Analysis
In an age that produced William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood achieved a popular success on the stage that very likely dimmed even that of the masters. He was extremely popular in the pit with an audience that sought entertainment more than enlightenment. Critic A. M. Clark has said that Heywood “was the journeyman-playwright par excellence, with a facility, not unlike the knack of a skilled artisan, with a dramatic insight that never altogether failed him, and without the vagaries and transcendences of a conscious literature.” Heywood’s plays presented characters and plots with which his audience could identify. That Heywood was able to present such middle-class characters, speaking naturally and responding to their conflicts with a morality consistent with their station in life, is not surprising, nor is it necessarily commendable. That he was able to do it and, within such strict boundaries, still produce effective scripts, always with dramatic and sometimes with literary quality, is more than commendable. As a result, Heywood became, in a genuine sense, the founder of the middle-class drama.
Heywood’s plots were often borrowed from the chapbook literature that was popular during the early seventeenth century, and those that were not were framed as if they had been. Thus, his settings and actions were familiar to theatergoers. The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, for example, follows from the interest of his contemporaries in witches—an interest on which Heywood later capitalized in The Late Lancashire Witches—and the play effectively uses the comic potential in the fraud of such persons as the Wise Woman proves to be. Such con artists were familiar to Heywood’s audience; thus, the Wise Woman’s various intrigues were of considerable interest. The Fair Maid of the West, although spiced with a certain amount of romance, also demonstrates this sense of immediacy. The audience would have found themselves quite at home during the tavern scenes or laughing with recognition at the clown Clem, who, with typical English decorum, takes himself a bit too seriously for his own good. The central plots of A Woman Killed with Kindness and The English Traveler, however, best demonstrate this point. Such accounts of infidelity and lovers’ intrigues were common in the popular literature of the day, materials that certainly would have been familiar to Heywood’s audience. They are, moreover, stories of characters from the middle class.
It is in fact the characters more than the plots in Heywood’s plays that do the most to break down barriers between the playwright and his audience. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, Frankford, though a member of the landed gentry, is not a member of the nobility. His grief is not that brought on by the peculiar circumstances of lofty birth but, rather, the kind of sorrow that anyone in the audience might experience. Anne’s sin, moreover, is not one she commits because of some gruesome sense of fate. Hers is the weakness of human nature—again, a weakness shared with the audience. Bess, the heroine of The Fair Maid of the West, despite her excessive virtues, would have greatly pleased the audience, as she was a tavern mistress, a member of their own plebeian class. These few examples well illustrate the generalization that the characters of Heywood’s plays, at least the better works, held up a mirror to early seventeenth century life.
To depict the experiences of such middle-class characters confronting what were generally the conflicts of the middle class, Heywood used what could well be regarded as pedestrian language. Poetry was the appropriate language for Shakespeare’s noble characters, just as Heywood’s...
(This entire section contains 2562 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
prose and simple diction are completely in line with the thematic structure of his plays. His characters are lower in stature than are Shakespeare’s; his themes are domestic. For his characters to speak in lofty tones would be out of place, and Heywood was enough of a dramatist to realize that his characters should use language and express sentiments appropriate to their station in life and the conflicts they faced.
The Fair Maid of the West
Clark has labeled The Fair Maid of the West the “quintessence of popular literature,” referring primarily to its excellent fusion of romantic elements with those of the domestic comedy. Heywood’s success in combining these seemingly disparate elements also makes this his best comedy, containing characters from the domestic mode and plot from the romantic. Both work well to illustrate a theme basic to the Heywood canon: that fidelity, chastity, and married love are virtues that ennoble men and women of the middle class.
Bess Bridges, the heroine of The Fair Maid of the West, is reputed to be unmatched in virtue as well as in beauty, making the tavern where she works a popular gathering place for a lively crowd of suitors, including the gallant Spencer, who in her defense kills the overbearing Carroll and is forced to flee to Fayal to avoid being arrested. There he is wounded and, thinking that he will die, sends Goodlack to entrust his entire estate to Bess if she has remained faithful to him. She has, and after hearing that her love is dead, she sets out to Fayal to see his grave. While on the sea, she purges it of Spanish pirates until she is reunited with and married to Spencer at the court of Mullisheg.
