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Ben Jonson & Bartholomew Fair

March 31, 2020 By in Elizabethan Drama, Jonson, Ben, Poetry Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair has been a play I’ve wanted to read time and again. Unlike most plays during the era, the play is written entirely in prose (rather than blank verse) and it’s a book length play. I started out with the sparsely annotated Yale edition (The Yale Ben Jonson) bought many years ago, but was thoroughly lost by the end of the second act. Completely. Lost. I had no idea what was going on. And with only the thinnest of thin annotations, Jonson’s topical allusions, references and Latin jokes went straight over my head. I can’t fathom what Yale was thinking when they printed this play. Did they think we were all taught Latin and Greek at an Elizabethan grammar school? So I shelved my Yale edition and ordered the Revels Student Edition, edited by Suzanne Gosset, and started once again from the beginning—this time with ample annotations.

Part of what makes Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair so challenging is that it’s, well, a fair, and stuffed with principle characters. There are so many that rather than being about individual characters, the play is really more about groups of characters. Additionally, because there’s so much going on, the first two acts are more or less exposition, establishing the various comedic entanglements that will unravel in the last two acts.

Of course, the play wasn’t written to be read like a closet drama but to live and breathe on the stage. I don’t doubt that actually watching the play would make following the plot lines simpler—characters are far easier to follow and differentiate when they’re embodied by actors, but the trade off would be the loss of nearly all the topical Elizabethan humor—Elizabethan puns, the various allusions to goings on in London, and the clothing. Much of the punning on sex might be lost as well without some signaling from the actors.

So what kind of playwright was Jonson? Ben Jonson was generally considered Shakespeare’s rival in his own day, though perhaps less for Jonson’s poetic and dramatic skills (which were still formidable) than for his notoriety. Jonson was an inveterate self-promoter, loud, picked fights, killed a man and was thrown in prison, had grandiose notions of himself as a writer, and had very set ideas about how plays should be written. He could be dogmatic to a fault, insisting that Elizabethan Drama conform to the classical unities of action, time and place (making his unpopular tragedies more like historical reenactments than works of drama). Shakespeare’s prologue to Henry V, which wafted excited playgoers from one side of English channel to the other, was something Jonson jeered at. Like any charismatic personality, Jonson acquired a number of followers who became known as the Tribe of Ben. The result is that Jonson’s theories of poetry and drama greatly influenced the next generation. Shakespeare, whose primary ambition (it seems) was to retire as Stratford’s wealthiest Gentleman, left much less of a mark on the generation that followed.

All that said, Jonson was capable of writing genuinely great poetry, On my First Son and Song: to Celia, among others, and among his comedies, Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair. There’s also The Sad Shepherd, his final unfinished play that nevertheless contains, in my opinion, his most beautiful poetry and comes nearest to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. That Jonson’s reputation survives today is a testament to these plays, his flair for comedy and his true poetic genius.

So why can’t we find a complete edition of Jonson’s plays? One can find Marlowe’s complete plays, but then Marlowe was a great poet and dramatist comparable to Milton, Keats and Shakespeare. Likewise, one can easily purchase the complete plays of Middleton, and yet his best plays, though labeled masterpieces, are generally considered inferior to those of Jonson and he seemed to have no poetic ambition. He imitates poetry rather than writing poetry and apart for the rare gem like the one from A Game at Chess, “I’m taken like a blackbird/ In the great snow,” his imagery is conventional and workaday. Yet if you want a complete print edition of Ben Jonson you can expect to pay upwards of a thousand dollars. I find that astonishing. By in large, Jonson is ranked second only to Shakespeare, and yet in the 21rst century English readers can’t obtain a hard copy of Jonson’s works without paying a fortune!

Probably the most cogent explanation for Jonson’s comparative neglect comes from T.S. Eliot’s famous (in its circles) essay on Jonson:

THE REPUTATION of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries—this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval. For some generations the reputation of Jonson has been carried rather as a liability than as an asset in the balance-sheet of English literature. No critic has succeeded in making him appear pleasurable or even interesting.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Sacred Wood.  1921.

So what makes Bartholomew Fair worth reading? First and foremost, alongside Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Bartholomew Fair is possibly as close as you’ll get to glimpsing what Elizabethan life must have been like in London (if that interests you). Jonson has a brilliant ear for the language of the street. And what you’ll discover is that any one of us would have fit right in.

