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Essay on Shakespeare's King Lear and Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi

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Both Romeo and Juliet and 'Tis Pity she's a Whore are tragedies derived from established literary traditions. Jill Levenson illustrates that the plot of Romeo and Juliet is founded on the essential elements of the sonnet tradition: the anguished lover, the unattainable lady, and the equating of love and war. In his unrequited love for Rosaline, Romeo takes on the image of the archetypal Petrarchan lover to reveal the inadequacy of the conceit. Mercutio names Romeo's suffering: 'Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flow'd in …' (Shakespeare 2.4.38-9), establishing Petrarch as Romeo's literary father, and allusion in which there is no escape from the influence of a pre-existing world. Like Romeo, William Shakespeare and John Ford are writing within an established world of literature. The inherited literary tradition is based upon a well-used poetic mode, but the evident similarity is translated into something different with each repetitive occurance.

Often described as 'Elizabethan' because of the trope of the revenge tragedy, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore emulates the tragedy of failed romantic love rather than of political intrigue which is distinctive of Romeo and Juliet. Ford's play was published in 1633, nearly forty years after the first production of Romeo and Juliet, and reflects a growing philosophy of humanism as well as the popular desire for new dramatic material. Irving Ribner places the period in which Ford writes between the earlier 'divinely oriented Christian humanism of … William Shakespeare' and a subsequent 'new belief in progress' anticipated by Francis Bacon. Superficially the plays are indeed very similar: the story of young love with a tragic end, a garrulous Nurse and well-meaning Friar act as confidants and catalysts, and both pairs of lovers experience the pinnacle of happiness through love. However, the differences are significant: while Romeo and Juliet are social elite, Giovanni and Annabella are social outcasts because of their illicit desire; for Shakespeare love is the symbol of universal harmony, while for Giovanni and Annabella it is the very force which forces them from society. Romeo and Juliet, from the opening Prologue, sets up a world of harmony and balance. 'Two households, both alike in dignity' establishes the lovers as complementary opposites, supported by the matching quatrains and kisses exchanged during their first meeting. In contrast, Ford's play contains no such balancing of opposing but complementary claims, and the play dominated by the idea of abnormal and overpowering love. The dramatic conflict in the play is generated not by external forces, but by the ambivalent nature of love itself.

Clifford Leech has demonstrated that 'Tis Pity She's a Whore derives much of its source material from a reworking of Romeo and Juliet, but the differences between the two plays are striking and indicative of greater social, political and epistemological changes. The presentation of the relationship between Annabella and Putana clearly evokes that of Juliet and her Nurse, as in both plays there is a contrast between a romantic idealism which rejects sense and the constraints of both family and society, and the voice of experience and a tough realism which is both sympathetic and ambiguous. However, whilst Juliet is attended by a nurse, a figure which connects Juliet with the childhood she rejects during the action of the play, Annabella is attended by a 'tut'ress', a woman whose role is an overtly educational one. The 'tut'ress', Putana, educates Annabella in an immoral view of human sexuality which results in Annabella's death and her own blindness. Unlike Juliet's nurse, Putana's sexual knowledge is not validated by her experience in marriage and family, but it is suggested that her knowledge is immoral and therefore she is leading Annabella astray. Indeed, throughout the play characters are presented as immoral and debase, and those few characters which incite pity and sympathy, namely Annabella, do not receive just rewards but instead are corrupted and punished.

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