SOURCE: Henderson, Diana E. “Many Mansions: Reconstructing A Woman Killed with Kindness.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 26, no. 2 (spring 1986): 277-94.

[In the following essay, Henderson explains the importance of home in Heywood's most famous play.]

“Domestic tragedy” has been defined in a myriad of ways, particularly often in terms of the protagonist (of ordinary status and capacity) or the conflict (between family members or a married couple).¹ One element contained in the name itself remains in the background—domus, the home. The “rich circumstantiality of an English country house” in A Woman Killed has been mentioned as an important device in establishing the play's immediacy with its audience, as a material concern in the subplot, and as an indication of a new bourgeois realism in the drama.² But Heywood's home is even more: it provides a base for transforming essentially static social precepts and Christian homily into a dynamic sequence of events on a localized stage.

A Woman Killed is built upon the narrative paradigm of exile from and return to the home, both sacred and secular. By using a double plot, Heywood presents his Christian and civic versions of this basic story without either collapsing important distinctions or losing the close relationship believed to exist between the two spheres of action. The primary plot of Anne Frankford's seduction and her husband's “kind revenge” clearly invokes the Christian movement of fall from Edenic bliss into sin, allowing a spiritual homecoming only after sacrifice. The subplot develops the cycle of wandering and return in the more material realm of human society, as Charles Mountford is sent to prison and must redeem his family honor before regaining his family home. This narrative line unites the two plots even more comprehensively than do thematic links and local parallels between love triangles and moral temptations.

In order to locate and unify this narrative dramatically, Heywood emphasizes the actual house, represented on stage, as the place of identity—of secular family identity, and of sacred and secular marital identity. The equation of home and identity, explicitly and repeatedly made, thus links the world of social conflict with that of sacred fable. The plots are not exclusively sacred (Frankford story) versus secular (Mountford story); rather, one version dominates each plot, while the language and often the plotting draw on both versions. Perhaps the two versions of exile and homecoming are best regarded as providing the play with two axes of potential narrative movement: a vertical axis ranging from heaven to hell, providing a “setting” for Christian fall and salvation; and a horizontal axis of earthly locations measured by their distance from the home, providing a “setting” for property ownership, dispossession, and social judgment. These axes are presented through the play's figurative and descriptive language, and through localized onstage settings.

Were this a Tudor interlude, we might not have any sense of particular location—we would merely know that the characters were meeting, in an undefined space. But because by Heywood's time the public drama had developed methods of suggesting specific scenic locales and allowed flexibility in moving between those locales, Heywood could use the stage space to reinforce the “horizontal” movement of his narrative. In choosing not to represent vertical movement onstage except as metaphor, Heywood exploits staging to emphasize the material reality of his story, and to place Christian and secular issues in the same space. This setting not only invigorates a story devoid of much intrigue or violence (a “bare scene” indeed); it also encourages a more social portrayal of Christianity than had the morality plays, in which Everyman stood alone amidst Vices and Virtues. Since even the Christian story of Anne's fall occurs in and around a recognizable English home, the two axes clearly intersect in the main plot. It is only in the language and beliefs expressed in Heywood's text that the Christian fable dominates.³ Through these intersections of language and of place, the play links traditional Christian and new bourgeois social codes, and makes the realistic drama capable of containing a sacred fable without creating the stylistic jumble of an early Tudor morality.

The Christian dimension goes beyond more association of heaven and hell with good and bad—hardly an unusual pattern of imagery in Tudor drama. While it obviously does not extend as far as personification allegory, its method resembles that which Joseph Mazzeo sees in constructed allegories. A Woman Killed similarly “implies a central paradigmatic story as reference system, a story taken to be of permanent significance and archetypal in that it must be retold as reapplicable to the present.”⁴ Mazzeo notes that allegory as a principle of construction usually is cast as a journey, the “spatial delineation of nonspatial events” (p. 18). A Woman Killed includes the spatial delineation of such nonspatial and spatial events as well.

Thus in presentation the play refers to the typological tradition (more useful for plot construction than homilies were), but subordinates it to contemporary realization. This may be due to the ban on religious drama, but Heywood goes farther than many in his exclusion of all devils, spirits, and gods. He does not go so far, however, as the complete “secularization of space, the abolition of qualitative up and down” that Cassirer notes in Renaissance philosophy and Greenblatt finds in Marlowe's use of theatrical space.⁵ Heywood retains the vertical hierarchy in language and analogy, even as he uses secular staging.

