John Ford

A fully modernised, annotated edition of Tis Pity She's a Whore, Ford's controversial tragedy of sibling incest and complex revenge plots. As with all Arden editions, detailed on-page commentary notes help the student understand and appreciate the play both in performance and as a many-layered literary text. The lengthy, illustrated introduction offers a wealth of critical and contextual information about...

Francis Bacon described revenge as a ‘kind of wild justice’. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu where dark fantasies of revenge are variously played out. In Kyd’s The...