For me, one of the more interesting characters was Zeal-of-the-land Busy, a satirical portrait of the Puritans who railed against playgoing, among other social innovations, and who would eventually, some forty years later, succeed in temporarily closing down London’s theaters. The character of Busy is readily found among our modern day populists, evangelists and reactionary conservatives.

Look not toward them, hearken not; the place is Smithfield, or the field of smiths, the grove of hobby-horses and trinkets, the wares are the wares of devils, and the whole Fair is the shop of Satan: they are hooks and baits, very baits, that are hung out on every side, to catch you, and to hold you, as it were, by the gills, and by the nostrils, as the fisher doth; therefore you must not look nor turn toward them.—The heathen man could stop his ears with wax against the harlot of the sea; do you the like with your fingers against the bells of the beast.

Act III Sc. 2

As compared to our present day “Puritan”, Evangelist John Ramirez on Halloween:

“…did you know that as soon as you dress up, whether you color yourself or put on a costume, the enemy owns you? Because by doing so, you have turned over your legal rights, and you have dedicated yourself and your kids to celebrating the devil’s holiday You have just made a pact with the enemy, and you are already sacrificing your children spiritually by dressing them up and changing their identity.”

And a little later Busy, using the “rhythms, divisions and repetitions” [Gosset p. 68] typical not only of Puritan rhetoric but religious and evangelical speechifying to this day, will say:

I will remove Dagon there, I say, that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam,—not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam, nor a weaver’s beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren; a very great beam, an exceeding great beam; such as are your stage-players, rimers, and morrice-dancers, who have walked hand in hand, in contempt of the brethren, and the cause; and been born out by instruments of no mean countenance.

Leath. Sir, I present nothing but what is licensed by authority.

Busy. Thou art all license, even licentiousness itself, Shimei!

Leath. I have the master of the revels’ hand for’t, sir.

Busy. The master of the rebels’ hand thou hast. Satan’s! hold thy peace, thy scurrility, shut up thy mouth, thy profession is damnable, and in pleading for it thou dost plead for Baal. I have long opened my mouth wide, and gaped; I have gaped as the oyster for the tide, after thy destruction: but cannot compass it by suit or dispute; so that I look for a bickering, ere long, and then a battle.

Act V sc. 5

Jonson was surely capturing some of what he heard. Some four hundred years later the American preacher Billy Sunday, who apparently never bothered to read Jonson (though he seems to have Shakespeare) will sermonize:

If you want obscenity you will find it in the theater.  If you want to see character destroyed, you will find that both behind and before the footlights.  Your show has to be tainted in order to gather in the coin.  The capacity for amusing people along decent lines seems to have gone by.  That may sound foolish, but you let somebody go out on the road with a Shakespearean play and that somebody will go into bankruptcy while the musical show and the burlesque show and the leg show are playing to full houses across the street and the people are drinking in from them gutterish ideas and filthy lines and obscene songs. 

I do not mean to say that all plays and all actors are rotten.  But you will have to hunt pretty hard to find those that are not.  They will tell you that there is money in the theater.  Well, there’s money in highway robbery and there’s money in prostitution and there’s money in the saloon.  Sure, there’s money in it! 

Dancing, Drinking, Card Playing by Billy Sunday  (1862-1935)

Notice the similar rhetorical habits and repetition. Sunday could have been describing Bartholomew Fair. Exchange Sunday’s “highway robbery” for Busy’s “cutpurses”, Sunday’s prostitutes for Busy’s “strumpets”, and Sunday’s saloon’s for Busy’s “stalls”, and you’ve got Bartholomew Fair. The only thing missing is the stage (which is what Sunday was lambasting no less than the Elizabethan Puritans), but Jonson brilliantly solves that by featuring a puppet play in Act V—a play within the play. This is what Zeal-of-the-land Busy was excoriating in the passage above. The puppet show is an analogous stand-in for the Elizabethan Stage. And what really has Zeal-of-the-land Busy exercised?

Yes, and my main argument against you is, that you are an abomination; for the male, among you, putteth on the apparel of the female, and the female of the male.

Ibid.

