ABSTRACT
A Woman Killed with Kindness, explicitly concerned as it is with feminine modesty and wantonness, in many ways could be said to be the dramatic exemplification of Thomas Heywood’s rhetoric: in this play, the familiar iconic figures of the unchaste and the chaste woman are manifested in the contrasting forms of an adulterous wife, Anne Frankford, and a dutiful sister, Susan Mountford. In accordance with Heywood’s claim for the admonitory moral power of drama, the former is rewarded with ostracism, self-loathing and death, the latter with marriage and an elevated social position. The closing line of the play suggests that the ‘kindness’ of the title is Frankford’s, in foregoing revenge and merely banishing Anne, thereby allowing her the opportunity to repent and obtain forgiveness. Heywood’s plot, drawn in part from the English translation of an Italian novella by Illicini which had appeared in translation in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, is an unusual example of the dramatic sub-genre of’domestic tragedy’.