This summary illustrates the romantic aspects of the play. It includes voyages on the high seas, suggestive of the many chronicles of travel that were popular at the time. Bess takes on heroic if improbable stature as she captures ships that have been terrorizing the English merchant fleet. Thus, the play rings with patriotism such as would have been applauded by an audience who had within recent memory seen the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The settings shift from the tavern at Fay, in the domestic comedy tradition, to the court of Mullisheg, in the realm of romance. Yet throughout, the basic theme of the play is that the fundamental chastity of simple characters such as Bess and the faithfulness to love characteristic of Spencer are ennobling—that it is virtue, not birth, which confers true nobility.
In one sense, all Heywood’s plays, including the comedies, are concerned with the nobility of virtue, particularly the virtue of fidelity. In Heywood’s terms, this virtue alone could ennoble even the most lowly characters on the social scale. The Fair Maid of the West treats this theme in various ways. First, there is the chastity that distinguishes Bess from the beginning. There is, moreover, the faithful love that she and Spencer share and that finally overcomes all the problems they face. There is, as well, the conversion of the two schemers Roughman and Goodlack, effected by Bess’s virtue. Under her influence, these two become her true friends and loyal companions in her search for Spencer. Mullisheg, the pagan, serves as the final yardstick by which these characters, particularly Bess, can be measured. Despite his non-Christian frame of reference, he is so overcome with Bess’s morality and her nobility of spirit that he ensures her marriage to Spencer and, despite his own loss, rewards all the characters in her entourage.
In The Fair Maid of the West, Heywood masks his seriousness of purpose, one that dominates all his plays, with comedy and occasionally with sheer farce. He was well aware that audiences came to the theater more for entertainment than for enlightenment, but he demonstrates that they could well appreciate homily and entertainment together if the playwright suitably fused the two.
The Wise Woman of Hogsdon
The Wise Woman of Hogsdon is perhaps Heywood’s best example of what can legitimately be called domestic comedy. Lacking the ornamentation of romance elements that spice the action of The Fair Maid of the West, the play points up Heywood’s place as a link in the chain that connects Renaissance and Restoration comedy. His role in linking the domestic tragedy of the two periods is well known, but too often his role in connecting the comedy of the two periods goes unacknowledged.
The action of The Wise Woman of Hogsdon revolves around the antics of the rake Young Chartley, who has deserted Luce from the city, has contracted to marry Luce from the country, and has left his marriage bed to pursue the lovely Gratiana, the daughter of Sir Harry. These intrigues are complicated even further when the country Luce contracts the Wise Woman, whom Young Chartley has insulted, to handle the wedding arrangements. To avenge herself on Young Chartley, the Wise Woman mixes wedding partners. All is finally resolved when Young Chartley, who does in fact end up married to Luce from the city, repents, and all the others are satisfied with the mates they have been left holding.
The Wise Woman of Hogsdon is an acknowledgment of the virtues of chastity, fidelity, and married love. Here Heywood’s recurring theme is treated within a completely comic framework. Here, moreover, the content is purely middle-class, suggesting strongly the notion that these virtues glorify even the common folk. Two other aspects from the play demonstrate further the fact that Heywood was directing his homily chiefly at a middle-class audience. First, the Wise Woman herself is a character drawn from contemporary life; she is a fraud and a charlatan akin to the witches, alchemists, and other con artists who were constantly being exposed both in the courts and in the popular literature of the day. Her antics are precisely what Heywood’s audience would have expected from her; her duping of Young Chartley and the others would have been much to their appreciation. One scene in particular demonstrates Heywood’s awareness of his audience. In the combat between Sir Boniface and Sencer, disguised as Sir Timothy, in which the Latin of the farcical schoolmaster is used by Sencer as a weapon against him, Heywood is clearly painting a comic picture of the pedants, the pretenders to learning, who in their own way were seen by the middle-class audience as even more absurd than con artists such as the Wise Woman. This is low comedy perhaps, but the scene works well to illustrate the folly not only of Sir Boniface but of the pretentious Sir Harry as well.
