A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays

by Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, William Rowley

Here is a marvelous collection of plays from the English Renaissance period, offering prime examples of the "domestic drama" genre that first appeared around 1590. These four pioneering works, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage and crime rather than war and power, focus on the lives of ordinary people, instead of kings and queens and politicians. Arden of Faversham dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling, critical introductions, wide-ranging notes, a chronology of the plays, and appendices that address the question: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Thomas Heywood write The English Traveller.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Genres: Plays, Fiction, Classics, Drama, Theatre

344 pages, Paperback

First published May 8, 2008

About the author

Thomas Heywood (early 1570s – 16 August 1641) was an English playwright, actor, and author. His main contributions were to late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre. He is best known for his masterpiece A Woman Killed with Kindness, a domestic tragedy, which was first performed in 1603 at the Rose Theatre by the Worcester's Men company.
He was a prolific writer, claiming to have had "an entire hand or at least a maine finger in two hundred and twenty plays", although only a fraction of his work has survived.

Reviews

[Sydney · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. After the first play (The Tragedy of Master Arden, blah blah, even this play is not particularly good), the quality of the writing of these plays drops off a cliff. Clunky exposition, numerous pointless characters, predictable plots; these are just simply not worth your time unless you are a scholar/student of the period. There is a reason why Shakespeare is so unparalleled while virtually none of his contemporaries are. Heywood, et. al. are painfully mediocre in comparison.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

(the english traveller doesn't have it's own goodreads listing so this is my score for it, i have scored the other plays individually, this is also my score for the collection as a whole, which is a marvellous range of texts

[B · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let's talk a minute about how much the portrayal of women gets under my skin in dated literature. "A Woman Killed with Kindness" was first performed in 1603, so I'm sure there are people out there who insist that I shouldn't be so peeved. "Women were subservient to men," the historically privy people roar, "deal with it! This play is simply reflecting the time it was written in." Well, I doubt African Americans enjoy reading Lit that debases their people; similarly I disregard Lit that debases mine.

And oh, am I going to spoil the shit out of this play.

Anne and Susan need to get the hell out of their lives, pronto. Anne rips herself apart for infidelity while the guy she cheated with (who had a creepily close relationship with her husband pre-coitus) runs off to see the world and one day return redeemed. Cause that's fair. MEANWHILE in a plot far far away Susan's brother convinces her to give up her virginity to square away a psychological debt he has to some guy named Francis. Francis, meanwhile, doesn't want her to be a whore because he's not an asshole (at least, not to Susan. He IS an asshole to his sister, Anne, saying he would murder her if he were in her husband's shoes).

Structurally speaking, this play is confusing. Comedies stereotypically end in weddings, tragedies in death. This play has both. Tell me, how am I supposed to take that?

Dear Heywood,

I wish someone would bring you back to life just so I could punch you in the gut. Societal norms be damned, this play is stupid and rather cruel, even with full knowledge of its context.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only actually read the first two plays in this collection, Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed With Kindness, but both are wonderful glimpses into the importance of the family in Early Modern culture and literature. The dramatic form in particular helps to showcase these interactions and connections visually and I can only imagine the use of theatrical modes (soliloquies, asides, staging) helps to solidify some of the more comedic and farcical elements in what are otherwise considered tragedies.

I particularly enjoyed Arden of Faversham, with its questioning of oath-taking/promises, marital relationships, use of women as bargaining tools, class-based antagonisms, and the microcosm-macrocosm of a stable family as the foundation of a stable state or society, this play functions on so many levels and I thoroughly enjoyed it as a piece of Early Modern drama.

[Lulu]

**Arden of Faversham** 1592
A Woman Killed with Kindness 1603
The Witch of Edmonton 1621
The English Traveller 1627


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