There it is. Gender. Zeal-of-the-land Busy furiously objects to the cross-dressing, gender switching and homosexual undertones of men and boys playing women. Some things never change. The preoccupations of reactionary conservatives during the Elizabethan Era were no different then as now. The mistake that Zeal-of-the-land Busy makes is the same mistake that all modern fundamentalists make—an odd inability to discern the figurative from the literal (literal interpretation being at the very core of fundamentalism). Jonson hilariously deflates this literalism when the puppeteer raises the skirts of the puppets to show that they’re neither male nor female.

It is your old stale argument against the players, but it will not hold against the puppets; for we have neither male nor female amongst us. And that thou may’st see, if thou wilt, like a malicious purblind zeal as thou art.

[Takes up his garment.

Ibid.

But the deflation of Busy’s fundamentalism is only one thread in the play. Jonson also satirizes the hypocrisies of justice, both in its application and in the person of Adam Overdo, a Justice of the Peace; and also the shallowness of the monied class in the person of Bartholomew Cokes. And if you read Suzanne Gosset’s introduction to Bartholomew Fair (see the link above), you will also get a sense for the ways in which Jonson reveals, wittingly or otherwise, the objectification and commoditization of women—then as now.

There is one piece of Jonson’s poetry in the play, A Caveat for Cutpurses, because what’s an Elizabethan Fair without a good Ballad?

My masters, and friends, and good people, draw near, 
And look to your purses for that I do say; 
And though little mony in them you do bear, 
It costs more to get than to lose in a day; 
You oft have been told, both the young and the old, 
And bidden beware of the Cut-purse so bold; 
Then, if you take heed not, free me from the curse, 
Who both give you warning for and the cut-purse. 
Youth, youth you hadst better been starv'd by thy nurse, 
Than live to be hang'd for cutting as purse. 
 
It hath been upbraided to men of my trade, 
That oftentimes we are the cause of this crime. 
Alack and for pitty! why should it be said, 
As if they regarded or places or time? 
Examples have been of those that were seen 
In Westminster-hall, yea, the pleaders between; 
Then why should the judges be free from this curse 
More than my poor self is, for cutting a purse? 
Youth, youth, &tc. 
 
At Worster, 'tis known well that even in the jale, 
A knight of good worship did there shew his face. 
Against the foul sinners in zeale for to raile, 
And so lost, ipso facto, his purse in the place: 
Nay, once from the seat of judgement so great, 
A judge there did lose a fair pouch of velvet. 
Oh Lord! for thy mercy how wicked, or worse, 
Are those that so venture their necks for a purse! 
Youth, youth, &tc. 
 
At playes and at sermons and at the Sessions, 
'Tis daily their practice such booty to make; 
Yea under the gallows, at executions, 
They stick not the stare-abouts' purses to take; 
Nay, one without grace, at a better place, 
At Court, and in Christmas, before the Kings face. 
Alack then for pitty! must I bear the curse, 
That only belongs to the cunning Cut-purse? 
Youth, youth you hadst better been starv'd by thy nurse, 
Than live to be hang'd for cutting as purse. 
 
But oh, you vile nation of Cut-purses all! 
Relent and repent, and amend, and be sound, 
And know that you ought not by honest men's fall 
Advance your own fortunes to dye above ground: 
And though you go gay in silks, as you may, 
It is not the highway to heaven, as they say. 
Repent then, repent you, for better for worse, 
And kiss not the gallows for cutting a purse. 
Youth, youth you hadst better been starv'd by thy nurse, 
Than live to be hang'd for cutting as purse. 
 
The players doe tell you in Bartholemew Faire 
What secret consumptions and rascels you are; 
For one of their actors, it seems, had the fate, 
By some of you trade to be fleeced of late: 
Then fall to your prayers, you that are way-layers! 
They're fit to chouse all the world that can cheat players; 
For he hath the art, and no man the worse, 
Whose cunning can pilfer the pilferer's purse. 
Youth, youth, &tc. 
 
The plain countryman that comes staring to London, 
If once you come near him he quickly is undone; 
For when he amazedly gazeth about, 
One treads on his toes, and the other puls't out; 
Then in a strange place, where he knows no face, 
His mony is gone, 'tis a pittifull case. 
The divel of hell in his trade is not worse 
Than gilter, and diver, and cutter of purse. 
Youth, &tc. 
 
