Thomas Heywood and his plays. A Woman Killed with Kindness

Thomas Heywood was noted for his many-sidedness and versatility (sokoldalúság). Lamb called him a ‘prose Shakespeare’. Of all the playwrights of the period Heywood was the most prolific. In the Preface to The English Traveller (1633) he stated that he had “either an entire hand or at least a main finger” in 220 plays. They include historical dramas, comedies of English life, dramatisations of classical legend, domestic tragedies, and romances. The Four Prentices of London, Heywood’s earliest extant play (1592), belongs to the last type. Its heroes are the four sons of the Duke of Boulogne. Their father has been dispossessed by the French king and is living in London as a private citizen and has apprenticed his four sons to different trades. The sons set out for the Holy Land and win their laurel in the first Crusade. The play combines different elements, such as pictures of London life, wildly romantic adventures by sea and land, and a historical background. In the Introduction to the Mermaid edition of Heywood’s plays, John Addington Symonds wonders if this absurd play was intended for a parody of chivalrous romances, like Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, or if it was meant for a hyperbolical compliment to the courage of the London apprentices. He regards the latter as the more probable supposition. But Heywood’s greatest achievement is undoubtedly in the field of domestic drama. His best known plays in this kind are The English Traveller, with a subplot borrowed from Plautus, and, chief of all, Heywood’s masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness, “ the finest bourgeois tragedy of Elizabethan literature”. In this play Heywood drew neither from romantic imaginings nor from classical sources. He concentrated on a simple domestic situation set in the background of a Yorkshire country house. Its owner, Frankford, is happily married until he receives into his house a friend of broken means who seduces (elcsábítani) his wife. The husband suspects nothing but his old servant breaks the truth to him. Frankford pretends to leave for a journey but returns at night to find his wife in his friend’s embrace (ölelésében). Instead of killing them both, as the conventions of ordinary tragedy would have demanded, he sends his wife to live in seclusion (elkülönít) in a lonely manor (földesúri birtok). But the wife is humbled to dust by her husband’s kindness, will not have food or drink or sleep, and, dying, sends for her. The play ends with a scene of reconciliation.

Plot

The play tells the story of a married couple, Master Frankford and his wife Anne. Frankford invites Wendoll into his home to act as a companion. Frankford tells Wendoll that anything in his house is at Wendoll's disposal. Wendoll then chooses to pursue Frankford's wife, Anne. Anne is quickly wooed by Wendoll and then caught by Frankford. Frankford then chooses to punish her not with death but with ostracism (száműzetés)—a "mild" sentence for her adultery. By the end of the play, Anne chooses self-starvation as a more appropriate form of punishment. As she is dying because of her self-starvation (önéheztetés), Frankford reunites with his wife, which restores the social and patriarchal order at the end of the play.