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 problems of its period, and commenting on them: “literature does not ‘reflect’ a life, static and fully formed, but is part of the cultural production which contributes to the process of formation.”³ Consequently, in such a methodology, immutable notions of genre are resisted.

This is contrary to most of the scholarly discussion concerning A Woman Killed. Although the play draws much of its aesthetic power from the symbiosis of realistic representation and emblematic meaning (a marriage of mimetic and didactic impulses), the latter is normally privileged at the expense of the former: the play is interpreted in light of its end, rather than the various means by which that end is attained.⁴ The two plots in the play depict members of the English gentry interacting with each other on an English country estate. The main plot shows the happy marriage of a country gentleman and his wife, which is destroyed by the wife's adultery with the husband's best friend. The subplot represents the decline of one man's fortunes after he kills two men in a fit of temper, and his subsequent rise in station because of another man's attraction to his sister. In neither plot are the main characters nobility, and they engage in leisure activities of the gentry—dancing, cardplaying, and hawking. The initial situations of both plots are also commonplace, and the realistic setting contributes to the overall impression that the play is offering a mirror of the life of the English gentry.

The contrived endings in both plots challenge this realism in representation. The subplot has a comic structure which, by definition, allows for improbable events and inconsistent characterization, and almost from the beginning loses its mimetic nature. The characters who abandon Mountford—his uncle, Old Mountford, and his cousin, Tydy; his former friend, Sandy; and his former tenant, Roder—are reminiscent of the personified characters who leave Everyman when he is confronted with Death, thus foregrounding a specific morality convention.⁵ Further, Acton's dramatic on-stage conversion from vengeful enemy to generous friend and lover is obviously an element of prescriptive literature. But the more explicit didacticism is in the ending of the main plot. Here Anne Frankford, the adulterous wife (who has already directly addressed the women in the audience, telling them to avoid her example of infidelity) is forgiven by her “kind” husband, just prior to her death by self-inflicted starvation. The critical history of the play is dominated by scholars' concern about this moralizing aspect of the ends of both these plots and its relationship to meaning and genre.

In his essay on Heywood, T. S. Eliot initiated the debate about A Woman Killed with Kindness with his statement that “Heywood's is a drama of common life, not, in the highest sense, tragedy at all.”⁶ Taking their cue from Eliot, later scholars have focused their discussions of A Woman Killed on precisely this issue of whether or not Heywood writes tragedy. Certainly, if the character of Anne Frankford is perceived as the protagonist, the play's structure shows her rise, her fatal action, and her fall—the classic tragic pattern.⁷ Even if the focus is shifted to John Frankford, the wronged husband, a kind of tragic structure is evident, since his actions in punishing his wife ultimately cause her to be taken away from him forever, and he thus loses an important reason for living.⁸

Sometimes elements other than its de casibus design determine the play as tragedy for its readers. Rick Bowers, making a virtue of necessity, sees the play's small scale as an essential element for its tragic effect,⁹ whereas Hardin Craig points to Elizabethan faculty psychology as the crucial element for tragic motivation in character.¹⁰ Leonora Leet Brodwin and Roger Stilling argue that the love element in A Woman Killed dominates the tragic effect, thus categorizing it in the subgenre of Elizabethan love tragedy.¹¹

On the other hand, the seeming moralistic message of the play—that the world is rightly ordered by a Christian paradigm—convinces many critics that Heywood is writing a particular kind of tragedy with its own peculiar tragic effect. The most prominent proponent of this theory is Henry Hitch Adams, who argues that A Woman Killed is an excellent example of English domestic or homiletic tragedy.¹² Most recently, Barbara Baines has argued that the peculiar effect of domestic tragedy in general, and A Woman Killed in particular, lies in “typological and emblematic amplification.”¹³ At least one critic, however, has argued that the domestic plot and the non-aristocratic setting of A Woman Killed are clear indications that the play is not tragedy: Moody Prior calls A Woman Killed a “drame,” that is, a play “in which the main characters face a trying situation and confront a difficult problem, any solution to which seems to involve them in possibly unhappy consequences.”¹⁴

Finally, some scholars, uncomfortable with the problematic characterization of Anne and Frankford, see the play as a kind of anti-tragedy. For example, John Canuteson views the play as an example of Renaissance skepticism, as the priggishness of Frankford deliberately undercuts the Christian allegory inherent in the lovers' triangle.¹⁵ George C. Herndl sees Anne's acquiescence to her seducer and her decision to kill herself by starvation as inconsistent with her virtuous character, and finds Frankford's cruel and kind judgment on Anne at the time of her sin ludicrous, given his later forgiveness on her deathbed.¹⁶ Another scholar finds a political message in Anne's extremity of behavior, asserting that the play offers a “prophetic” description of women's roles in later centuries, specifically in the “weak personality and weak morals” of Anne Frankford.¹⁷

These various interpretations of the play—traditional tragedy, domestic drama, anti-tragedy and political document—relying as they do on the assumption that the play is monolithic in meaning, are undercut by the psychological and sociological ambiguity of the character relationships in both the main plot and the subplot. The importance of social history for a critical understanding of A Woman Killed has recently been recognized by Laura G. Bromley, who argues that “Heywood intended to dramatize a code of gentlemanly behavior for an emerging middle-class audience eager for guidance in the business of living.”¹⁸ Although I agree with Bromley that Heywood's play is illuminated when examined in the context of domestic courtesy manuals, the frame of reference could be even further expanded to include the broader frame of family life. The adultery in the main plot and the question of honor in the subplot foreground the problematic role of women in a patriarchal society, particularly in the smaller family unit: in the main plot, the husband allows the hierarchical nature of the family to be disrupted by his introduction of a male outsider into the dyad of husband and wife; and in the subplot, the head of the family first wastes the family's fortune because of an impulsive act of violence and, second, makes his sister an object by which he can reconstitute the name of his family.

A second area of tension is that between family interrelationships and extra-familial bondings, as the conflicts in both plots arise out of the nuclear family's relationships with kinfolk, servants, and neighbors. Such indeterminacy within private and public affective relationships of necessity affects the play's genre. The models of traditional tragedy and domestic drama, which offer essentialist representations of human experience, skew the experience offered by the play, as do the models of anti-tragedy and the political document, since all of these privilege the play's emblematic meaning and ignore its sociological context. Although individual aspects of A Woman Killed might point to one of these models, a more accurate categorization of the play is melodrama, since it stretches to encompass a breadth of audience response in its depiction of the culture-specific problem of adultery. However, before we can come to any kind of conclusion about genre, it is necessary to understand the ideological tensions at work in the play's depiction of the family.

