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A Woman Killed with Kindness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Hallett D. Smith
Hallett D. Smith*
Affiliation:
Williams College
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Extract

Among the playwrights of the Elizabethan age, Thomas Heywood stands in a peculiar position. He is not as interesting as Webster or Chapman; he is far below Jonson or Marlowe or Lyly in artistic power; he has proved less attractive to scholars than Massinger or Beaumont and Fletcher or Marston. He wrote too much, it is said, and he was too eager to flatter the 'prentices to care about the quality of his work, either as poetry or as drama. Charles Lamb, to be sure, called him a prose Shakespeare, but Lamb could find something kind to say about any Elizabethan, and men like Heywood and Dekker were of that gentle and friendly disposition which would particularly endear them to Elia. And yet one play of Heywood's, A Woman Killed With Kindness, is reprinted in every anthology of plays of the period, always as a masterpiece of its kind. If literary immortality consists in having written a work which is always in print, of being known by name and by at least the title of that work to all historians of literature, Heywood has achieved immortality with A Woman Killed With Kindness.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1938 , pp. 138 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1938

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References

1 The Age of Shakespeare (New York and London, 1908), p. 238.

2 Ibid., p. 239.

3 Yves Bescou, “Thomas Heywood et le problème de l'adultère dans Une femme tuée par la Bonté,” Revue Anglo-Américaine, ix (1931), 127–140.

4 Otelia Cromwell, Thomas Heywood, A Study in the Elizabethan Drama of Everyday Life, Yale Studies in English lxxviii (New Haven, 1928), 78–79.

5 Philipp Aronstein, “Thomas Heywood,” Anglia, xxxvii (1913), 236.

6 H. W. Singer, Das Bürgerliche Trauerspid in England bis zum jähre 1800 (Leipzig, 1891), p. 41.

7 A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, Bohn Library (1892), p. 459.

8 Op. cit., p. 240.

9 Op. cit., pp. 131–132.

10 T. S. Eliot, “Thomas Heywood” in Elizabethan Essays (1934), pp. 108–109.

11 Op. cit., pp. 113–114.

12 A Woman Killed With Kindness, ed. K. L. Bates (Boston, 1917), v, v, 36–41.

13 Op. cit., p. 459.

14 E. Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility, Harvard Studies in English, iii (1915), p. 36.

15 Published in Benjamin Victor, Original Letters, Dramatic Pieces and Poems (1776), ii, 81 ff.

15a P. Niemeyer, Das bürgerliche Drama in England im Zeilalter Shakespeares, Göttingen, (1930) 70 ff.; A. Winkler, Thomas Heywood's ,,A Woman Kitted With Kindness“ und das Ehebruchsdrama seiner Zeit, Jena, (1915); H. Galinsky, Die Familie im Drama von Thomas Heywood, Breslau, (1936).

16 Haslewood ed., ii, 461 ff.

17 Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley, 1936), p. 293. See also MP, xxix (1932), 395–410.

18 Stanza 38, p. 470.

19 Haslewood, i, 62 ff.

20 Ed. A. C. Sprague in Poems and A Defense of Rhyme (Harvard, 1927).

20a In Deloney's Garland of Good Will the first ballad tells of Rosamund, the second of Jane Shore, and the fifth of Elstred. The earliest extant edition is dated 1631, but there was an earlier edition in the 1590s. See Deloney's Works, ed. F. O. Mann, p. 562. Rosamund also figures in Warner's Albion's England (1586) and Drayton's Heroical Epistles (1597).

21 The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, Hunterian Club ed., ii, 59 ff.

22 In Churchyard's Challenge. The added stanzas and variants are given in Haslewood, loc. cit.

23 Reprinted in W. Budig, Untersuchungen über ,,Jane Shore,“ Rostok diss. (Schwerin i. M., 1908), pp. 89–111. The poem contains (stanza 33) a couplet, hitherto unnoticed, which is curiously similar to the title of Heywood's play:

Yet oft we see, so carefull some do proue

They kill their car'de for with their too much loue.

24 Nashe in Foure Letters Confuted and Harvey in the dedication to Pierce's Supererogation.

25 Ed. W. W. Greg, Malone Society (1929), 1076–79.

26 “The Rising to the Crown of Richard the Third,” An English Garner, ed. Arber, (Westminster, 1896), viii, 466.

27 Churchyard's “Dolorous Discourse of a Gentlewoman” in Churchyard's Challenge, 1593, is an example of the democratic process at work on the type.

28 The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, Pearson ed. (London, 1874), i, 129.

29 ii. i. 1–2.

30 v. iii. 1–4.

31 v, iii. 76–78.