just to add to the welter of gore.
So. Not a comedy.
But not a simple moralizing tragedy, either. The level of ambiguity toward marriage in this play must have been shocking in its day. To paint the lawful husband as arguably more overtly hateful and evil than the incestuous, murderous brother, who until the very end is at least faithful and kind in his obsession must have been wildly unsettling in a day when marriage was a far more sacred thing. I’m amazed at the skill it shows to put all of this into just 90 pages, and to put it all in such gorgeous, striking language.
I’m traumatized and awed, in equal measure.
Again, I wish I had more than a day to think about this (it’s definitely going to stick with me) but I’ve got to move on. Next up, something less grim in Mary Pix’s comedy (I double-checked) The Beau Defeated; or, The Lucky Younger Brother.
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