1

Modern historians of the family caution their readers and each other about picturing the family, in any period, as a static social unit, made up of the same kind of members who understand family relationships in the same way and who derive the same emotional value from such relationships. Family structure and meaning differ across cultures and between social classes. They are perceived differently by people of different sexes and of different ages; they are perceived differently by the same person at different times in his/her life. And finally, the modern historian's ability to understand and articulate this ever-shifting social phenomenon rests on limited records, and the validity of interpretation depends on a methodology that takes into account all such variables and qualifications. However, because the English gentry of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was a literate class that left behind records of its existence, the outlines of its family make-up and character are more accessible to modern historians than family units of less literate classes.¹⁹A Woman Killed with Kindness focuses on three particular aspects of the family: power relations within the household, particularly between husband and wife; the situation of younger sons; and the relationship between the nuclear family and a larger community of neighbors and kinfolk.

The nuclear family seems to be the norm for the gentry, rather than the exception, that is, “the conjugal pair and their unmarried children.”²⁰ This family unit is the core of the household, all “persons living under one roof.”²¹ People other than the nuclear family in the household would include servants primarily, although other kin might also be included—particularly grandparents or married children. The household was often described as “a little commonwealth,”²² with various value-laden levels:

[In this commonwealth], there are diuers societies and degrees, reciprocally relating, and mutually depending one vpon another. The highest degree or societie is between the husband and the wife; and this is as the first wheele of a clocke, that turneth about all the rest in order. The next societie, is betweene the Parents and the children. The third betweene the seruants one with another, and towards all other superiors in the familie. Into these three societies may a familie bee disposed.²³

While the hierarchical pattern between each of these societies is relatively clear, the power relations within the conjugal pair is more complicated. Should the husband be his wife's superior (patriarchal model of marriage), or should the husband and wife be equal partners (mutuality model of marriage)?²⁴

In arguing for the patriarchal model, contemporary authors claim that male domination is the natural and proper state of things: just as mankind owes love and worship to God, as citizens owe duty and allegiance to their king, wives owe love and obedience to their husbands. “Nature hath framed the lineaments of [a husband's] body to superiority, & set the print of gouernment in his face, which is more sterne, less delicate then the womans.”²⁵ The husband “is a priest unto his wife … He is the highest in the family, and has both authority over all and the charge of all is committed to his charge; he is as a king in his own house.”²⁶ Marriage is a reflection of universal order:

It standeth not, in what man and wife shal conclude vpon, that there may be peace & quietnes, but what order God hath prescribed them, to bee obeyed in their places: so that they must looke vnto Gods wisedom, order, & polity for oeconomical gouernment, and not what may seeme right and good in their owne eies. And that, if the man may not weare womans apparrell, nor the woman mans, how much lesse may the one vsurpe the others dignitie, or the other (to wit the husband) resigne or giue ouer his soueraigntie vnto his wife? but each must keepe their place, their order, and heauenly politie, wherto God hath called them.²⁷

This patriarchal model of the family, grounded as it is in the ideological underpinnings that legitimate the cultural status quo, underscores the importance of the family as the foundation of political, social, and moral order.²⁸

However, Renaissance and Reformation attitudes toward the nature of man offer another perspective of the husband and wife relationship—the idea of “mutuality,” where the wife is a companion, not a subordinate, to her husband. Advocates of this position point to the fact that Eve was created from Adam's side, so “that shee might walke joyntly with him, under the conduct and government of her head.”²⁹ As Davies has pointed out in her work on Renaissance marriage literature, this conception of “mutuality” or “love” is basic to both Catholic and Protestant conceptions of marriage.³⁰ Daniel Rogers provides a particularly good description of this model in his Matrimoniall Honour (1642):

Husbands and wives should be as two sweet friends, bred under one constellation, tempered by an influence from heaven, whereof neither can give any great reason, save that mercy and providence first made them so, and then made their match; Saying, see, God hath determined us, out of this vast world, each for other; perhaps many may deserve as well, but yet to me, and for my turne, thou excellest them all, and God hath made me to thinke so (not for formality sake to say) but because it is so.³¹

While a modern audience might see a contradiction between the patriarchal and the mutualistic views of marriage, Davies points out that the Renaissance commentators themselves “took the paradox in their stride.”³²

Related to these differing views of marriage is the question of what kind of education a woman should be given. Although virtually all writers are agreed that women should be taught “religion, duty to parents, good manners, and the care and supervision of the household,”³³ the question of further education in the arts and sciences is much debated. While opponents to this idea argue that knowledge makes a woman immoral as well as discontent with her role in the social hierarchy, proponents disagree and assert that such knowledge assists a woman in fulfilling her religious and domestic duties. Thomas Becon writes in 1564:

Is not the woman the creature of God, so well as the man? … Can that woman govern her house godly, which knoweth not one point of godlynes? … Who seeth not now then howe necessarye the vertuous education and bringinge up of the womankinde is?³⁴

Arguers on both sides of this debate assume that a woman is defined solely by her roles as wife and mother, and education is valued or not valued in relation to this cultural given. Consequently, no matter what kind of marriage is advocated in domestic manuals, patriarchal determination prescribes women's social roles.

This patriarchal emphasis is evident in other kinds of discussions of marriage. Catherine Belsey, for example, characterizes the many versions of Alice Arden's adultery and murder of her husband (the subject of Arden of Feversham), from the time of its occurrence in 1551 through the first years of the seventeenth century, as society's attempt to make sense of a private insurrection within the family.³⁵ The center of this insurrection is the wife—in particular, her violation of what is perceived to be the mark of her excellence, her chastity: “the flower of manners, the honour of the body, the ornament and splendour of the feminine sexe, the integrity of the bloud, the faith of their kinde, and the proclaimer of the sincerity and candour of a faire soule.”³⁶ A woman's abuse of her chastity ranks as such a serious transgression because her chastity belongs, not to the woman herself, but to the woman's male overseer, either her father or her husband: “A woman hath no power of her own body, but her husband … thou dost the more wrong to give away that thing which is another body's without the owner's license.”³⁷

This conception of a woman's honor as a male possession parallels the legal reality barring woman from any kind of ownership: at her marriage, all a woman's property—that is, all that she was given by her father—was transferred to her husband's ownership. A woman possessed nothing that her father, and then her husband, did not give her. Lévi-Strauss's thesis that the exchange of woman is the basis of culture is consequently applicable to early modern England. Because woman was no more than “a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it,”³⁸ the patriarchal system is particularly defined as “relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women.”³⁹ Women were objects, not subjects, in early modern England.