An understanding of Heywood's plot, then, is of critical significance: “plot” as the ground upon which one constructs a home, “plot” as a sequence of events. Although Christian references abound in the Frankfords' story of temptation, fall, judgment, penance, and salvation, by themselves they do not account for the entire play's plotting—hence the criticism that the Mountford subplot is extraneous and distracting.⁶ In countering this view of the narrative as disconnected, I shall outline the play's references to the two axes of movement, first the sacred and then the secular. This method is necessarily misleading; it distorts the dynamics of the play, and, more to the point, it can disguise the very integration of the two axes which makes this play unique. Yet arguments require evidence, and I must first demonstrate that two realms of action are indeed crucial to interpreting the play's single narrative paradigm. As will become clearer as the evidence compounds, it is the interplay of these two realms which complicates Heywood's narrative, producing “problem scenes” and revising traditional boundaries of genre. The very artificiality of this analysis, separating the two realms for clarity, finally supports my central contention about Heywood's use of narrative space: for A Women Killed's artistry and importance lies in that well-tempered collusion of religious and realistic patterns.

The Christian analogues account for much of the play's scope and seriousness. Often criticized as unmotivated or unbelievable, the choices of the characters, especially in the main plot, make more sense if viewed in part as reenactments of the primary Christian plot. The Frankfords' connubial bliss, repeatedly lauded in the play's early scenes,⁷ is jarred by the entrance of Wendoll into their paradise, of whom the perspicacious servant Nicholas notes, “The Devil and he are all one in my eye” (iv.88). Wendoll briefly struggles against sin, swearing not to look at Frankford's bride:

And when I come by chance into her presence,
I'll hale these balls until my eyestrings crack
From being pulled and drawn to look that way.

(vi.14-16)

Yet immediately as Anne Frankford passes across the stage, he is represented as succumbing to concupiscentia oculorum, which traditionally leads to concupiscentia carnis, lust of the flesh. As a devil figure looking through his worldly eyes to satisfy the desires of his flesh, Wendoll incarnates the infernal triad of temptation, and soon begins his seduction of Anne. Heywood reminds us of their relationship in the Christian hierarchy: “Anne: There is sedition in your countenance. Wendoll: And in my heart, fair angel, chaste and wise” (vi.105-106). When he has the presumption to swear his love and “call to record / The host of Heaven,” Anne properly retorts, “The host of Heaven forbid / Wendoll should hatch such a disloyal thought” (vi.109-11). Soon, however, his professions of love begin to work upon her ear. Wendoll's obvious rhetorical flourishes in his “I care not, I” speech echo the perverse use of language by another demidevil to woo another Anne in Richard III. His overwrought conceits stand out against the “bare scene” announced in the play's prologue; good or bad aesthetically, his imagery achieves its aim in moving his fictional audience. As Anne's brother, Sir Francis Acton, later laments, “'Twas his tongue / That did corrupt her” (xvii.12-13). Appropriately so, for it was the serpent's persuasive speech which led to the original Fall.

In the subplot, Sir Charles Mountford's fall into sin also calls attention to the state and place of his soul, especially as that conflicts with the concerns of earth and property. When the hunting party turns into a battle and he commits the unpremeditated murder of Sir Francis Acton's followers, his “soul lies drown'd” in the blood of those “Poor innocents” (iii.44). Charles asks his sister Susan to call a surgeon not for his body but for his soul, and soon after wishes to escape upwards where identity is immutable: “I would I were in Heaven, to inherit there / Th'immortal birthright which my Saviour keeps” (v.27-28).

Anne also comes to lament her distance from the home of God. The next portion of the Frankford plot focuses on the experience of sin and its discovery. Numerous references are made to the vertical axis of movement with increasing emphasis on the distance of the sinners from heaven. Frankford, unchanged from his original state, finds the idea of betrayal “as hard to enter my belief / As Dives into Heaven” (viii.63-64), even “should an angel from the heavens drop down / And preach this” (viii.83-84). His marital paradise, suspended between heaven and the human world of change and exchange, soon collapses. Anne is now Frankford's “saint turn'd devil” (viii.151), whose fall leads Frankford to “try two seeming angels” (xi.2). The discovery scene is a metaphorical descent into hell for him, carefully transferred into a mundane setting. Frankford sneaks home at “dead midnight” and unlocks his own front (hell) gate, proceeding to the bedroom door

Where the most hallowed order and true knot
Of nuptial sanctity hath been profan'd.
It leads to my polluted bedchamber,
Once my terrestial heaven, now my earth's hell.

(xiii.12-15)

He prays to the heavens that they keep his sight from betraying him into a murder of passion, for he

                                                            would not damn two precious souls
Bought with my Saviour's blood and send them laden
With all their scarlet sins upon their backs
Unto a fearful Judgement.

(xiii.44-47)

Fortunately, the maid “like the angel's hand / Hath stay'd [him] from a bloody sacrifice” (xiii.68-69), making way for a more acceptable Christian punishment. After Wendoll runs away “Judas-like” (xiii.77), Frankford constructs his own Judgment scene.

