TIS PITY SHES A WHORE PB – JOHN FORD-MARTIN WIGGINS-MARTIN WIGGINS

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.