The poor servant maid wears her purse in her placket, 
A place of quick feeling, and yet you can take it; 
Nor is she aware that you have done the feat, 
Untill she is going to pay for her meat; 
Then she cryes and she rages amongst her baggages, 
And swears at one thrust she hath lost all her wages; 
For she is ingaged her own to disburse, 
To make good the breach of the cruel Cut-purse. 
Youth, &tc. 
 
Your eyes and your fingers are nimble of growth, 
But Dun many times hath been nimbler than both; 
Yet you are deceived by many a slut, 
But the hangman is only the Cut-purses cut. 
It makes you to vex when he bridles your necks, 
And then at the last what becomes of your tricks? 
But when you should pray, you begin for to curse 
The hand that first shewd you to slash at purse. 
Youth, &tc. 
 
But now to my hearers this counsel I give, 
And pray, friends, remember it as long as you live, 
Bring out no more cash in purse, pocket or wallet, 
Than one single penny to pay for the ballet; 
For Cut-purse doth shrowd himself in a cloud, 
There's many a purse hath been lost in a crowd; 
For he's the most rouge that doth crowd up, and curses, 
Who first cryes, "My masters, beware of your purses!" 
Youth, youth you hadst better been starv'd by thy nurse, 
Than live to be hang'd for cutting at purse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewvZoz3cTPc

Anyway, if you’re interested, below is an amateur production of Bartholomew Fair from Boston University. What else have you got to do whilst stuck at home?—avoiding the plague?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAWk-DmINjA

John Ford & ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

March 11, 2020 By in Ford, John, Poetry Tags: , , , , , 7 Comments

The next play I just finished is John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. This is the one play by John Ford that is usually included in anthologies of Elizabethan Plays. Interestingly, John Ford got lots of attention at the start of the millennia when A Funeral Elegy was identified as being by Shakespeare (note that the link to MITs site still lists it as being by Shakespeare). The Elegy was even included in the 2nd edition of the Norton Complete Shakespeare as by Shakespeare until scholarly opinion finally converged on John Ford as the actual author. The poem, needless to say, is not in the 3rd edition and Norton took some heat for including it. To my credit, I never thought that it was by Shakespeare and even proposed (though I was roundly ignored because I’m a nobody) that the poem was by John Ford. There’s proof on the Shaksper Listserv somewhere—if they still call it that.

John Ford was born some 20 years after Shakespeare and so didn’t really get started until Shakespeare was at his peak. Around 1601 when he would have been 15 or 16, he joined the Middle Temple, an institution that was considered a prestigious law school. Whether he studied law is debatable but he was obviously well educated, a man of letters, and must have had literary ambitions. After being kicked out of the Middle Temple due to financial issues, he set about looking for patronage by writing an elegy and a prose pamphlet. Yet it isn’t until 1620, four years after Shakespeare’s death (though Ben Jonson was still alive and active) that he appears as an active playwright. What can be said for Ford is that he became one of the Elizabathen era’s finest dramatists and collaborated with other dramatists like Dekker (with whom he co-authored The Witch of Edmonton), Webster and Massinger. That said, while Ford had a fine instinct for drama and could write some of the most pellucid blank verse of the era, he was a mediocre poet at best (which makes the mis-identification of his Funeral Elegy as Shakespeare’s all the more baffling).

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is generally thought to be the finest incest tragedy of the Elizabethan Era, a highly popular genre in its day, that continued to be performed through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Not only that, but according to Wikipedia, the 20th century saw the play adapted into two movies: My Sister, My Love (Sweden, 1966) and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Belgium, 1978). The genre remains popular for all the obvious titillating reasons.

So what was my impression? Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down. This though I knew it was all going to end tragically—and that’s probably the point. The dramatic tension is not in wondering how the play will end, but in the spectacle of its unraveling—as one character after another is stabbed and/or poisoned. Before they even stepped foot in the theater, Elizabethans knew matters were going to go spectacularly bad. The only question was how bad. Ford handles it all beautifully, disappointing no one when, in the final scenes, a bloody Giovanni steps into the banquet hall with Annabella’s heart impaled on the tip of his phallic dagger. Has there ever been a more brutally symbolic manifestation of incest?