In asking his pardon, Anne acknowledges her distance from their former wedded integrity through an analogy with the first vertical plunge: “I am as far from hoping such sweet grace / As Lucifer from Heaven” (xiii.80-81).⁸ Ashamed in the presence of her lord, Anne gratefully accepts Frankford's judgment, the words of which he has “regist'red in Heaven already” (xiii.152). He will “torment thy soul / And kill thee even with kindness” (xiii.155-56). In exiling Anne from their paradise Frankford certainly has a precedent, although critics have questioned his authority to judge (Frankford having after all invited the serpent to enter his garden).⁹ Within Renaissance society, no man would have greater authority to punish a woman's violation of the marriage bond than her husband. Given the standard punishment supported by the Church (adultery being under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical rather than civil courts, as a crime against God's law),¹⁰ Frankford is “kind,” demanding no public degradation. Nor does anyone else in the scene voice disapproval of his sentence, including Anne. Indeed, his refusal to kill Anne immediately and hence send her to damnation is later praised by Acton as exceptionally kind and patient. In his mercy, Frankford no longer echoes Adam in paradise, but instead follows the second Adam as an imitatio Christi. To give the judgment any greater moral sanction, Heywood would have to send a messenger from a higher position in the vertical hierarchy, not merely an angelic maid but an actual angel. This would make physical that vertical axis which the playwright had been at pains to create through narrative analogy and verbal allusion, rather than through direct onstage representation. Having adopted a contemporary and familiar setting in northern England for his action, Heywood had not the freedom to call on such supernatural intruders as appear in Shakespeare's romances (nor, one suspects, would he want them to come had he called). Frankford has as much moral authority within this setting as an author could give him. If one perceives Frankford's merciful judgment as properly analogous to God's, as the play encourages, and not as a usurpation or arrogant displacement of God's authority, the scene presents a consistent and logical extension of the Christian narrative line.¹¹

Meanwhile, back in the subplot, the lustsick Acton has invoked the vertical hierarchy to give his object of desire a new pedigree, supplanting her less attractive identity and name of enemy; he argues that Susan “was an angel in a mortal's shape / And ne'er descended from old Mountford's line” (vii.100-101). Susan, unaware of Acton's plans and pleading with her Mountford relatives “For the name's sake, for Christianity” to help her brother Charles, finds no greater correspondence between God's world and this (ix.10). “O Charity, why art thou fled to Heaven / And left all things on this earth uneven?” she asks (ix.37-38). Charles too has reason to complain. Having been absolved of guilt in the hunting accident and freed from prison, he has only a brief respite living in innocence with his sister in their Edenic summer home. “He in whom first our gentle style began, / Dwelt here,” Charles reminisces of his noble roots, as he lives happily impoverished (vii.18-19). Soon, however, he is again in a “hellish dungeon,” this time for the purely civil crime of indebtedness (x.2). As the subplot develops, Charles's concerns are more secular, and social honor becomes all-important, placing the language of heaven and hell very much in the background. Nevertheless, the Christian context of Susan's dilemma cannot be disregarded, for feminine honor in the seventeenth century coincides with chastity, a Christian virtue as well as a bodily fact. Thus, when she allows Charles to repay his honorable debt by offering her body to Acton, she also plans to prevent her own dishonor by killing herself before Acton can violate her (see xiv.84-99). She will her “imprison'd soul set free” to fly to Heaven (xiv.99). Fortunately, Acton's decision to wed her resolves her dilemma and the subplot with a less painful relocation.

The final portion of the Frankford plot presents the wages of sin after judgment. Frankford's “thoughts are all in Hell” when he thinks of Anne's crime (xv.6). Anne, now repentant, finally sees Wendoll's true colors and flees him:

The Devil doth come to tempt me ere I die.
My coach! This sin that with an angel's face
Courted mine honour till he sought my wrack,
In my repentant eyes seems ugly black.

(xvi.108-11)

Wendoll leaves to “wander like a Cain” and like Cain cannot be destroyed; he promises, “I will return” (xvi.126, 133). Anne's final scene on the other hand is irreversible as well as redemptive. Frankford's forgiveness enables her to complete her vertical return to grace, so that she can die proclaiming “Pardon'd on earth, soul, thou in Heaven art free” (xvii.121). The play then contains a divine comedy of sorts, although the scene plays as anything but comedic. It has been labelled “sentimental tragedy rather than pure tragedy,” containing “bathos enough for the piously inclined”—but few have agreed with Peter Ure that the “triumphant flaring-up of the marriage theme is in key with the exaltation of the happy pair.”¹² Perhaps in theory the marriage is happily restored, but on stage this divine homecoming is also an occasion for tears, most clearly illustrating the dramatic tension between the two axes of narrative pull in this play. The vertical Christian frame alone cannot account for the conclusion's affective power—nor for other problematic scenes. To understand A Woman Killed as a realistic, Christian, and tragic piece of theater, the secular or horizontal axis must receive equal attention.