Because of the male ownership of a woman's honor, a wife's chastity effectively became the delicate foundation for the social institution of marriage. A husband was absolutely dependent upon his wife's sense of honor, given his inherent inability to insure her faithfulness.⁴⁰ For this reason, a wife's adultery was considered a more heinous violation than was her husband's.⁴¹ But although a wife's adultery was a clearly perceivable wrong in Renaissance England, it was nevertheless a wrong difficult to categorize and thus to eradicate. Not only did adultery violate one of the Ten Commandments, and thus was a crime prosecuted in Church courts, but it was also a disruption of the social order. In spite of its nature as both moral and civil offense, however, offenders were punished only moderately, much less severely than in other European countries.⁴² Even when adultery was formally determined a felony against the state in 1650, when the Rump Parliament introduced the death penalty for the female adulterer, the law seems to have been virtually unenforceable.⁴³ On the one hand, this perception of adultery as an offense against both Church and State shows the equation of private morality with public welfare, but on the other hand, the problem of enforcement also reveals a corresponding struggle between individual rights and institutional authority, a characteristic social tension of the age. Was adultery a crime against the state? Or was it exclusively a sin against God? Should it be punished by death? Was a less serious punishment advisable? Should the state be the judge? Or the church? Or the husband?

Besides the relations between husband and wife, A Woman Killed dramatizes the situation of Wendoll, a character who is identified as a member of the gentry, but who is apparently landless and explicitly without economic means. Although his family fortunes may simply be lost, he more probably is a younger son, unable to draw on family wealth. Modern historians have determined that, while primogeniture was the pervasive rule, it appears that many fathers tried to insure the future of younger sons, either by providing the sons with money during their lifetime for schooling or apprenticeship, or by willing the sons land that was not entailed, or by trying to instill in the eldest son a sense of responsibility for his younger brothers. Houlbrooke points out that it is difficult to chart the fortunes of younger sons, but he does note that “a high fertility and a dramatic expansion of the ranks of the gentry had sharpened competition for places of profit and honour” during the first part of the seventeenth century (when A Woman Killed was written), and that “perhaps … the situation of younger sons was worse at this time than it had been earlier or would be later.”⁴⁴

Whatever the power relations within the marriage and nuclear family unit, the household existed as a social entity within a larger community of kinfolk and geographically important neighbors. In describing the relationship of the smaller social unit with the larger, Wrightson argues that, among the gentry, in general, “more vital social bonds were those … individually established and maintained not with an extended kinship group but within … the neighborhood.”⁴⁵ While ties of blood were important in practical matters, such as choosing the executor of one's will, records seem to show that “kinsfolk were selected for certain purposes if they were locally available and all other things were equal.”⁴⁶ The bonds of a family with those people who lived in geographical proximity, on the other hand, seem to be more significant. “Neighborliness” is the term used to describe a horizontal relationship, that is, a relationship of equality and mutuality among the members. Deference and paternalism are terms used to describe a vertical relationship between social unequals, such as between a landlord and his tenant. While affective bonds seem to rule “neighborliness,” mutual self-interest is the mark of a successful vertical relationship. One of Wrightson's more interesting observations is that such self-interest seems to rule kinship bonds as well, when geographical distance is involved. If this is true, then conflict between bonds of kinship and bonds of friendship may not have been uncommon.

This background of family history illuminates the various political and erotic power relations in A Woman Killed with Kindness: husband vs. wife; wife vs. husband's best friend; husband vs. friend; family head vs. kinfolk, friends and neighbors; family vs. community. The depiction of these relations, as well as their potential for conflict, controls the play's generic classification.

2

The sociological context of A Woman Killed is established in the first few scenes, with the wedding celebration of Frankford and Anne taking place in the confines of Frankford's Yorkshire estate and being witnessed by family relatives and servants. Husband and wife, members of the gentry, are identified immediately as the core of a family and the center of a large household. The presence of wedding guests of the same class as the wedding couple establishes a larger network of community outside the household. Further, the music and dancing, common Elizabethan metaphors for the orderliness of creation, establish the Edenic world in which the action begins.

The Frankfords' marriage is described in terms of both the patriarchal and the mutualistic models of marriage. Anne immediately demonstrates the proper humility and subservience of a wife when she asserts the importance to her of her husband's favor:

His sweet content is like a flattering glass,
To make my face seem fairer to mine eye:
But the least wrinkle from his stormy brow
Will blast the roses in my cheeks that grow.

1.33-36⁴⁷

And Mountford describes husband and wife as intellectual, as well as social, equals, signifying that Anne has probably received a more extensive education than many women:

You both adorn each other, and your hands
Methinks are matches. There's equality
In this fair combination; you are both scholars,
Both young, both descended nobly.
There's music in this sympathy …

65-69

Both these models rest on the excellent character of Anne, “beauty and perfection's eldest daughter” (23), paralleling the discussion of marriage in domestic handbooks: no matter whether the wife is described as a subordinate or as a companion to her husband, she bears the burden of making the marriage harmonious, since it is she who must be pliant and obedient to her husband, no matter what he demands. The success of the marriage—and thus of the household as well—depends on the acquiescence of the wife to the subordinate role that society prescribes for her.

What disrupts the family is the entry of another man into the husband-wife dyad. Frankford places his affective bond with Wendoll on a footing almost equal to his relationship with Anne,⁴⁸ and it unsettles the marital harmony. The conjugal pair, bonded not only in terms of class, intellect, and mental compatibility, are also sexual partners. In effect, the entry of a man into this unit shakes up the erotic configuration, as both husband and wife form an intimate bond with this third party, in addition to the one that they have formed with each other. Male friendship, co-existing in the same affective space as the marital relationship, becomes a source of conflict between husband and wife.

Wendoll's entry into the household, on the surface, seems not at all disruptive, only a sign of Frankford's generosity. However, his place in the larger community signals his potential for disruption. Frankford describes Wendoll as “of small means, … somewhat pressed by want” (4.31-32), as having “mean possibilities” (64). This economic want is counterbalanced by Wendoll's class as “a gentleman / Of a good house” (32-33), “a gentleman / In all things” (63-64). It appears Wendoll is a younger son, a victim of primogeniture on the one hand, but also a potential source of social disorder on the other, since he has no place within the carefully prescribed social hierarchy. Further, Wendoll's participation in the hawking wager that results in Mountford's fit of passion—in spite of Wendoll's lack of resources—indicates his propensity for ill-conceived action.

That Wendoll is a threat to the marital union is implicit when Frankford welcomes Wendoll into his household on the day after his own wedding. He welcomes Wendoll “from this present day / … for ever” (4.83-84), an echo, certainly, of the marriage service. Wendoll has Frankford's “table and … purse” (64), and Frankford pays for his “man [and] gelding” (71): Wendoll's possessions are Frankford's possessions. Frankford asks his wife to “use [Wendoll] with all thy loving'st courtesy” (80) and Anne agrees to give him all that “modesty may well extend” (81). Prior to her acquiescing to Wendoll, Anne reports that her husband asks Wendoll to “be a present Frankford in his absence” (6.79). And Wendoll admits that Frankford

                                                                                cannot eat without me,
Nor laugh without me. I am to his body
As necessary as his digestion,
And equally do make him whole or sick.

