5. Slightly horrified smiles: ‘Tis Pity today

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this final module, we think about the presentation of ‘Tis Pity today, focusing in particular on the difficulty of staging a play that seems to straddle Jacobean and Caroline modes. In the second half of the module, we think about modern attitudes to incest more generally—in John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire, Ian McEwan’s Cement Garden, and Poliakoff’s 1991 film Close My Eyes—before ending with a brief conclusion.

Course

In this course, Professor John Lennard explores John Ford’s 17th-century tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. The course begins by thinking about john Ford himself, about whom we know very little, and his literary output, before moving on to explore the structure and language of the play itself. In the fourth module, we focus on the central theme of the play—that of incest—while in the final module, we think about attitudes towards Ford’s play—and incest more generally—today.

Lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.