The gulling of Sir Boniface is reminiscent of the slapstick humor that Jonson fell into in plays such as The Alchemist (pr. 1610), as when Face and Subtle dupe the Puritans. The overall style of the play, however, is much more in line with the works of Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley; its action is not unlike that of Etheredge’s The Man of Mode: Or, Sir Fopling Flutter (pr., pb. 1676) or Wycherley’s The Country Wife (pr., pb. 1675). Young Chartley, too, reminds one a great deal of Horner and Dorimant, whose quests for women trap them in a web of comic intrigue. For Heywood, however, there is a stronger moral bent at the denouement, not the essentially immoral conclusion typical of Wycherley or the amorality typical of Etherege. Young Chartley is penitent, and all the lovers are satisfied that they have ended up with the partners they should have. No character is totally humiliated. Even the con artists of the play have used their talents to ensure a proper resolution to the basic conflict. Thus, whatever this play may have in common with Restoration comedy, its morality sharply distinguishes it from the masterpieces of that licentious period.
A Woman Killed with Kindness
A Woman Killed with Kindness is generally regarded as Heywood’s masterpiece, and it has ensured him of a lasting place in the history of English literature. It is a sentimental or domestic tragedy constructed, like his other works, to appeal to a popular audience. The play has, moreover, a subplot that causes many of the same distractions caused by the secondary action in works such as The English Traveler. There is, however, one significant difference between this play and Heywood’s lesser-known works. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, the poet in Heywood shines. His language, although appropriate to his domestic framework and therefore still somewhat pedestrian, is used so well to express meaning consistent with the theme and the characters of the work that there is a harmony between language and sentiment that is characteristic only of great literature.
The central plot of A Woman Killed with Kindness begins with the marriage of Frankford and Anne, a marriage viewed by their friends as the perfect union. Frankford, however, takes Wendoll into his home, only to have his friend tempt Anne to infidelity. On discovering her adultery, Frankford banishes Anne to a secluded cottage on their estate. Anne refuses to eat and soon lies on her deathbed. Frankford, however, comes to her and forgives her, reinstating her to her position as wife and mother.
A Woman Killed with Kindness is Heywood’s best statement of his constant theme: the ennobling grace of married love and fidelity. In this work, however, the statement is enhanced by an explicitly Christian sentiment. Frankford overcomes his initial rage and his desire to kill Anne and Wendoll, determined that he will not destroy two souls that Christ died to save. In this way, the revenge tragedy motif so characteristic of Renaissance theater is shattered by Christian sentiment. His punishment of Anne, suggested by the title of the work, is also characteristic of his goodness, as is his final forgiveness of her. Such is Frankford’s virtue that scholars generally refer to him as the ultimate Christian hero.
While the goodness of Frankford accounts in part for the overwhelming sentimentality of the play, the genuine repentance of Anne and Wendoll adds significantly to the final pathos. They accept the tortures of their guilt and do not at any point try to justify their actions. Anne dies—Heywood’s morality would not have allowed otherwise—but there is beauty in her death, the beauty of justice matched by forgiveness.
What makes A Woman Killed with Kindness a superior work, recognized as such even by those critics who do not accept the possibility of domestic tragedy and do not call Heywood’s work a tragedy, is the language. The play’s powerful fusion of language and sentiment is particularly clear in the scene in which Frankford confronts Anne about her infidelity. With a series of short questions, pointedly delivered, he asks her what failings as a husband he had demonstrated that would make her turn from him. She denies there being any, until at last Frankford explodes with a declaration of innocence from such failings that demonstrates well the grief he feels. This whole scene is built on the assumption that the marital vows are sacred and that Frankford’s faithfulness as a husband should preclude such treachery by his wife.
Of all Heywood’s plays, A Woman Killed with Kindness has had the most lasting interest to scholars; more important, the play has had an enormous impact on dramatic literature. Writers interested in the possibilities of sentimental tragedy have taken it as their model; Diderot referred explicitly to the success of A Woman Killed with Kindness as justifying the writing of domestic tragedy. Though the bulk of his work has been forgotten, Heywood has achieved a permanent place in the history of drama.