40-43

Frankford does not, of course, extend to Wendoll his rights as husband, but he places Wendoll above the servants and shares with his friend some of the patriarch's privileges. Wendoll's role comes close to, but is not entirely, that of the master of the household. In the world of the family, this addition of another man in the position of paterfamilias disrupts the dyad of husband and wife.

The enactment of the seduction makes visible the ease by which adultery enters the apparently harmonious world of the family. In his soliloquy before he confronts Anne, Wendoll enlarges upon the closeness he enjoys with Frankford (6.38-43, partially quoted above), concluding with his understanding of what kind of outrage against the moral order he is contemplating:

Hast thou the power straight with thy gory hands
To rip thy image from his bleeding heart?
To scratch thy name from out the holy book
Of his remembrance, and to wound his name
That holds thy name so dear, or rend his heart
To whom thy heart was join'd and knit together?

45-50

Wendoll's recognition of the wrong he will be doing to Frankford persuades him not at all to resist his passion: “And yet I must” (51). He is conscious from the very beginning that he is violating both a personal and social code of behavior, but his appetite, which in effect has been endorsed by Frankford in Frankford's insistence that Wendoll use his home as if he were Frankford himself, is too strong for his reason to control.

What is also important about Wendoll's self-inspection and self-questioning—shallow though it is—is that he sees the seduction of his best friend's wife as an act that is relevant only to the best friend and not to the wife. Anne has no identity for Wendoll beyond her relationship with Frankford. Further, Anne herself defines who she is solely in terms of her role as Frankford's wife, responding to Wendoll's entreaties in the seduction scene only in relation to what such an act might mean to her husband, calling Wendoll disloyal, and reminding him that Frankford “esteems [Wendoll] / Even as his brain, his eyeball, or his heart” (6.114-15). But Wendoll asserts that his bond with Frankford, which he acknowledges willingly, does not preclude his desire for Anne: “Mistake me not, the augmentation / Of my sincere affection borne to you / Doth no whit lessen my regard of him” (144-46). Anne is bewildered, because Wendoll is telling her that her identity as Frankford's wife does not have the power to keep him in his socially prescribed place. And Anne has no other argument for him: “What shall I say? / My soul is wand'ring and hath lost her way” (150-51).

Anne's upbringing and education, the foundation for her chastity, are liabilities in this situation, for they have defined her only in terms of wife and mother, and have allowed her no internal resources with which to fight Wendoll's suggestion.⁴⁹ She gives in to Wendoll, her only guide in the disordered new world in which she finds herself, a man who, in all ways but one, she has been treating as her husband:

                                                                                O Master Wendoll,
Pray God I be not born to curse your tongue,
That hath enchanted me. This maze(50) I am in
I fear will prove the labyrinth of sin.

158-61

Both Anne and Wendoll are moved to sin because fundamental family relationships have been upset: Wendoll has been acting like Frankford in all things but sexual access to Anne, and he now assumes this prerogative; Anne, denied her protective shield as Frankford's unapproachable wife, acquiesces to this “surrogate” husband she has known since the day after her marriage.

Frankford's situation differs from that of Anne and Wendoll because his is the only role in the family and household that has not been disrupted by the introduction of Wendoll. This is so because, as the source of all power, he alone can define function and position within the family and household structures. He has placed Wendoll second in his affections, and while this position results in catastrophe for Wendoll and Anne, it proves no such disaster for Frankford. Therefore, he suffers no identity crisis, no disruption of world view, no loss of private and public context, and he is able to control his grief and passion with reason. Like both other characters, he is presented with an idea that shatters his world and invites him to sin. However, unlike Wendoll, he maintains an anguished self-restraint:

                                                  No, I will loose these thoughts;
Distraction I will banish from my brow
And from my looks exile sad discontent.
Their wonted favours in my tongue shall flow;
Till I know all, I'll nothing seem to know.

8.107-11

And, in contrast with Anne, Frankford is able to assimilate the most hideous fact with what he knows to be true. Even though he wishes “it were possible / To undo things done, to call back yesterday,” he ultimately realizes that he “talk[s] of things impossible, / And cast[s] beyond the moon” (13.52-53, 63-64). When Frankford struggles against the temptation to kill, he prays to God for patience; he calls the servant girl's hand an “angel's hand” when she stops him from murdering; he treats his sinning wife with righteousness and dignity. His self-government sets him off dramatically from the lovers, who are unable to fight temptation successfully. But his singular lack of self-knowledge about the sexual confusion into which he has thrown both his wife and his best friend demonstrates a basic inadequacy about the effectiveness of patriarchal authority when two different affective bonds come into conflict.

The responses of the three principal characters to the presence of adultery in their lives demonstrate the ineffectuality of the family in reestablishing the order it has violated, and also call into question the effectiveness of patriarchal control. Wendoll repents his actions and feels guilt for destroying the home of his friends, yet his decision to go abroad and enter the world of the court does not preclude his ability—or even his proclivity—to be the agent for yet another adulterous liaison. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Anne's response. Acting like the “Puritant” that Wendoll calls her, Anne reveals her intense feelings of despair and guilt when Frankford discovers her in bed with Wendoll. She is unable to call Frankford by the name of “husband” because she has, in effect, destroyed the bond of marriage. She also expects drastic and irreversible punishment from his hands: “When do you spurn me like a dog? When tread me / Under your feet? When drag me by the hair?” (92-93) When Frankford's “kind” punishment finally is voiced—that Anne is banished forever from him and her children to a neighboring mansion—Anne's response is that it is “a mild sentence” (171). In fact, she later demonstrates that it is too mild, sentencing herself to death by starvation to erase the blot of her sin. Anne's deeply felt contrition affirms the masculine order that she has threatened by her marital infidelity, and her self-inflicted starvation, certainly a kind of self-violence, appears to be the physical punishment that her husband refuses to enact. From another perspective, however, it also seems like a kind of wayward individualism, an open challenge (albeit unconscious—Anne is the play's most fervent apologist for the patriarchal status quo) to the age's insistence on masculine authority.

If Wendoll's response to his part in the adultery demonstrates an ambiguous tension between repentance and retribution, and if Anne's response reflects her age's desire for harsh retribution for such a crime, Frankford's response to his wife's adultery seems to show a kind of mean. Not only does he free Wendoll, but he also uses no physical violence upon Anne and ultimately embraces her as his wife when she shows true contrition: “As freely from the low depth of my soul / As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death, / I pardon thee” (17.93-95). However, Frankford's self-restraint and non-violence are unusual responses to a wife's infidelity, as we see in Anne's initial expectations of the treatment she will receive at her husband's hands, and in Acton's comments upon his brother-in-law's action at his sister's deathbed (17.16-22). This difficulty on the part of both victim and one of the “oppressors,” to accept human compassion as a proper response, exposes the cruelty and oppression marking the patriarchy's treatment of women.