Seen “horizontally,” the play's first scene is a celebration of marriage hosted by the newlyweds in their home, with praises of domestic union and harmony. All members of the household engage in gaiety in their proper spheres, including the servants who parody the festivities in debate over which dance to perform. They too end in harmony, dancing. If one examines the play's dynamic progressions from stasis towards a climactic “big scene” of upheaval, then the next two segments (sometimes edited as acts) similarly begin with a paean to the home, first by Frankford and then by the Mountfords (scenes iv and vii). In all these speeches, the home is analogous to happiness, both personal and social. While in some instances a Christian context appears in the language, always and dominantly the home in its material reality matters, both in language and as the drama's physical setting. A threat to the home develops as the play's chief danger and conflict, for such threats encompass all kinds of identity and order itself.

The story's scenic movement begins with the hawking wager between Sir Charles and Sir Francis, while still at the Frankfords' celebration. What seems like a harmless challenge in a home, however, results in death at Chevy Chase, an alien space belonging to neither party. Aptly, in this historical location of strife and personal heroism (recalling a very different ballad from “The Shaking of the Sheets” joked about in the play's first lines), the characters assume an anachronistic code of chivalric honor.¹³ With Pistol-like inflation but more dire results, the knights swagger and eventually fight (iii.34). In this first major conflict, the threat to the home remains metaphoric, as Acton draws his sword proclaiming “now I'll strike home” (iii.37). Charles's reply, “Thou shalt to thy long home / Or I will want my will,” foreshadows in small the play's focus on Charles's dispossession and Anne's journey to her long home, the grave (iii.37-38). What Charles uses as metaphor ironically becomes the price of passionate “sport.”

The actual house becomes a more powerful force as the subplot proceeds. In scene vii, Susan laments the changes “in our father's house” (line 6), but Charles remains content so long as he owns his home; indeed, deprived of wealth, home is all that remains of his identity except a name, a word—hence the place becomes essential. Charles observes that “To keep this place I have chang'd myself away,” acquiring personal debts (vii.55-56). This place, the family's summer home, ties Charles with his ancestors; in his words, Charles gives the family name and place priority over his particular honor as the basis for social identity. While the clan ethos might be regarded as medieval, this stress on the physical house sounds a note of special concern for Tudor nobility in an era of indebtedness, property transfers, and titles based solely on wealth. In the face of his “friend” Shafton's treacherous demand that Charles sell him the house, Mountford stresses that “if this were sold, our names should then be quite / Raz'd from the bead-role of gentility,” and its “virgin title” would be “deflower'd” (vii.36-37, 23). This latter claim gives the material home a symbolic power which should be recalled as the plot advances; it is not, as has been argued, a sign that Charles cares more about a summer retreat than he later will about his sister's honor. The threat is to both Mountfords here, to their very existence, and Charles's response is not one of greed or vanity alone. Without the house, both its place and its name, neither Charles nor Susan have a social identity.

Indeed, the play reinforces the validity of Charles's worries soon enough, as events remove him to prison. Charles dissolute is Charles dissolved, without substance. Hence he becomes a hollow name, dead on earth in his “long home” lamenting the unkindness of his relatives: “Mountfords all too base, / To let thy name lie fetter'd in disgrace. / A thousand deaths here in this grave I die” (x.6-8). The metonymy is telling. Susan's trip to plead with these flinty cousins reinforces the necessity of place to sustain conventional identity: “I knew you ere your brother sold his land,” she is told by cousin Sandy, “Then you were Mistress Sue” (ix.22-23). Old Mountford refuses help, claiming that Charles “lost my kindred when he fell to need” (ix.17). In the Tudor world of exchange, bonds of kindness were formed not by blood alone but by love or property as well. Charles's reliance on a politically and economically outmoded code of honor once again lands him in jail. At the nadir of the subplot, exile from the family home makes Charles and Susan nothing.

The Frankfords are also having problems at home. Wendoll is of course their houseguest, the invited intruder who usurps the husband's place only when Frankford roams away from home on business of a worldly sort. Wendoll follows his host's wish that he “be a present Frankford in his absence” a good bit farther than his host intended (vi.79). Whereas Charles must relocate to a hellish prison, Frankford's own home is transformed by the sin within it, so that when the supposedly absent Frankford returns to discover a present Frankford in his bed, the room itself converts from heaven to hell. Unlike the subplot's initial event in a neutral public space, the main plot's sinning begins at home, corrupting it, and making any “return” far more complicated spatially than a trip home.

