ABSTRACT
Within four years of the death of Margaret Ratcliffe, in the year of Queen Elizabeth’s death, Thomas Heywood wrote A Woman Killed with Kindness (c.1603), a popular play in which female food refusal plays a prominent role. In the main plot of this play, Mistress Anne Frankford starves herself to death as a self-inflicted punishment for her sin of adultery. Although the social order of the play ultimately is realigned at the play’s end, in spite of Anne’s transgression, the direct connection of food refusal with female sexuality, more explicit than in the extant historical record of Margaret Ratcliffe which I examined in the previous chapter, exposes the threat that female agency has in a community in which men are ascendant. That Mistress Frankford is a fictional character existing in a dramatic text, not a historical figure interpreted by her contemporaries, puts emphasis on her plight as a cultural creation in a particular milieu. Her decision to refuse food and the ultimate assent to this decision by the play’s community have equivocal meaning, in stark contrast to the thorough rhetorical containment of Mistress Ratcliffe’s parallel action.
