About the Play - 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford
John Ford was born in the spring of 1586, and apparently vanished without trace in 1639. No one knows how, when, or where he died. But we do know that he left behind one the greatest plays of the golden age of English theatre – the shocking, thrilling revenge tragedy, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
John Ford’s early writings were not for the stage. He was admitted to the Middle Temple to study law in 1602, and – apart from two years exclusion for having apparently failed to pay his buttery bill – seems to have been in residence most of his life, presumably practicing law. He is not heard of theatrically until 1621, when, at the age of 34 or 35, he collaborated with Thomas Dekker and William Rowley on The Witch of Edmonton. (By the time Shakespeare was 35, in 1599, he’d already written about twenty plays, and was about to get started on Hamlet.)
The Witch of Edmonton is Ford’s first known play of around twenty. Like Ben Jonson, and certainly unlike Shakespeare, he seems to have taken unusual care in publishing his works, apparently viewing them as literature as opposed to merely ephemeral entertainments. ’Tis Pity is Ford’s most famous play, and probably his best.
’Tis Pity was first performed, by the Queen Henrietta’s Men, in 1633, at the Phoenix Theatre in Drury Lane, and must have been popular, because it was still being played there in 1639, when a legal dispute took it out of the repertoire until after the Restoration. (Is it a coincidence that the play disappeared from the stage the same year its author disappeared from history?)
Samuel Pepys saw an early-Restoration revival at Salisbury Court in 1661 (he hated it, and was apparently more interested in the ‘most pretty and most ingenious lady’ lady sitting next to him). The play was then produced in Norwich in 1663, but tastes were changing, and sensibilities were getting offended. Despite the celebrated re-opening of the theatres, and the advent of the actress, ’Tis Pity fell from favour, and would not be seen again on any English stage for 260 years, when (appropriately enough) the Phoenix Society gave two performances of the play at the Shaftesbury Theatre.
Since then, the play has been produced about thirty times. Donald
Wolfit starred opposite Rosalind Iden (the future Lady Wolfit) in his
own production of 1940-41; a young Ian McKellen played Giovanni opposite
the Annabella of an equally young Felicity Kendall in 1972; Alan Ayckbourn
directed the play at the National Theatre in 1988 (with Rupert Graves
as Giovanni); Saskia Reeves played Annabella in 1991-92 for the RSC; Eve
Best and Jude Law were David Lan’s lovers at London’s Young Vic in 1999;
while Edward Dick’s Southwark Playhouse production (2005) starred Charlie
Cox and Mariah Gale.