But is there anything for the modern reader beyond an Elizabethan fondness for incest, bloody denouements, and murderous spectacle? First to be said is that Annabella is really little more than the shiny object around which all the men plot and scheme; which is to say, Annabella’s own agency is slim to none. When she takes Giovanni as her lover, there’s little to no deliberation on her part. While Giovanni is wracked with doubts throughout Act I, essentially deliberating for both of them, Annabella confesses her love after the briefest of conventional and clichéd Elizabethan tropes. In short, Giovanni claims that if his love is not requited, he would rather die. Of course, this symbolically makes Annabella responsible for Giovanni’s fate. To drive home the point, Giovanni “offers his dagger to her“. That’s Annabella’s one moment of agency. Take her brother as lover or murder him. The correct response would have been obvious to any self-respecting Elizabethan play-goer: she should have murdered him and taken her own life forthwith. Instead, after a series of pro-forma objections, she blows it:

...what thous hast urged
My captive heart had long ago resolved.
I blush to tell thee—but I'll tell thee now—
For every sigh that thou hast spent for me
I have sighed ten; for every tear shed twenty:
And not so much for that I loved, nor scarcely think it.

And so let the play begin. Would that the Elizabethans had had popcorn.

Once the secret tryst between Giovanni and Annabella is sealed, the other suitors, none the wiser, court Annabella with all the gusto of horse-traders. Annabella’s father Florio, meanwhile, makes a somewhat modern concession:

My care is how to match her to her liking:
I would not have her marry wealth, but love...

One often reads that marriage in those days, especially among the aristocracy, was a bleak market wherein marriageable women were used as currency, to be “bedded”, buying peace between warring families, buying social status, securing extravagant endowments which would be promptly gambled away by profligate husbands, etc… The desire of women, and men, to marry for love wasn’t a foreign concept. Some one hundred and fifty years later Jane Austen would make marrying for love (among the aristocracy) the centerpiece of her novels. And don’t forget that Giovanni and Annabella’s love is an ironic commentary on Florio’s statement coming, as it does, immediately after Annabella and Giovanni have gone off to make love for the first time. Such is Ford’s dramatic art.

At any rate, immediately after Florio has stated that he would not have Annabella marry for wealth, Donado (the father of one of Annabella’s suitors) reassuringly states:

Sir, you say well,
Like a true father, and for my part I,
If the young folks can like ('twixt you and me),
Will promise to assure my nephew presently
Three thousand florins yearly during life,
And after I am dead, my whole estate.

[Act I, Scene iii]

La! Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Florio responds approvingly, to which Donado adds:

Well,
Here's hope yet, if my nephew would have wit;
But he is such another dunce, I fear
He'll never win the wench.

[Act I, Scene iii]

And that’s the tone with which the suitors discuss Annabella—wench this and wench that—though it should be said that the appellation ‘wench’ didn’t carry the same negative connotations then as now. One could use ‘wench’ as as term of endearment, but it was more commonly used as shorthand for a sexually available young female. “Wenching” was used in the sense of lecherous, and Elizabethan playwrights, including Shakespeare, did seem to take a certain relish and discussing women. Bergetto, Donado’s nephew has taken to a different wench, Philotus, and comments: 

O, the wench! Uda sa' me, uncle, I tickled her with a rare speech, that I made her almost burst her belly with laughing.

The sexual innuendo wouldn’t have been lost on Elizabethan audience. He tickled her (penetrated her) with a rare speech (intercourse) and almost burst her belly (impregnated her) with laughing (their mutual orgasm). And if you suppose I’m reading too much into this, Ford clears up any confusion when Donado, Poggio (Berghetto’s servant) and Berghetto are later discussing Annabella:

Donado What’s the news now?
Bergetto Save you Uncle save you, you must not think I come
for nothing Masters, and how and how is ’t? what you have
read my letter, ah, there I — tickled you i’ faith.
Poggio But ’twere better you had tickled her in another place.

[Act II Sc. vi]

So, Donado’s use of the word wench is both an endearment and a mutual acknowledgement as to the purpose to which his daughter should be put. Who wins the right to conceive in a female? You may think that’s a crass way to put it, but the seriousness of the question will be what leads to the play’s bloody denouement. In general, the lascivious way in which Annabella and other women are discussed, given the play’s central theme and the way in which incest takes that objectification to its extreme, no doubt contributed to the play’s popularity.

