I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire hand or at least the main finger” in “two hundred and twenty” (!) plays (Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, p. 38). He is more like a television writer. His most famous play, A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), is like a television melodrama, a weepy.
It even has a clear A plot and B plot, which only connect in
the first and last scenes. A gentleman
in trouble – in prison – for debt tries to prostitute his sister. Somehow this story works out for the best for
everyone. I suppose this is the B plot. In the A plot, another gentleman catches his wife
with another man but refrains from murdering them, instead killing her
with kindness.
FRANKFORD: My words are register’d in Heaven already;
With patience hear me. I’ll not martyr thee,
Nor mark thee for a strumpet, but with usage
Of more humility torment thy soul,
And kill thee, even with kindness. (IV.4, 251)
Against the title of the Penguin collection, Heywood’s play
is domestic but not really a tragedy. It
is if anything a deliberate move from the tragic to the pathetic, and from a
pagan to a Christian ethos. It makes me
wonder what a Puritan accommodation with the London theater might have looked
like. It is an ancestor of Samuel
Richardson novels and Douglas Sirk movies.
Only the last couple of acts, maybe just the last, are especially
interesting, as the melodrama really ramps up to an absurd level.
NICHOLAS: I’ll say you wept, I’ll swear you made me sad.
Why, how now eye? What now, what’s here to do?
I am gone, or I shall straight turn baby too. (V.3, 262)
Almost an instruction to the audience to burst into tears. Although Heywood does include a surprising joke
from this same servant at the end of the play, where the poor wife is about to
die, and her husband says he wishes to die with her:
FRANKFORD: As freely from the low depth of my soul
As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death,
I pardon thee. I will shed tears for thee,
Pray with thee, and in mere pity
Of they weak state, I’ll wish to die with thee.
ALL: So do we all.
NICHOLAS [aside]: So will not I;
I’ll sigh and sob, but, by my faith, not die. (V.4, 268)
Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies also includes Arden
of Faversham and The Yorkshire Tragedy (1605-8, somewhere in there),
both of which are domestic true crime plays featuring shocking murders. Where Arden is about an old murder
that for some reason was written up in a popular history book, The Yorkshire
Tragedy is ripped from the headlines, and feels like it. Simple, quick, short – less than half the
length of a regular five act play.
Socially interesting but artistically null. I suspect that a large number of plays like
this have been lost, never published or published in throwaway editions.
I wonder how much Heywood-style melodrama there was. Is A Woman Killed by Kindness a rare
beast, or were there dozens of these kinds of plays? Was Heywood working from an established
model, or was he an innovator, the hack who outdoes himself? No way to know.
The next play will be The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair
Queen of Jewry (written c. 1603, published 1613) by Elizabeth Cary. More interested in the world of the theater,
I have been avoiding closet dramas, but this one is a special case. I know very little about it. We’ll see.
