3. Why, here’s plain dealing: The Language of ‘Tis Pity

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about the language of the play, focusing in particular on the unusual clearness of Ford’s dramatic language, and the harmony between his units of form (verse lines) and grammar (clauses, periods, and sentences). In addition to this, we explore Ford’s use of ‘speaking’ names—including Putana, whose name simply means ‘whore’, as well as Hippolita, whose name evokes two characters from Greek myth—Hippolyta and Hippolytus.

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.