Female Heroism in Heywood’s Tragic Farce of Adultery

Abstract

I will begin this paper with two reasonably reliable critics of Thomas Hey wood’s play, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603). The first is the anonymous author of the “blurb” on the back of the New Mermaid’s edition of the play who describes A Woman Killed with Kindness as follows: “The play is notable for the restraint with which Heywood deals with his theme, and for the spirit of reconciliation, rather than violence, in which tragedy ends.”¹ The second is my eight-year-old son, who, on seeing a copy of the play on my desk, read its title aloud and said quite matter-of-factly, “That’s impossible!” The argument I will advance is that while the former view is the one most commonly held by critics, that the play’s end is a model of forgiveness, restraint, and reconciliation, it is the latter view that should concern feminist readings of the play. If it is essentially impossible to “kill with kindness,” if the play’s title can be read ironically or even parodically, then the play’s subject might also be read in a different light.² The figure of the adulterous wife may be tragic, immoral, even sinful, given the cultural, social, and religious context in which the play was written, but the act of adultery by this married woman, punished by her husband’s “kindness,” is at the same time more complex. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, Anne’s adultery is crucial to defining and defending her fledgling heroism and it is key to understanding the tragedy of the heroine of the subplot, the hapless Susan.³ Against a comic backdrop that mocks the masculine and patriarchal world on which this marriage is necessarily based, a brief vision of female heroism emerges, a heroism that quite radically suggests that “kindness” is really cruelty and that adultery is a flawed but singularly feminine act of heroism.