ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 focuses on Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness. It argues that A Woman Killed depicts the strain on the master-servant relationship that the servant’s awareness of marital infidelity in the household causes. It examines the way poor household government, here taking the specific form of the householder’s failure to control the sexuality of his wife, re-arranges domestic relations, re-defining the roles of master and servant. In the Frankfords’ household, where authority figures fail to govern, household government is practised from below, by those placed by the theories of domestic service at the very bottom of the domestic hierarchy. Correspondent with this inversion of hierarchy, the play depicts masters adopting roles that theatrical tradition usually assigned to servants, namely the role of the trickster. The most important contribution of this play to the argument of this book is the way Heywood’s depiction of servants nuances the picture offered both in conduct literature and in many recent studies about servants. As in A Yorkshire Tragedy, the servants in the Frankfords’ household care about their masters’ name and well-being and do not try to take advantage of the domestic chaos they witness. Importantly, the servants are positioned, in the second part of the play, as commentators and critics of their social superiors’ problematic beliefs and values. In this, the play suggests, sound morality does not always reside with the social superiors.