Thus, although the actions of each of the three main characters offer a condemnation of adultery—a transgression recognized as heinous by both the play's characters and its audience—they likewise reveal the virtual impossibility of correcting adultery in a way that is both satisfactory and complete: is adultery to be treated harshly, as a crime worthy of capital punishment, as the Puritan radicals desired; or is adultery, if not a lesser offense, at least a sin that is forgivable? The only clear point is that, just as Anne has served as the unknowing battleground for the civil war between Frankford and Wendoll, she also becomes society's scapegoat for the resulting confusion and disorder, as might be expected in a society which bases so much of its moral, social, and political structure upon the controlled sexuality of a woman.

The family unit's inability to solve the problem of adultery in the main plot finds a parallel in the subplot, as the problematic nature of the relationship between woman's chastity and family honor results in a woman's brutalization and victimization by the patriarchal system. The entry of passion into the family unit disrupts the family in the main plot of A Woman Killed; likewise, in the subplot, Mountford's passion, in the form of uncontrollable rage, disrupts his family. His rage not only results in the murder of two innocent men, but it also decimates his patrimony, making Mountford “the poorest knight in England” (5.17). Mountford is further victimized by both his friends and kinfolk, who refuse him aid (an interesting development, given Wrightson's assertion about the great strength of local ties), and by an usurer who seizes the last small family plot of land, the only mark of his rank as gentleman, and throws Mountford into jail for failure to repay his debts.

During all of these misfortunes, Mountford is supported by his loyal and loving sister, Susan, who becomes, at this lowest point in his fortunes, the key to his economic and social recovery. Acton, the engineer of Mountford's hardships, determines to seduce and abandon Susan as further revenge, but falls in love with her at first sight. He tries to give her the money for her brother's release from prison, but, when she refuses his offer, negotiates Mountford's release on his own. When Mountford realizes he owes his life to his enemy, he determines that family honor dictates that he give Susan to Acton as repayment, making all too explicit the patriarchy's attitude that a woman's chastity, in spite of the idealized descriptions of its value as a sign of worthiness and character, is a mere commodity, to be bought and sold at male discretion.

The play upon the concepts of “kind” (kindness) and “kin” (kinship) especially link the treatment of women in the two plots.⁵¹ Frankford's “kindness” impels Anne to the extremity of self-starvation in order to discharge the tremendous debt he places on her. Mountford's less than “kindly” behavior (that is, behavior inappropriate to one sharing “kindred”), on the other hand, in response to Acton's “kindness” in relieving Mountford of debt, results in the “happy” marriage of his sister to his former enemy. The irony inherent in these separate actions again foregrounds the problematic role of woman, and the consequent fragility of the family structure.

Acton is well aware that in paying Mountford's debts, he is saving his enemy's life, and that “such a kindness … fasten[ed] on [Susan]” (9.64-65) will require some payment. Mountford's appeal to Susan makes this fact even more explicit:

His kindness like a burden hath surcharged me,
And under his good deeds I stooping go. …
                                                                                                                        Shall the weight
Of all this heavy burden lean on me,
And will not you bear part? You did partake
The joy of my release; will you not stand
In joint-bond to satisfy the debt?
Shall I only be charged?

14.64-65, 71-76

Susan's chastity is the only possession of Mountford's that will satisfy Acton. However, Susan's voiced plan to give herself to Acton to satisfy family “honor,” and then to use a knife on herself to save her honor (14.85), problematizes this patriarchal control, for, if her plan were carried out, she would have effectively cheated on the deal, although the conditions of the trade would have been apparently satisfied. (Her brother's acquiescence to this plan [88-91] entangles this patriarchal quest for honor even further, if that's possible). In any case, even with Acton's magnanimity in marrying her instead of corrupting her, the subplot, like the main plot, presents the body of a woman as a battleground for male competition.

3

The questioning of the family in particular, and of the patriarchy in general, as a source of social order, is a significant element in determining the appropriate generic classification of A Woman Killed with Kindness. While tragedy and domestic drama, as particular dramatic modes, both account for certain aspects of the experience of the play, neither satisfactorily addresses the importance of this sociological content.

Because the main plot of A Woman Killed dramatizes a conflict within each of the three characters as they confront the problem of adultery in their lives,⁵² it may appear that one or all of these characters may accurately be termed a tragic hero, a man or woman whose nature and situation mark him or her as representative of the human condition.⁵³ But close analysis of the action reveals no such kind of dramatic portrayal. The moral dilemma in tragedy, in which the protagonist must choose between two apparent goods, is not the case here. Wendoll is too weak to withstand the force of his passions; both Anne and Frankford are strongly conventional creatures and paragons of their class: neither wants to sin. All three characters realize they are faced with only one possible “right” choice.⁵⁴ Nor is it the case that the protagonist, in the moment of decision, asserts his or her humanity in the face of a hostile universe: Anne's narrow conception of self limits her recognition; Frankford's conventionality is too much in line with the cultural status quo. In place of tragedy's moral questioning and existential isolation is an explicit cultural paradigm with carefully delineated parts and interrelationships—specifically, the family unit. And this social unit is delineated, not as a stable and rock-like determiner of authority, but as a fragile construct at best, at the mercy of tenuous human interdependences and mutual affective bondings. This shift in focus from the internalization of conflict within character to the external workings of family interrelationship as an arbiter of meaning takes the play out of the realm of tragedy.

However, domestic tragedy, the seemingly logical alternative to traditional tragedy, given the play's significant social context, is an inappropriate category for A Woman Killed as well. Madeleine Doran defines domestic tragedy as a uniquely English genre that

deals with the troubled affairs in the private lives of men of less than noble birth—gentlemen, farmers, merchants. … [T]he action is most frequently a murder, committed for greed or love, the setting is usually English and realistic, the basis for the story is nearly always an actual and fairly recent crime. … [Its] ethical pattern of temptation, sin, repentance, and punishment [tends to emphasize] pathos to the exclusion of more complicated feelings and of reflection.⁵⁵

The resemblance of A Woman Killed to the main points of Doran's definition is self-evident: Frankford is a country gentleman and the setting of the play is his country estate.⁵⁶ Anne is tempted by Wendoll to commit adultery and submits, but repents her crime, suffers a “kind” punishment at her husband's hands, and ultimately kills herself in the enormity of her own grief. Her reconciliation with Frankford on her deathbed is pure pathos, not the complex emotional turmoil that results in tragic catharsis. And finally, the action and the language in the play's final scenes suggest a specific interpretation of the characters: Anne is a type of mankind, Wendoll is the devil figure, and Frankford is the figure of a forgiving and merciful God.

