Twisted Sister

Some people have heard the title ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, perhaps from one of the two films made of the story. Most don’t know just how old the title is, nor how freighted with infamy. In the scandalous 1633 play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, playwright John Ford wrote an unbelievably twisted story that would draw fire if it were performed next week in über-liberal Manhattan, this being the tale of a passionate affair between a brother and sister, Giovanni and Annabella. No, Ford didn’t cop out and do it in the Greek fashion, in which the two don’t find out they’re siblings until the tragic end when they pay for a crime they didn’t commit in their hearts. (But as Woody Allen said from prison in the hysterical Love and Death, “Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed? The difference is that all men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock, but I have a smart lawyer.”)

Shockingly, the mutual passion of brother and sister is openly discussed from the first lines of the play, and is consummated soon after. As Shakespeare did so often, Ford set his play in Italy, as if to imply that this sort of debauchery might occur in hot-blooded Napoli, but never in the cool and clean-living pastoral countryside of England. And of course, just about everybody but the cat ends up dead in the end, in a horrifically graphic and grisly bloodbath of heavenly retribution. None of it helped. Though the play was performed, appropriately enough in the Cockpit Theatre near Drury Lane, most considered the material unpalatable, and it was in later years often removed from collections of Ford’s plays.

It didn’t grow more tasteful with the passage of three and a half centuries. Luchino Visconti directed a version of it with the luscious Romy Schneider at the Théâtre de Paris in 1961, while Roland Joffé directed a version for the BBC in 1980. Charlotte “I’ll peel for anyone” Rampling starred in a lousy Italian film version in ‘71, though in all fairness, the film is only available in America in a gutted version. Other than that, both the play, and the subject of incest as entertainment, has pretty much remained the province of porn, hard or soft at the core.

Actually, incest is, like child pornography, one of the only remaining taboos in our anchorless society that takes all the fun out of things being dirty because not much is dirty anymore. Not many “respectable” works have dealt with the subject; it does pop up a lot in the fiction of John Irving, most notably in The Hotel New Hampshire, which makes one wonder about his home life. In the few other serious works on the subject, punishment is swift and sure; in England, Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure features a stunningly grim ending with suicidal children as the moral payback when two cousins run off together. Kind of hypocritical, when you think about it.

Few societies have tolerated incest, and it was looked on with particular horror in England, probably because it struck a nerve; the blooded class was always running around marrying their first cousins, a relationship considered too close in other cultures for making the beast with two backs. And all in all they were probably right, when you take a look at what consanguinity in the Windsors wrought, in the bat-boy ears and low criminal forehead of Prince Charles.

They say that one of Britain’s most notorious seducers, the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, was done in by the temptation of fishing in home waters. As a young man he fell hopelessly in love with his half-sister, one Augusta Leigh; they shared a father in John “Mad Jack” Byron, who was married three times and dropped, probably of exhaustion, at thirty-five. Eventually Byron fled England in 1809, returning long enough to cause a scandal with Lady Caroline Lamb before leaving for good in 1816. The first time, it was probably because he was afraid of prosecution for incest. He would have done time for it.

Of course, we’ll never know for certain whether or not Byron slept with his sister, because his family burned his letters to Augusta after his death. This happened a lot in Victorian times, which really pisses historians off. From about 1750 to 1820, an Enlightenment window opened in both Europe and America, for good and ill as these things go, but a fresh breeze nonetheless. Sex was freer, adultery more common, belief in a personal God of fire and brimstone way down in the polls, and swearing was very, very popular. The educated classes in those days were fanatical letter-writers and journal-keepers, which would normally be a gold mine for historians. But from Aaron Burr to the explorer and anthropologist Sir Richard Burton, family members often burned their “lewd” journals and letters after their deaths, depriving posterity of the juiciest bits they left behind. Some, like George Washington, even purged their journals of coarse language while they were still alive, many having been born into the Enlightenment world and survived to the Victorian one, in which even the bare legs of pianos were covered for modesty’s sake.