"Ignorance in Knowledge": Marlowe's Faustus and Ford's Giovanni

Abstract

HE prevailing view of the relation of Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore to the earlier Elizabethan drama holds to be indebted some measure to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Thus H. J. Oliver says: It is characteristic of [Ford's] method of working that this, a way his most independent and original play, would seem to have begun as a reworking of a Shakespearean tragedy, Romeo and Juliet.' Oliver proceeds to comment on some of the principal elements which the two plays share. In each there is a friar (Friar Lawrence Romeo and Juliet, Friar Bonaventura 'Tis Pity) who tries, without success, to aid the lovers. Juliet's nurse seems to have furnished the model for Annabella's nurse, the bawdy Putana, 'Tis Pity. And Annabella's father, the good-natured Florio, displays some of the qualities of Capulet in his more expansive moods.2 Without wishing to deny categorically that Ford's tragedy was influenced by Shakespeare's, I would suggest, however, that such common elements as have been noted are confined to similarities of relatively subordinate character types and that, insofar as the real subjects of the two plays are concerned, they have next to nothing common. Both are accounts of unfortunate love, but here all similarity ends. The love that is unfortunate because of the enmity of the lovers' parents is a vastly different affair from the love that is unfortunate because the lovers happen also to be brother and sister. Among the work of Ford's predecessors the Elizabethan drama there is, however, a play which can be profitably compared to his early tragedy but which, so far as I know, has not previously been, and this is Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. At first sight the two plays would appear to have little common. Great forces are at work Marlowe's play 1 H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford (Melbourne, Australia, 1955), p. 86. Cf. Clifford Leech, John Ford and the Drama of His Time (London, 1957), p. 56. Lord David Cecil an essay on Ford's tragedies (The Fine Art of Reading and Other Literary Studies [Indianapolis and New York, 19571) says that 'Tis Pity She's a Whore has something of Othello about it (p. 109). One wonders what; and one wonders if Cecil has not confused 'Tis Pity with Ford's Love's Sacrifice, which was obviously influenced by Othello. 2 Oliver, p. 87.