However, as Doran points out, Heywood's play “suffer[s] distortion if viewed as [a] dramatized homil[y],”⁵⁷ and in fact, A Woman Killed deviates from the genre of domestic tragedy in several important ways. First and most obvious, it enacts no violent crime (usually the woman's husband is murdered, with or without the wife's complicity). Second, it is a fictional story, not a dramatic account of a recent actual occurrence. These two clear departures from the normal criteria can be joined to other, more subtle, differences.

Whereas previous domestic tragedies depict the sensationalist situation of a female criminal who commits adultery and then murders her cuckolded husband, Heywood rather represents the problematic position of women in the family, especially in relation to male bonding outside the family unit. Such a focus suggests a fundamental precariousness in the culture's concept of marital and familial cohesiveness. Where the wife contracts her adulterous affair with an outsider in Arden of Feversham and A Warning for Fair Women, the two other domestic dramas most often compared with A Woman Killed, Anne's liaison arises out of the family unit, for Wendoll, her lover, is part of the Frankford household and has been such since the day after her wedding. She is unable to juggle the affective demands such a situation makes on her, when a man not her husband asserts his prerogative. Susan's chastity, which ideally should be a reflection of family honor, is—in all practical terms—bartered in order for the family's patriarch to recover the loss of the family name. This questioning of the family as a source of order challenges the conventional configurations of domestic drama.

Thus, the ethical pattern of sin, repentance, and punishment that is the framework of so many domestic tragedies is absent in A Woman Killed with Kindness. And so is the multi-faceted response of tragedy, the direct involvement of the audience's being with the protagonist's dilemma. Instead A Woman Killed with Kindness dramatizes the age's moral uncertainty about the role of women by focusing on the potentially catastrophic social trangression of adultery. In treating this culture-specific problem, the play assumes the role of historical document, as well as artful object. The aesthetic power and appeal of Heywood's A Woman Killed, as well as its documentary importance as historical artifact, emanates from this symbiosis between text and culture. Such a relationship more accurately defines the play as melodrama in opposition to both traditional tragedy and domestic tragedy.

4

In the past, the word melodrama has been used as a pejorative term to describe “popular machine-made entertainment,”⁵⁸ probably the result of the first usage of the term in the nineteenth century to describe a particular kind of sensationalistic drama. In recent years, critical discussion has used the term in a more sophisticated and complex way, as a neutral description of a certain kind of drama. Eric Bentley and Robert Heilman, in particular, have demonstrated that melodrama “is drama in its elemental form”⁵⁹ in which man reorders his relations, not with himself as in tragedy, but with others; and this reordering is often expressed by magnified and exaggerated situations, characters, and problems. Because the conflict is external, antithetical impulses are frequently concentrated in two antagonists, of whom one is obviously good while the other is obviously evil, and the resulting conflict is much like that of the good angels and Lucifer in morality plays—with this exception, that the characters in melodrama are provided with realistic names and histories. In any case, this struggle of opposing forces in melodrama approximates that of tragedy, while the clear realization that one of these forces is definitely “better” than the other is closer to moralistic drama. In other words, both mimetic and didactic impulses are intrinsic to the form.

The combining of mimetic and didactic impulses in melodrama works to distance the audience from the action of the play. Unlike tragedy, which reveals the mysterious and complex nature of the human condition, melodrama aims for clarity and directness of meaning within a cultural paradigm. Of necessity, it reflects the culture in which it is set. Its characters are figures specific to the time; its issues are those which the culture believes are important. This particularity of social and moral milieu has further implications: because of the playwright and audience's acceptance of a shared value system, the treatment of issues, either explicitly or implicitly, supports the status quo. In A Woman Killed, Frankford, Anne, and Wendoll are all in agreement that adultery is a violation of the social and moral order. This shared Christian value system is the rhetorical link between play and audience that allows for the power and appeal of the play.

Consequently, melodrama shows men and women acting in an idealized world where right and wrong appear uncomplicated absolutes. However, there is another dimension to this genre, which, in general, scholars have ignored, and this aspect more than anything else describes A Woman Killed as melodrama. Although there is no doubt that the conflict is simplified and the conclusion apparently satisfying, the actual complication and resolution of melodrama rather point to social problems about which the culture is ambivalent. In other words, while melodrama depicts an ideal resolution (social relationships and institutions are reinforced by a happy ending which establishes their desirability, or by a sad ending, which establishes their power of authority), it may nonetheless contain moral ambiguity, an ambiguity resulting from a dialectic between the ideal represented and the real that is suggested by its very absence. Easy solutions are only available in fiction. As Brooks points out,

melodrama offers us heroic confrontation, purgation, purification, recognition. But its recognition is essentially of the integers in combat and the need to choose sides.⁶⁰

The recognition is not the tragic recognition of the hero about the nature of the human condition, only the “melodramatic” recognition on the part of the audience that it is best to be on the side of virtue, whether in victory or defeat. The fact of conflict, no matter what its resolution, asserts the presence of the abyss. The genre's demand that the audience choose sides “makes the abyss yield some of its content,”⁶¹ as Brooks states, but does not ultimately remove the threat.

In A Woman Killed with Kindness, a woman commits adultery and suffers a punishment that her community, as a whole, recognizes as proper and just, and her repentance reinforces this cultural affirmation of patriarchal domination. Further, the action of the play appears to be a paradigm of the fall of mankind, and the characters likewise typological or typical, rather than realistic and round. Nevertheless, this seeming stratification of reading into a monolithic mold—whether of cultural ideals or Christian dogma—is undercut by the sociological forces at work in intra- and inter-family relationships.⁶² The social situation that prompts Anne's adultery, her own response and that of her husband and lover, and the ironic parallels in the subplot's examination of a woman's honor—all demonstrate the inadequacy of the patriarchy to contain the problem satisfactorily. So, although the crime of adultery is punished and the authority of the patriarchal family reinforced, the process by which this ending is achieved makes equivocal the satisfying nature of the resolution.⁶³ The seventeenth-century (or modern) audience may favor Frankford's Christian mercy, or Anne's strict justice, or Wendoll's ineffective self-control, as methods of handling adultery, but none of these is a “doomsday machine” that will finally and for all time eradicate adultery from English (or western) culture.

A Woman Killed with Kindness opposes the established forms of traditional tragedy (a kind of drama that challenges cultural norms) and domestic tragedy (a kind of drama that reinforces cultural ideals) with the cultural indeterminacy of melodrama (a kind of drama that is “part and parcel” of cultural ferment). The universal depiction of the human condition of tragedy, and the simplistic news story with a moral of domestic tragedy, are transmuted to the open-ended analysis of adultery, an inherently insoluble social problem.

