53 pages • 1-hour read
A Woman Killed With Kindness
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Background
Authorial Context: Thomas Heywood
Though Heywood’s early life is difficult to plot with certainty, the general consensus is that he was born in the 1570s, educated at college, and moved to London, where he began writing plays in the 1590s. He was a member of the Admiral’s Men, the second largest Elizabethan/Stuart acting company of the time. He later joined Lord Strange’s Men and Worcester’s Men, two other acting companies, and he claimed to have written or assisted in writing over 200 plays. Heywood wrote tragedies, comedies, historical (or “chronicle”) plays, romances, poetry, and prose, though only a limited amount of his work survives. A Woman Killed with Kindness is considered Heywood’s masterpiece, although he is also known for the prose essay An Apology for Actors, which argued against Puritan criticisms of the theater. Notably, when Anne tries to reject Wendoll in A Woman Killed with Kindness, his response is, “You talk too like a puritan” (184), referencing the Puritans’ strict sexual mores.
Heywood is best known for his ability to portray middle-class, common life in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. A Woman Killed with Kindness is often cited as an example of this talent for domestic sentiment. Heywood is also known for his disjointed plots, with plays often including multiple storylines that intersect only slightly or not at all. This is the case with A Woman Killed with Kindness, in which the plot of Anne’s infidelity does not cross paths with the plot of Charles’s debt to Francis.
Literary Context: Early Modern Domestic Tragedy
Following Aristotle’s theories on drama, early modern Europe considered “common” people fit subjects for comedy and royalty and other elites better subjects for tragedy. These ideas influenced drama well into the 17th century, as reflected in many of Shakespeare’s plays, such as Hamlet and Macbeth, in which royal characters suffer tragic downfalls. The idea was that tragic characters should be objects of widespread admiration, making their tragic falls more emotionally impactful. Common people, being “coarse” or “vulgar,” were not seem as worthy of imitation, so dramatists used such characters in humorous, bawdy scenes that aimed to make the audience laugh rather than cry.
However, as Elizabethan theater progressed, dramatists set tragedies in more ordinary settings and featured more ordinary characters. Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness is one such play. Sir Charles, Sir Francis, and Sir John Frankford are members of the gentry—wealthy landowners who could be titled (“sir” typically denotes a knight or baronet) but nevertheless ranked lower than the earls and dukes that populated the court and political structures like the House of Lords. Moreover, even lower-class characters, like Nick, share in the sentiment of the play, with Nick playing a central role in Frankford’s discovery of Anne and Wendoll. Nonetheless, Heywood still uses servants for comedic relief, such as having Jenkin laugh at Wendoll in Act IV.
In some ways, this new kind of drama marked a shift toward catering to the common audience, which intersected with a shift toward more risqué content in plays leading into the Restoration period. The latter was part of what sparked Puritan opposition to the theater, resulting in the banning of non-religious performances during the Interregnum. Nevertheless, several examples of domestic tragedy are considered classic pieces of literature, including The Witch of Edmonton by Thomas Dekker, Willia Rowley, and John Ford, Arden of Faversham by an unknown author, and potentially Othello by William Shakespeare, which centers on the marital troubles of a military officer (albeit a high-ranking one).
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