Domestic Conduct in A Woman Killed with Kindness

Abstract

It universally agreed that A Woman Killed with Kindness, Thomas Heywood's domestic tragedy published in 1608, a masterpiece, the best of its kind, and that it a seriously flawed play. But through the years, there has been a change in the nature of the problems which have concerned critics, along with a shift in their approach to these problems. In the 1930s and 1940s, critics of A Woman seemed preoccupied with Anne's sudden and unmotivated adultery. Eventually, Hallett Smith,' Henry Hitch Adams,2 and, a little later, Hardin Craig3 satisfactorily explained her behavior in terms of, respectively, Elizabethan literary conventions, Elizabethan theology, and Elizabethan psychology. In the next two decades, other critics, following the lead of Freda Townsend,4 turned their attention to resolving the problem of the apparent lack of relationship between the main plot and the subplot, which T. S. Eliot said is too obviously there merely because an underplot required to fill out the play.5 Townsend showed that both plots deal with virtue and honor and that the chaste Susan contrasted with the unchaste Anne. Patricia Meyer Spacks found that the plots are linked by the contrast between apparent and real honor in the characters,6 and Herbert Coursen argued that the romantic nature of the subplot emphasizes the realism of the main plot.7 All of these suggestions are useful and none at odds with our understanding of other aspects of the play. Recently, there has been a vaguer but nonetheless pervasive anxiety about the character of Frankford which threatens to jeopardize the appreciation of the play in our own time. What are we to do with a protagonist who attains heroic stature by killing his wife with kindness? Critics find themselves swept onto the horns of a dilemma

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