Notes

1. Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 14.

2. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5. See also his introduction to the anthology, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982), in which he defines his method as the “new historicism,” and his “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” Southern Review 20 (March 1987): 3-15, which more fully describes this “practice” (3).

3. Kate McLuskie, “‘Tis But a Woman's Jar’: Family and Kinship in Elizabethan Domestic Drama,” Literature and History 9 (1983): 238.

4. An exception to this rule is Diane E. Henderson's discussion in “Many Mansions: Reconstructing A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Studies in English Literature 26 (1986): 277-94, in which she charts the “collusion of religious and realistic patterns” (279) in A Woman Killed. Although Henderson recognizes the interdependence of mimetic and didactic impulses as a vital aspect of the play's aesthetic effect, she sees such interdependence as a mark of “domestic tragedy.” As I demonstrate later, I see such cooperation of apparently diverse impulses as a mark of melodrama. For discussions of the different powers and effects that distinguish mimetic from didactic drama, see Elder Olson, “William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction,” in Critics and Criticism: Essays in Method, ed. R. S. Crane, abr. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 24-61; and Edgar Schell, Strangers and Pilgrims: From “The Castle of Perseverance” to “King Lear” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 7-8. But for a discussion arguing that mimetic and emblematic impulses result in “generic malformation,” see Robert Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 214.

5. I am grateful to Ira Clark for pointing out this parallelism to me.

6. T. S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama (1932; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1960), 109.

7. Hallet D. Smith, in “A Woman Killed with Kindness,” PMLA 53 (1938): 138-47, argues that Anne's tragedy is modelled after a type of Elizabethan fallen woman.

8. David Cook, “A Woman Killed with Kindness: An UnShakespearean Tragedy,” English Studies 45 (1964): 353-72.

9. Rick Bowers, “A Woman Killed with Kindness: Plausibility on a Smaller Scale,” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984): 293-306.

10. Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 128-36.

11. Leonora Leet Brodwin, Elizabethan Love Tragedy (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 101-18; Roger Stilling, Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 175-83.

12. Henry Hitch Adams, English Domestic Or, Homiletic Tragedy 1575 to 1642 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 144-59. See also Arthur Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931), 234; Peter Ure, “Marriage and Domestic Drama in Heywood and Ford,” English Studies 32 (1951): 200-216; and Robert Ornstein, “Bourgeois Morality and Dramatic Convention in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” in Renaissance Drama: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Doran and Mark Eccles, ed. Standish Henning et al. (London: Feffer and Simon, 1976), 128-41.

13. Barbara Baines, Thomas Heywood (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 100.

14. Moody Prior, The Language of Tragedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1947), 94-97, especially 96.

15. John Canuteson, “The Theme of Forgiveness in the Plot and Subplot of A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 2 (1969): 123-47.

16. George C. Herndl, The High Design: English Renaissance Tragedy and the Natural Law (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970), 169-74.

17. Bonnie Alexander, “Cracks in the Pedestal: A Reading of A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Massachusetts Studies in English 7 (1978): 1-11.

18. Laura G. Bromley, “Domestic Conduct in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Studies in English Literature 26 (1986): 260.

19. I have relied on the following books for this discussion of family history: Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973); Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), and The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977); Michael Anderson, Approaches to the History of the Western Family 1500-1914 (London: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1980); Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982); Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984); Joyce Youings, Sixteenth-Century England (London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1984); S. D. Amussen, “Gender, Family and the Social Order,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

20. Stone, Family, 26.

21. Ibid., 26. In The World We Have Lost, Laslett points out that “no sharp distinctions [were] made between [a person's] domestic and economic functions” (2). People who slept, ate, and worked under the same roof made up a single household. Therefore, the institutions of family and marriage were based on economic interdependence, as well as on ties of affection. The pervasive use of economic metaphors in A Woman Killed (and other domestic drama), noted by such critics as Baines and Alexander, is apparently grounded in the actual living conditions of the day. See also Leonore Lieblin, “The Context of Murder in English Domestic Plays, 1590-1610,” Studies in English Literature 23 (1983): 190 and note.

22. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), as quoted by Amussen, 200.

23. Ste. B., Covnsel to the Hvsband: To the Wife Instruction (London, 1608), 40-41.

24. See particularly Kathleen M. Davies, “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage,” in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R. B. Outhwaite (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 58-80.

    For the following discussion of the relationship of the husband and wife in marriage, I have consulted the following marriage handbooks and conduct manuals: William Harrington, [T]he comendacions of matrymony (London, 1528); Richard Whytforde, A Werke for housholders (London, 1530); Johannes Ludovicus Vives, A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instructio[n] of a Christen woma[n], trans. T. Hyrde (London, 1541); [Heinrich Bullinger], The Christen state of matrimony (London, 1546); Ste. B.; William Heale, An Apologie for VVomen (London, 1609); The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, and Froward, and vnconstant women … VVith a Commendation of wise, vertuous, and honest VVomen (London, 1616); Gouge; Daniel Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (London, 1642).

    I have also consulted the following secondary works: Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman, rev. ed. (Mamaroneck: Paul P. Appel, 1975); Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage; McLuskie; Lieblin; Linda T. Fitz, “‘What Says the Married Woman?’: Marriage Theory and Feminism in the English Renaissance,” Mosaic 13 (1980): 1-22; Keith Thomas, “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 195-216; W. and M. Haller, “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941-42): 235-72; and Roland Mushat Frye, “The Teachings of Classical Puritanism on Conjugal Love,” Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955): 148-59. Although the articles by the Hallers and Frye are somewhat dated, their review of the literature remains helpful.

25. Quoted in Camden, 112.

26. Gouge, 138.

27. Ste. B., 42.

28. See on this subject Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1975); and Lena Cowen Orlin, “Man's House as His Castle in Arden of Feversham,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2 (1985): 64-67. For a discussion concerning the extent of a husband's real authority over his wife, see Amussen, note 19 above.

29. R. C., as quoted in Wrightson, 91.

30. See note 24 above.

31. Rogers, 245.

32. Davies, 60.

33. Camden, 44.

34. Quoted in Betty Travitsky, The Paradise of Women (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981), 7. See also pp. 6-10; Camden, chapter II; Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 3-15. The most thorough discussion of the history of women's education during the Renaissance is Retha M. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983).

35. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 129-48.

36. Quoted in Camden, 41.

37. Vives, sig. 66r.

38. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 174.

39. Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 14, as quoted in Eve Konofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 150 (Sedgwick's emphasis).

40. Such a situation results in giving the woman a kind of “passive” or “negative” power. Social anthropologists recognize that this kind of “power” is inherent in such dominated groups. See, for example, Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, “Introduction,” in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Contribution of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18-21.

