A Woman Killed With Kindness

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, rape, sexual harassment, death by suicide, death, graphic violence, sexual content, and suicidal ideation.

Heywood’s play is set in the early 1600s, in which women in England did not have many legal rights and were subject to strict sexual mores—particularly in the upper classes, where marriage was often a matter of wealth and inheritance (making concerns about children’s paternity paramount). By contrast, men of means had near total freedom within the law to travel, own property, advance themselves, and pursue sexual relationships outside of marriage. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, the conflict between Frankford, Anne, and Wendoll best encapsulates the gendered disparities in rights and roles, while the resolution of Charles, Susan, and Francis’s conflict highlights the status of women as property.

The storyline centering on Wendoll and Anne’s affair starkly exposes the difference in how society approached sexual transgression in men versus women. When Frankford finds Wendoll and Anne in bed, his first instinct is to kill both of them, and other characters emphasize Frankford’s legal right to do so. While his response may seem to involve a kind of gender parity, it speaks to Anne’s subordinate status as a wife; a woman whose husband was unfaithful would not have been able to exact similar punishment because her husband did not “belong” to her in the way a wife “belonged” to her husband.