‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

Like Shakespeare’s Juliet, Annabella, accompanied by her down-to-earth
nurse, is introduced to a series of suitors to her hand. Like Juliet,
she finds all of them unsatisfactory – and rightly so, for the audience
know that the nastiest of them is having an affair with her domineering
aunt. Like Juliet, Annabella is wooed by a sensitive and passionate
young man whose love she returns – but this young man happens to be her
own brother, Giovanni. When they consummate their love and she, to
avoid the scandal of extramarital pregnancy, agrees to marry her aunt’s
lover, the tragic outcome is inevitable. John Ford, writing his
psychologically powerful and intellectually challenging tragedies in
the early years of King Charles I’s reign, is a playwright of the first
rank, as 20th-century directors have shown both in the theatre and on
film.