In her seduction scene, Anne uses figures of movement to describe her fall: “My soul is wand'ring and hath lost her way”; “This maze I am in / I fear will prove the labyrinth of sin” (vi.151, 160-61). When her sin is discovered she must literally move. Like the Mountfords, she has lost her name by forfeiting her domestic identity, and realizes the loss in her first words onstage after the discovery:

O by what word, what title, or what name
Shall I entreat your pardon? Pardon! O
I am as far from hoping such sweet grace
As Lucifer from Heaven. To call you husband—
O me most wretched, I have lost that name;
I am no more your wife.

(xiii.78-83)

Anne wishes to obliterate her bodily identity along with her name, to become an absolute nothing with “no tongue, no ears, no eyes / No apprehension, no capacity” (xiii.90-91). The division in the Frankfords' marriage, caused by her fall which “cut two hearts out of one” (xiii.185), puts her in a postlapsarian quandary; her name and identity no longer match, the word no longer corresponds perfectly with the thing. Her social position only causes pain as she stands “in this place / Asham'd to look my servants in the face” (xiii.150-51); and she accepts exile passively.

Anne's banishment from the home, found in none of Heywood's novella sources, is the logical addition of a playwright transferring the Christian fall into realistic drama. In scene viii, when the faithful servant Nicholas first informs his master of the adultery, the startled Frankford threatens to “turn you with your base comparisons / Out of my doors” (47-48). Nicholas's appropriate response sounds like that of a semiliterate Hollywood cowboy: “Do, do. There's not room for Wendoll and me too both in one house” (viii.49-50). Once Nicholas's suspicions are vindicated, Frankford turns to his wife with the same punishment for evildoing. Frankford does not simply throw her out to wander; her torment, as the subplot has shown, will lie at least partially in the continued disjunction between her place and what must remain her name, however tainted. For the women, social status resides entirely in relationship to men, and honor in either complete or married chastity. Although Anne must

Leave nothing that did ever call thee mistress,
Or by whose sight being left here in the house
I may remember such a woman by,

(xiii.160-62)

she nominally remains Frankford's wife, estranged and sent to another house also nominally Frankford's. Merciful in neither killing nor abandoning his wife, Frankford still declares a rigorous sentence. It does not allow Anne a chance to renew her social identity through total relocation (as Wendoll intends to do), nor to return to her former state. Removed from her social world, she must go to a house which is a sterile double of her past home, where in solitude she will be unable to regenerate her name. Unlike Charles Mountford, whose male honor does not lie entirely in his “crime” and whose soul has not been seriously endangered with his body, Anne becomes an exile whose sin and whose sex bar her from any action to retrieve her status within human society.

Heywood emphasizes the contrast by resolving the subplot in the scene immediately following Anne's banishment. Charles's path is not so hopeless as Anne's, but he too faces a problem of honor. He cannot honorably claim his name and land until he has paid his debt to Acton, the enemy who has freed him. His heart “must lie bound / In more strict prison than thy stormy gaol” because of Acton's “kindness” (x.94-95). The debt must also be paid “in kind,” and because Acton's motivation was his desire to have Susan, Charles pleads with her to repair the wound to their name with her body. He clearly recognizes her honorable dilemma, though one must add that he does so inadequately. Partly out of embarrassment at his barbaric request, he tells her, “Nor do I woo you in a brother's name, / But in a stranger's”—but partly too out of accuracy, for he has not yet repossessed that name with his land (xiv.50-51).

Nothing can make Charles's behavior quite acceptable to a twentieth-century audience, no matter how well it fits the narrative scheme which develops home, family name, and identity; and indeed, Charles's request of Susan remains inherently contradictory. As she remarks, Acton would leap at the chance to bed her and “give the Mountfords' name so deep a wound” (xiv.44). Yet this is not cleansing the family name but merely transferring the shame to Susan. Charles argues that she should, as kindred, share the burden; she, noting that this would place her soul as well as body in the space he previously occupied as dishonored, finds a solution: she will kill herself before she actually loses her honor. One senses here an attempt more ingenious than successful to resolve both the sacred and secular demands of feminine honor. Juxtaposed with Charles's dominantly social motivations, the demand that Susan suffer in body and soul for him seems excessive. Yet it is not censured within the play, and does provide a neat contrast with Anne's weakness. Susan's offer is an alternative which moves Acton to true kindness and an honorable marriage.