Modern readers might be more taken with the early inklings of humanism, atheism and enlightenment rationalism in Ford’s play. When one read’s Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, a modern reader gets that sense that Marlowe, though he dutifully damned Faust, was sympathetic. Likewise, though Ford no doubt would have condemned incest without the Master of the Revel’s prompting, one does get the sense that he was sympathetic with the humanistic impulse behind the arguments made (by Giovanni) in defense of his relationship with Annabella. The very first words of the play begin thusly:

Enter Friar and Giovanni.

Friar Dispute no more in this, for know (young man)
These are no School­points; nice Philosophy
May tolerate unlikely arguments,
But Heaven admits no jest; wits that presumed
On wit too much, by striving how to prove
There was no God; with foolish grounds of Art,
Discovered first the nearest way to Hell;
And filled the world with devilish Atheism:
Such questions youth are fond; For better ’tis,
To bless the Sun, than reason why it shines;

In other words, like any perplexed parent when too cleverly challenged by their child: The Friar’s response is: Do it because God said so. And this was an absolutely legitimate theological argument in the medieval era (of which the Elizabethans were still a part). Even so, you will find strikingly modern thought.

Giovanni.
What Judgement, or endeavors could apply
To my incurable and restless wounds,
I thoroughly have examined, but in vain:
O that it were not in Religion sin,
To make our love a God, and worship it.
I have even wearied heaven with prayers, dried up
The spring of my continual tears, even starved
My veins with daily fasts: what wit or Art
Could Counsel, I have practiced; but alas
I find all these but dreams, and old men’s tales
To fright unsteady youth...

Love to God or love to one another? The passage could have been written as a critique of arranged marriage, rather than incest. Do we owe primacy to love, to ourselves, or to societal norms and conventions? While incest might be the “libertarian ethicist’s” most extreme provocatoin, the tension between individual liberty and societal conventions is fiercely ongoing especially as regards gender, marriage, adultery, erotic fantasy and even pornography. At any rate, hundreds of years later Steinbeck will take up the same question in Grapes of Wrath, only this time it will be the “Friar” himself, in the shape of an old preacher, who loses religion.

An’ I got to thinkin’ like this—’Here’s me preachin’ grace’. An’ here’s them people gettin’ grace so hard they’re jumpin’ and shoutin’. Now they say layin’ up with a girl comes from the devil. But the more grace a girl got in her, the quicker she wants to out in the grass [have sex].’ An’ I got to thinkin’ how in hell, s’cuse me, how can the devil get in when a girl is so full of the Holy Sperit that it’s spoutin’ out of her nose an’ ears. ¶ Finally it give me such pain I quit an’ went off my myself an’ give her a damn good thinkin’ about. [….] I says to myself, ‘What’s gnawin’ you? Is it the screwin’?’ An’ I says, ‘No, it’s the sin.’ An’ I says, ‘Why is it that when a fella ought ot be just about mule-ass proof against sin, an’ all full up of Jesus, why is it that’s the time a fella gets fingerin’ his pants buttons?’ ¶ And it come night, an’ it was dark when I come to. They was coyotes squawkin’ near by. Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some things folks do is nice. and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.” ¶ “I says. ‘What’s this call, this sperit?’ An’ I says, ‘Don’t you love Jesus?’ Well, I thought an’ thought, an’ finally I says, ‘No, I don’t know nobody name’ Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people. An’ sometimes I love ’em fit to bust, an’ I want to make ’em happy.’

Compare Ford’s “old men’s tales” to Steinbeck’s “just a bunch of stories”. The humanist questions are the same. Is it intrinsically wrong to sleep with ones sister? Is it intrinsically wrong to sleep with girls in the grass after baptizing them? Why shouldn’t we take pleasure in lust and love? Giovanni will make other ingenious arguments defending his incestual love, all while obliquely criticizing the absurdity of the religious arguments on which they’re based:

Giovanni Father, in this you are uncharitable;
What I have done, I’ll prove both fit and good.
It is a principle (which you have taught
When I was yet your Scholar) that the Fame
And Composition of the Mind doth follow
The Frame and Composition of Body:
So where the Body’s furniture is Beauty,
The Mind’s must needs be Virtue: which allowed.
Virtue itself is Reason but refined,
And Love the Quintessence of that, this proves
My Sister’s Beauty being rarely Fair,
Is rarely Virtuous; chiefly in her love,
And chiefly in that Love, her love to me.
If hers to me, then so is mine to her;
Since in like Causes are effects alike.

