A Woman Killed with Kindness is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragedy written by Thomas Heywood. Acted in 1603 and first published in 1607, the play has generally been considered Heywood's masterpiece, and has received the most critical attention among Heywood's works. Along with the anonymous Arden of Faversham, Heywood's play has been regarded as the apex of Renaissance drama's achievement in the subgenre of bourgeois or domestic tragedy. The play was originally performed by Worcester's Men, the company for which Heywood acted and wrote in the early Jacobean era. The records of Philip Henslowe show that Heywood was paid 6 for the play in February and March 1603. The 1607 quarto was printed by William Jaggard for the bookseller John Hodgets. A second quarto was issued in 1617 by William Jaggard's son Isaac Jaggard.The plot of Heywood's play derives from an Italian novel by Illicini, which was translated into English and published in The Palace of Pleasure by William Painter (1566). The play tells the story of a married couple, Master Frankford and his wife Anne. Frankford invites Wendoll into his home to act as a companion. Frankford tells Wendoll that anything in his house is at Wendoll's disposal. Wendoll then chooses to pursue Frankford's wife, Anne. Anne is quickly wooed by Wendoll and then caught by Frankford. Frankford then chooses to punish her not with death but with ostracism-a "mild" sentence for her adultery. By the end of the play, Anne chooses self-starvation as a more appropriate form of punishment. As she is dying because of her self-starvation, Frankford reunites with his wife, which restores the social and patriarchal order at the end of the play. The adulterous wife, Anne Frankford, is contrasted with the virtuous Susan Mountford. In the play's subplot, Sir Charles Mountford attempts to prostitute his sister Susan to Sir Francis Acton (Anne Frankford's brother), to whom he is deeply in debt. Susan, however, retains her virtue. In the end Acton discharges the debts of Mountford and marries Susan.Early Modern Elizabethan and Jacobean views of fasting or self-starvation were often hearkened to old Medieval views which considered a woman's fasting a visual cue to a woman's obedience, chastity, and honour. Eating, binging, or gluttony were considered to be fundamentally connected with sexuality. According to several Early Modern conduct book writers, the sin of gluttony will inevitabily lead to lust, and several of these tract writers suggested female fasting should be a part of a woman's education as it would prove her to be a better wife and mother........ Thomas Heywood ( early 1570s - 16 August 1641) was a prominent 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.... Katharine Lee Bates (August 12, 1859 - March 28, 1929) was an American songwriter. She is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem "America the Beautiful." She popularized "Mrs. Santa Claus" through her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride (1889).... George Pierce Baker (April 4, 1866 - January 6, 1935) was an American educator in the field of drama....."
This is the ideal edition for study and performance.
These works offer readers the opportunity to absorb some of Heywood's most prominent writings. A Woman Killed with Kindness is Thomas Heywood's signature drama.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there...
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
SOMNER ( Sumner ) , JOHN ( Duke of Florence , Pt . II ) . A regular member of the company , his specialty seems to have been dashing roles , like that of Florence and Mustapha , Basha of Aleppo , in The Renegado .
“Here lies she whom her husband's kindness killed” This is the epitaph, in golden letters, Master John Frankford proposes for the tomb of his wife, Anne, who has just starved herself to death.
Thomas Heywood (1574?-1641), a professional English actor and one of the most prolific playwrights of the seventeenth century, is most famous for his plays written about contemporary English life. "The...
Reprint of the author's thesis, Yale, 1926.
... 573n White, Edward (stationer), 274n, 275, 455, QD A67.11 White, James, Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, 175, ... 230 Wilson, Anne S., 990 Wilson, Francis Percy, 1026 Wilson, James (bookseller), 1012 Wilson, John (1785–1854), ...