Acton returns the Mountfords' identities by recognizing their honor and allowing them a socially respectable alliance rather than exploiting their vulnerability. He even renames the exiles (men first) in relation to himself: “I seal you my dear brother, her my wife” (xiv.146). After dramatic upheaval, then, this plot resolves in a homecoming which requires realignment and modification of the old family names and, at least for Susan, places of kinship. Only when place and name are harmoniously re-bound can the Mountfords find an acceptable identity within the social order.

Frankford's attempt to clean house is not so successful. Anne's exile was his attempt to obliterate the past, but as he encounters her forgotten lute, he remembers their former harmony and remains in torment. Movement through time, unlike space, is not reversible, as Frankford eloquently recognized in his soliloquy before awaking the guilty lovers; like so many other characters in Renaissance drama, Frankford cannot

                                                                                                    call back yesterday;
That time could turn up his swift sandy glass,
To untell the days, and to redeem these hours.

(xiii.53-55)

But by allowing Anne her life, Frankford has left open a path toward reconciliation, if not restoration, through a forward movement in space as well as time. Anne now has the time to repent (not merely to feel shame) and turn her soul back to heaven. By meeting again in a place which possesses their name yet is not the violated home, Anne's house of exile, the Frankfords can end their spiritual divorce—albeit briefly. Unlike the subplot, the cost here has been high, and renaming can only take place en route to another world. Anne had recognized this on the road: “So, now unto my coach, then to my home, / So to my deathbed” (xvi.100-101); and now we are reminded that she is “not of this world” (xvii.113). In terms of the horizontal narrative line, as well as in terms of the Christian line already examined, the final scene is a true re-placement for the married couple in which Frankford gives Anne her full name and identity along with forgiveness:

My wife, the mother to my pretty babes,
Both those lost names I do restore thee back,
And with this kiss I wed thee once again.

(xvii.115-17)

Though she is “wounded in thy honour'd name,” Frankford's forgiveness allows her to die “Honest in heart” (xvii.118, 120). And as in the subplot, Sir Francis Acton also gives Frankford a new name of relationship; having lost his sister Anne, Acton will replace her with a brother Frankford. Wendoll, meanwhile, has become the true exile wandering “In foreign countries and remoted climes” (xvi.127). Seeing Anne on the road, he laments:

O God, I have divorc'd the truest turtles
That ever liv'd together, and being divided
In several places, make their several moan;
She in the fields and he at home.

(xvi.47-50)

Yet he is on his way soon enough, neither repentant nor long daunted, in search of a new place to play the devil's advocate under another name.

The scene at Anne's death fulfills both the plots as an appropriate but ironic “homecoming.” The demands of the sacred make the secular reunion tragically brief. Penance cannot make Anne's body well, and indeed Frankford is compelled to visit only because she is penitently dying. The result is a comedy of the soul's progress, but only at the price of separating Anne's body and soul. Frankford is left with the corpse, and a “cold grave” to replace his “nuptial bed” (xvii.124). Because this is a play and we see the bodies, this image of loss evokes pity. Furthermore, because this is a secular drama in its stage setting, showing us only the horizontal range of movement visually, we recognize that even this brief “homecoming” remains incomplete, taking place not at home but in exile. We may believe in the soul's ascent but not see it; what we see onstage is death and separation. In terms of the theatrical presentation we have no image to replace them. We do have words, words of ascension and renaming, and it is this tension between language and image that saves the scene from bathos. The audience now experiences a disparity similar to that which the characters must face in their exiles. Without the Christian story, so dominant in the speech of A Woman Killed, the painful last scene would resemble the sentimental endings of many later melodramas, in which death seems gratuitous.¹⁴ Without the secular story and its power in presentation, we would have a throwback to earlier Christian morality plays, divine comedies rather than human tragedies. But in this moral work set in a mortal world, mistakes have a high price. The tension between the two realms of action remains powerful as Heywood emphasizes the necessity of earthly suffering and death.

In historical perspective, Heywood's combination of sources seems a predictable step in Renaissance drama. This was an age of genera mixta, particularly on the English stage. Yet despite the “relevance” of Heywood's dramaturgy, A Woman Killed did not spawn a school of Christian domestic tragedies. Contemporary issues and settings remained exceptions to the unwritten rules of writing tragedy, perhaps for both political and aesthetic reasons.

