Heywood, Thomas | Nancy A. Gutierrez (essay date fall 1989)
Nancy A. Gutierrez (essay date fall 1989)
SOURCE: Gutierrez, Nancy A. “The Irresolution of Melodrama: The Meaning of Adultery in A Woman Killed with Kindness.” Exemplaria 1, no. 2 (fall 1989): 265-91.
[In the following essay, Gutierrez contends that Heywood's play is not a tragedy but a melodrama with an open-ended conclusion that provides no solution to the problem of adultery.]
Since genre is a mediating concept “between the individual work and its culture,”1 it seems appropriate to apply to Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), a play whose critical history is notable for its many arguments about genre, the critical perspective that Stephen Greenblatt calls a “poetics of culture.”2 Rather than perceiving literature as autonomous and fixed, this methodology strives to consider each text, not as a static artifact, but as a living expression of its time, depicting values and...
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