41. The double standard was, of course, part of Elizabethan culture. A husband's adultery was not deemed as heinous, either socially or morally, as a wife's adultery, although there were dissenters. See also Fitz, note 24 above.

42. For a succinct summary discussion of the history of the lenient attitude toward adultery in England, see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England 1300-1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986), 239-44.

43. J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60-62. For a discussion of the complicated political, legal, social, and religious trends that culminated in the 1650 act of Parliament, see Keith Thomas, “The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered,” in Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History presented to Christopher Hill, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 257-82.

44. Houlbrooke, 237.

45. Wrightson, 51.

46. Ibid., 50.

47. All quotations are from the Revels Plays edition of A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. R. W. Van Fossen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).

48. To be fair to Frankford, he never treats Wendoll as Anne's equal in his affections, but says he “[prefers] him to a second place / In [his] opinion and [his] best regard” (4.34-35). However, this tension that I am describing between homosocial and heterosexual bonding, a theme in a number of Renaissance plays (for example, Two Gentlemen of Verona) suggests that this play might be further illuminated by Eve Konofsky Sedgwick's work on homophobia. See her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), and note 39 above.

49. Stilling anticipates me in this explanation of Anne's “hamartia” (179). See also Baines, 91 and Cook, 356-58. The chronology of the play also suggests that Anne's “lapse” is very brief. First of all, it is likely that only a short amount of time elapses between scene vi and scene viii, primarily because Nick, who discovers Anne's infidelity at the end of scene vi, is a character who has already proven to be quick in decision and action. His report to Frankford is, therefore, logically immediate. Likewise, Frankford himself quickly moves to prove or disprove Nick's observation.

50. Otto Rauchbauer reminds us, in “Visual and Rhetorical Imagery in Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness,” English Studies 57 (1976): 200-210, that the concept of “maze” had allegorical implications in the Middle Ages as a symbol of the vita Christiana, that is, man caught between sin and God. He cites several iconographic examples of this metaphor, but fails to note a striking parallel application in Samuel Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond (1592), which went through numerous revisions and reprintings in Heywood's lifetime. Rosamond, after giving in to King Henry, is enclosed in a labyrinth, as much to keep Rosamond in as to keep the world out. Daniel's language significantly, even heavy-handedly, describes the maze as a symbol of human sinfulness (I quote from the 1592 edition of Delia):

    A stately Pallace he foorthwith did buylde,
    Whose intricate innumerable wayes,
    With such confused errors so beguil'd
    Th'vnguided entrers with vncertaine strayes,
    And doubtfull turnings kept them in delayes,
              With bootlesse labor leading them about,
              Able to finde no way, nor in, nor out.

    sig. L₂

    This maze, a concrete image of Rosamond's psychological and spiritual turmoil, has obvious parallels to the “maze” that Anne Frankford finds herself in.

51. Ure and Baines have been especially helpful for this part of my discussion.

52. Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (1940; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 225.

53. I have relied on the following works for this discussion of tragedy: O. B. Hardison, “Commentary,” in Aristotle's “Poetics”, trans. Leon Golden (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968); Elder Olson, Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961); Heilman, 3-73; and Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy, enl. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

54. In his article, “A Woman Killed with Kindness as Subtext for Othello,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 14 (1983): 112-13, Peter Rudnytsky makes a similar point in relation to Anne's address to the audience in 13.141-44.

55. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), 143, 145-46. For the most extensive discussions of domestic drama, see Adams, and Andrew Clark, Domestic Drama: A Survey of the Origins, Antecedents, and Nature of the Domestic Play in England 1500-1640, 2 vols., Jacobean Drama Studies, no. 49 (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1975); Orlin's work, however, demonstrates a need for further reassessment. See note 56 below.

56. A commonplace about domestic tragedy is that it focuses on the middle class, on common men. Consequently, scholars have often used the terms “domestic” tragedy and “bourgeois” or “middle-class” tragedy interchangeably. For example, Henry Hitch Adams includes in the full title of his English Domestic Or, Homiletic Tragedy 1575 to 1642, the following enlargement, “Being an Account of the Development of the Tragedy of the Common Man …” See also Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 631-36. Other scholars confuse the terms “middle class” and “gentry” or “gentleman.” See Doran, 142-47; Ornstein; Clark; and more recently, the articles by Bowers and Bromley.

    In her seminal article on Arden of Feversham (note 28 above), Orlin redefines domestic tragedy, not as exhibiting “middle-class” or “bourgeois” values, but as portraying the “gentle status” of gentlemen, with particular emphasis on the role of the protagonist as landholder and householder: “He is located in the arena where he has full responsibility for and final authority over family, servants, and guests. It is in his house that the gentleman is king, and that house is seen by the Elizabethan playwright as a little kingdom, a microcosm in which tragic action can ensue” (82).

    Orlin's thesis relies on the revisionist attitude toward the power of the gentry as argued by recent English historians. Briefly, the terms “bourgeois” and “middle class” are considered anachronistic in this period, primarily because of the fluidity of the social classes and because rank depended, not on economics necessarily, but on status and degree. See the list of modern family histories in note 19 above, but see also, for an interesting analysis of the Elizabethan attitude toward making money, Laura C. Stevenson, Praise and Paradox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 11-39. Orlin's reassessment of the protagonist's class in English domestic drama has been long overdue. However, as will become clear, I believe that melodrama is a more accurate term than tragedy to describe what is going on in this kind of play.

57. Doran, 143.

58. Heilman, 75.

59. Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (1946; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1979), 216. For the following discussion of melodrama, I rely on Heilman, 74-87; Bentley, 195-218; and Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), especially his introduction and conclusion.

60. Brooks, 205.

61. Ibid. For an analysis directly opposed to my own, see Sharon Kaehele Shaw, “Medea on Pegasus: Some Speculations on the Parallel Rise of Women and Melodrama on the Jacobean Stage,” Ball State University Forum 14 (1973): 13-21. Shaw argues that the rise of the simplified woman on the stage, “who might be Laura-like in her charm, Eve-like in her cunning innocence, Magdaline-like [sic] in her sin, but never the complex woman who is a mixture of all of these” (14) is linked to melodrama, because both “served the same need in the Jacobean mind: both fed the desire to simplify the world in order to understand it and gain at least a spurious sense of control over one's universe” (15). Shaw's discussion does not go far enough. The plays might ostensibly simplify moral problems, but they also exhibit common social tensions: Anne dies for her sin, but her judge, the method of punishment, and her tempter remain morally ambiguous.

62. Although she approaches the play from a different critical perspective than my own, Baines points out that the characters in A Woman Killed “[function] on both a literal, realistic level and on a typological, mythic level” (95).

63. As Belsey states, “the family is emblematically restored by the self-elimination of the offending wife” (178).