Immediacy in time and place were just two signs of Heywood's adherence to contemporary notions of realism, of particularity, in a play whose dominant mode is tragic. The signals of realism in Heywood's time have been aptly summarized as “a more carefully represented set of local conditions in narrative, a more accurate and discriminating depiction of social class, a narrative ear attuned to local speech, an attempt to record recognizable geographical places, an attention to national and regional custom.”¹⁵ These signs describe the conditions of narrative, not the narrative events themselves; therefore realistic technique would not in itself preclude a tragic story, even for a stronger adherent to formal rules than Thomas Heywood. But neither did this technique traditionally lend itself to the seriousness and scope of tragic drama, especially in an immediate location. By stressing the local and particular conditions in a tragedy, which was certainly a genre associated with the universal, one risked a parodic disjunction between the style of representation and “larger than life” events. Heywood's peculiar talent was to find a Christian and social conflict with serious symbolic resonance through patterns of metaphor, analogy, and narrative movement which for the most part do not clash with his local conditions (as grand passions, intrigue, and spectacle surely would).

Indeed, this act of combination seems the play's major endeavor—to realize the theological in the everyday, the material within the ethical. Doubtless this was more akin to the experience of Heywood's audience at the Rose than were the romantic or historical worlds rendered in many other plays. Within A Woman Killed, the old chivalric code of honor comes under attack, initiating the conflicts of the subplot beyond its adherents' control. Instead of such honor triumphing through successful violence, the connection of good Christianity with good homemaking is finally asserted in plot and language. It can be rendered visually onstage at this time in English theatrical history, given the flexible use of particular settings. The home provides the essential unifying emblem that the play needs: it is the origin and measure of movement in the secular realm, and a spatial analogy—a narrative replacement, as it were—for the theological progression in the sacred.

What we have, then, is an extreme case in an age of reinterpreted traditions, a case which not only alters its story line from the novellas and violent neo-Senecan tragedies by incorporating Christian traditions of stage and sermon; it revises the mode of presenting such a story onstage. The change is not merely formal. In finding a method to combine contemporary social structures with timeless truths, Heywood exploits genre as a way to structure experience in a communicable and apt form.¹⁶ Being an ideologically conservative play, in that it conserves rather than challenges the values of its time, A Woman Killed fittingly turns to traditional genres (tragedy, the morality play, homily) and conserves these “kinds” through contemporary techniques in language and stage usage.

The very appropriateness of Heywood's dramaturgy for his didactic purposes may explain the rarity of this kind of drama. The play's coherence is achieved only because the dramatic conflict has corresponding physical, social, and theological valences. The scarcity of possible plots like Heywood's in part accounts for the novelty of A Woman Killed.¹⁷ Of course, Elizabeth's reign also ended the year that A Woman Killed premiered, and under the Stuarts, theatrical energy moved in a different direction—also indoors, into the private theaters and palaces where plays were produced, but not into a fictional indoors world of serious drama about the home.

In moving Christian morality into a contemporary household, Heywood's play anticipated later bourgeois sentimental drama, in which the home and “intruder” figure prominently. Such drama, however, did not emerge until more than a century later and reflected a very different “reality”; when Heywood's play was then revised, the two axes of movement were conflated, erasing most of the narrative's logic and the conclusion's powerful tension. The energies motivating A Woman Killed had moved elsewhere. Before the drama regained a bourgeois following, a different combination of homiletic and realistic narrative was flourishing in what would become its most influential form, the novel.

Notes

1. See Rick Bowers, “A Woman Killed with Kindness: Plausibility on a Smaller Scale,” SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900] 24, 2 (Spring 1984):293-306. He discusses the smaller scale of “everyday human life” (p. 306), although he is not interested in the play's narrative patterns. Peter Ure, “Marriage and the Domestic Drama in Heywood and Ford,” ES [English Studies] 32 (1951):200-16, recapitulates earlier definitions and proposes that the focus of domestic tragedy is the marriage bond. Waldo F. McNeir, “Heywood's Sources for the Main Plot of A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Studies in the English Renaissance Drama: In Memory of Karl Julius Holzknecht, ed. Josephine W. Bennett, et al. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1959), p. 193, cites the “native rather than Renaissance spirit of thought and style in domestic tragedy,” but his focus is not on how this spirit functions in the narrative. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), p. 350, mentions the moral intention of domestic tragedy, but also the thriller plot—A Woman Killed being the exception. I will examine how Heywood includes both sin and society without a thriller's unrelated narrative.

2. McNeir, p. 198. Yves Bescou, “Thomas Heywood et le Probleme de l'Adultere dans Une Femme tuee par la Bonte,” Revue Anglo-Americaine 9 (1931):139, briefly mentions that the home functions as a prinipal character. R. W. Van Fossen also notes the importance of marriage and the home in his introduction to the play: Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961). All citations of A Woman Killed will refer to his edition.

3. Both Ure and Michel Grivelet, in Thomas Heywood et le Drame Domestique Elizabéthain (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1957), extend the work of H. H. Adams on homiletic tragedy; they regard the Christian framework as functional in the Frankford plot.

