ABSTRACT
The Gunaikeion is in fact central to the wider gynaecritical enterprise which constitutes Heywood’s long career as a professional writer, from the early 1590s to the year before the closure of the theatres. Women are his subject, whether in popular dramas such as A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603) and The Fair Maid of the West (before 1610), or in the prose works, Englands Elizabeth (1631), A Curtain Lecture (1637) and The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World (1640). The Gunaikeion itself is the gathering together of the raw material for a writing career spent in speaking about women, but its particular aim is to speaks for women and to women, and it represents, as Heywood says later, ‘a kind of duty in all that have had mothers; as far as they can, to dignify the sex’. He hopes to produce a compendious vernacular history of women addressed to a female audience, acknowledging that it would also be read by men (including those misogynist satirists he hopes to convert) in which he will make ‘perspicuous and plaine’ much of the literature of the ancients, as well as more recent writers, without being didactic.3 It is, however, a project fraught with contradiction. While claiming to write on behalf of women, Heywood’s dedication subjects them to the Earl’s male scrutiny and appraisal. The book is a publication, yet it maintains the fantasy that the women are being privately presented between the ‘sheets’ to Worcester, admitted ‘into your Bedchamber without suspition’. Moreover, while claiming not to be didactic (‘the purpose of my tractate, is to exemplifie, not to instruct; to shew you presidents of vertue from others, not to fashion any new imaginarie forme from my selfe’, p. 118), he later stresses the moral purpose of the work, which is ‘to put you in minde of rewards and punishments (p. 429). These contradictions are in fact part of a more general-and more deliberate-scheme of discordance, as we shall see.
