A Woman Killed With Kindness

Heywood is a well-known Early Modern playwright, but he is not so well known as Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, or Christopher Marlowe. Compare A Woman Killed with Kindness to a play by one of these other authors. What similarities exist in subject matter or style, and what do those similarities tell you about the era in which the works were written?

Compare Anne and Wendoll’s fates. How do their storylines expose double standards surrounding male versus female sexual behavior? Does the play endorse that double standard? How can you tell?

Ultimately, A Woman Killed with Kindness is a play about forgiveness and the limitations of forgiveness. Given the play’s depiction of this, how do you read the Prologue’s request that audience members “forgive” the play’s deficiencies? How does the Epilogue, which suggests that perceived deficiencies are often matters of personal taste, complicate this?

What influence does money have on the way the plot unfolds, and what commentary does this offer regarding social class? Does the play depict a world in which class is merely a matter of wealth, or are other factors important as well?

What exactly does “honor” mean in the play? Does its meaning vary between men and women, or even between individual characters? Whose definition, if any, does the play imply to be “correct”?

Frankford’s name, as well as the praise he receives from other characters, frames him as the moral center of the play. To what extent do his words and actions complicate this characterization, and what is the effect of this tension?

The card game that Frankford plays with Anne and Wendoll features many puns and double entendres. What purpose does this wordplay serve, and where else in the play does it feature?

The play features many scenes involving eating and ends with Anne’s death by starvation. What is the significance of this? Consider especially the traditional association between gluttony and lust in Christian thought.