4. Joseph A. Mazzeo, “Allegorical Interpretation and History,” CL [Comparative Literature] 30, 1 (Winter 1978):19.

5. Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Marlowe and Renaissance Self-Fashioning,” in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), p. 44.

6. Most critics before the 1940s saw no point in the subplot at all; see Freda L. Townsend's summary of the attacks in “The Artistry of Thomas Heywood's Double Plots,” PQ [Philological Quarterly] 25 (April 1946):100-19. Moody E. Prior, The Language of Tragedy (1947; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), p. 74, uses the play as an example of loose construction. Others have proposed thematic links between A Woman Killed's double plots (cf. Townsend and Ure, among others). M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions in Elizabethan Tragédy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1957), p. 47, saw a link through moral antithesis but “no felt fusion.”

   Rather than accounting for A Woman Killed's narrative structure, more recent scholarship has defended the play through revisionary interpretation of characterization—neither Heywood's strong suit nor his focus of attention (see David Cook, “A Woman Killed with Kindness: An Unshakespearean Tragedy,” ES 45 [1964]:353-72). Cook does praise the structural rise and fall in general terms, as well; but the standard judgment of Heywood's narrative is harsh, from Arthur Melville Clark (“Nor is the plot, skilful as are some of the scenes, as carefully worked out as is required”; Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931], p. 231) to Robert Ornstein, who detects a “tinge of irony” lurking amidst the “facile plotting” (“Bourgeois Morality and Dramatic Convention in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” English Renaissance Drama: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Doran and Mark Eccles, ed. Standish Henning, et al. [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1976], p. 128). The narrative remains more easily dismissed than explained.

7. Charles says to Frankford: “She doth become you like a well-made suit”; “You both adorn each other, and your hands / Methinks are matches. There's equality / In this fair combination” (i.59, 65-67). This is a match of sympathies as well as ownership. See also Frankford's opening speech in scene iv.

8. John Canuteson takes the vocabulary too literally. In sympathy for Anne he states, “We have to agree that according to custom her marriage is doomed, but we also have to correct her theology. No relationship among men can be compared to God's treatment of Lucifer” (“The Theme of Forgiveness in the Plot and Subplot of A Woman Killed with Kindness,” RenD [Renaissance Drama] 2 [1969]:136). He does not recognize that Heywood is creating an analogy through a pattern of allusions; Anne's speech is figurative, and she is not making precise theological distinctions about her state.

9. Canuteson complains, “The most galling use to which Frankford puts religious terms is when he repeatedly compares himself with the divine” (p. 133). Cook says that Frankford lacks the “great-hearted emancipation from emotional constraint which would allow him to forgive” and his “insufficiency” of passion drove Anne to adultery (pp. 360, 361). This explanation not only runs counter to the play's action and commentary, but also to Renaissance views of reason and passion.

10. See Van Fossen on the adultery laws, pp. xxx-xxxi.

11. This obviously does not mean that we have to like the ideology; it just means that the scene is consistent within the play's stated code, and not a subtly masked criticism. Ornstein and Patricia Meyer Spacks (“Honor and Perception in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” MLQ [Modern Language Quarterly] 20 (1959):321-32) rightly point out problems with this code, although they sometimes imply that Heywood saw them too, which the play does not support.

    Also notable is a less attractive intersection between the axes here, in that Anne is Frankford's property, which he has the right to dispose of as he pleases. Christian charity qualifies this legal right.

12. Otelia Cromwell, Thomas Heywood: A Study in the Elizabethan Drama of Everyday Life, Yale Studies in English 78 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1928), p. 54; Ornstein, p. 139; Ure, pp. 209-10.

13. Canuteson (p. 128) notes that the characters' “assumption of a knightly code archaic in terms of the play” leads to their troubles. A major difference from earlier treatments of honor is the play's recognition of exchange and the middle class; for more on the historical conditions that may inform this change, see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

14. In the eighteenth-century version of this play, The Fatal Error by Benjamin Victor, it is Lady Frankford and she is raped, not seduced; her “error” is that she is too ashamed to tell her husband afterwards (see Hallett Smith, “A Woman Killed with Kindness,” PMLA 53 [1938]: 138-47). Under these conditions, death indeed seems gratuitous and uses a woman—as Ornstein claims A Woman Killed does—as a scapegoat sacrificed at the altar of a double standard.

15. Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), p. 80, in a discussion of the greater and more radical contemporary experiment in genera mixta, Don Quixote.

16. This description of genre is derived from Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973).

17. Heywood's play is not the only one to unite theology and domesticity, of course. Othello was produced in the same year and examines many of the same concepts, but with a radically different focus. A few other domestic tragedies also attempt to unite these concerns “realistically,” but almost all of them allow intrigue and murder and thus subordinate rather than endorse doctrinal orthodoxy.