'Tis Pity She's a Whore - John Ford

Written just three decades after Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, John Ford’s (1586 – circa 1639) provocative and psychologically penetrating tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore enters into a striking conversation with that earlier tragedy. Both plays explore forbidden love, divided loyalties, family conflict, secrecy, and the destructive consequences of a society that cannot accommodate the desires of its young.

Yet where Shakespeare often places passionate lovers within a world of feuding families and social constraint, Ford turns our attention even more intensely inward. What happens when desire becomes inseparable from obsession? How do guilt, fantasy, self-deception and the longing for absolute emotional union shape human behaviour?

Join Dr Julie Sutherland in this seven-week study, where we will explore Ford’s acute insight into the inner workings of the human mind, as well as his capacity to animate those dark interior places where love, desire, conscience and reason collide.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Seven-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Julie Sutherland
• Wednesdays, 6 January to 17 February, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK time)
• Recommended edition: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford, edited by Sonia Massai, Arden Early Modern Drama, ISBN: 978-1904271505
• £245 for seven two-hour meetings, to include background notes and resources