[Act II, Sc. v]

The friar’s impotent response is to call him a madman, though that would certainly have been sufficient for the censor. Likewise, many Elizabethans would have deemed Giovanni’s argument so absurd as to merit no other retort but madman. And what do the women say? Ford leaves that to Annabella’s older nurse and servant:

Putana Nay what a Paradise of joy have you passed under?
why now I commend thee, charge, fear nothing, sweetheart;
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.

[Act II, Sc. 1]

And that’s no argument at all. So frank and extreme is Putana’s amorality that I have to suppose it’s to make her later treatment, when her eyes are gouged out and she’s ordered to be burnt to ashes, more just and palatable.

Ford’s awareness of the hypocricies at work will make itself felt in the final scenes of the play when Soranzo, who has married Annabella unaware of her affair with her brother, demands to know who has already conceived a child in her—essentially robbing him of his prize.

Soranzo Tell me his name.
Annabella Alas, alas, there’s all
Will you believe?
Soranzo What?
Annabella You shall never know. Soranzo How!
Annabella Never,
If you do, let me be cursed.
Soranzo Not know it, Strumpet, I’ll rip up thy heart,
And find it there.

Soranzo’s servant will interrupt Soranzo and Annabella:

Vasques Now the gods forefend!
And would you be her executioner, and kill her in your rage too?
O ’twere most unmanlike; she is your wife, what faults hath
been done by her before she married you, were not against you;
alas Poor Lady, what hath she committed, which any Lady
in Italy in the like case would not? Sir, you must be ruled by
your reason, and not by your fury, that were unhuman and
beastly.
Soranzo She shall not live.
Vasques Come she must; you would have her confess the Authors
of her present misfortunes I warrant ’ee, ’tis an unconscionable
demand, and she should lose the estimation that I (for
my part) hold of her worth, if she had done it; why sir you
ought not of all men living to know it: good sir be reconciled,
alas good gentlewoman.

And what does Vasques mean by “you ought not of all men living to know it”? Vasques knows that Soranzo has slept with another man’s wife, Hippolita; and did so shortly before courting and marrying Annabella. Soranzo is a hypocrite of the first order, but ultimately Vasques’s efforts are also hypocritical. He only means to calm Soranzo long enough to trick Annabella’s servant, Putana, into revealing who it was that impregnated Annabella.

Before it’s all said and done, Annabella is murdered by her brother, another of Annabella’s suitors is mistakenly murdered by the servant of the man whose wife Soranzo has slept with. The wife, Hippolita, in attempting to exact revenge, is tricked into drinking from her own poisoned cup. Putana, Annabella’s servants, has her eyes gouged out and is burned as a heretic, Vasques is banished to Spain and poor Florio, the well-meaning, decent and honorable father of Giovanni and Annabella, dies of a heart attack during the death and blood-letting of the final banquet.

La!

My final thought is to remark on the one passage that offers anything like poetry, and this is Ford’s Dante-esque description of Hell. Ford’s poetic muse seems to wake right up when it comes to Hell:

Friar I am glad to see this penance; for believe me,
You have unripped a soul, so foul and guilty.
As I must tell you true, I marvel how
The earth hath borne you up, but weep, weep on,
These tears may do you good; weep faster yet,
Whiles I do read a Lecture.
Annabella Wretched creature.
Friar Ay, you are wretched, miserably wretched.
Almost condemned alive; there is a place
(List daughter) in a black and hollow Vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no Sun,
But flaming horror of consuming Fires;
A lightless Sulphur, choked with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness; in this place
Dwell many thousand, thousand sundry sorts
Of never dying deaths; there damned souls
Roar without pity, there are Gluttons fed
With Toads and Adders; there is burning Oil
Poured down the Drunkard’s throat, the Usurer
Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten Gold;
There is the Murderer forever stabbed,
Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton
On Racks of burning steel, whiles in his soul
He feels the torment of his raging lust.

And that’s that. I leave you with a famous description of Ford by a contemporary:

Deep in a dump alone John Ford was gat,
With folded arms and melancholy hat.