‘Venice in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’

The Caroline dramatist John Ford, like a number of his contemporaries and predecessors, shows a clear interest in Italy in a number of his works, and his most famous play, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, is set in Parma, and includes characters who have visited Livorno and Bologna. However at an early stage of the play, while Soranzo is still a suitor for Annabella, we see him alone ‘in his study, reading a book’, which he later tells us contains Jacopo Sannazaro’s encomium on Venice. Soranzo apparently both quotes from this and proposes a rewriting which would praise Annabella rather than Venice. However, the Revels note points out that the lines attributed to Sannazaro have not been identified, and indeed Sannazaro was in fact associated almost exclusively with Naples. This paper proposes some reasons for why Ford might refer to him in this context

Point, counterpoint, needlepoint: the tapestry in Margaret Cavendish’s The Unnatural Tragedy

This essay explores the mention of a set of wall-hangings showing the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar in Margaret Cavendish’s play The Unnatural Tragedy. It relates this to the prominence of actual tapestries and other hangings in the Cavendish family houses, following a tradition established by Bess of Hardwick. Cavendish herself had no interest in needlework, and tapestries in particular might have been a difficult topic for her because she associates them with pregnancy and childhood, matters on which she was sensitive because she was childless and aware that Newcastle had married her partly because he desired more sons. In The Unnatural Tragedy, however, these associations are put to good use by providing thematic echoes of both the play’s main plot and subplot and also of Cavendish’s own situation. Probably alluding to a set of tapestries in the royal collection, the Hagar panel speaks of the continuity of the royal line and by implication tropes dynastic continuity more generally, and thus forms an interface between the private space of the house and the public space of the world outside, underlining the extent to which this is a play with a public resonance as well as a purely private one

The Danish romance play: Fair Em, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, and Hoffman

This essay considers the representation of women from around the Baltic Sea in three plays, Fair Em, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, and Hoffman, and explores how they are framed or conditioned by stories from classical mythology. I argue that not only do these have elements in common but that they are also so different from the genre of the Danish history play (made up of plays which are centred on or refer to Viking invasions) that they deserve a separate classification of Danish romance play. Unlike the Danish history play, in which Danish women in particular are often frightening and alien figures, the Danish romance play gives us resilient, resourceful women who actively deploy stories from classical mythology rather than allowing themselves to be passively inscribed in them, and it also speaks of a significant and continuing connection between Britain and the continent