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The Play in Performance
There were
no productions of A Woman Killed with Kindness so far as is known, from Heywood’s time until 1887, when it was
staged by the Dramatic Students Society at the Olympic Theatre.
Perhaps the most significant modern production was by Jacques copeau
given in Paris to open the famous Vieux-Colombier on 23 October 1913.
The French critic Michel Grivelet comments on the appropriateness of the
choice for the inauguration of this original and influential theatre:
The point was to issue a challenge to the boulevard routine, with its
complacent mediocrity, to take a stand against the eternal triangle
comedies—husband, wife, lover—and their all-too-Parisian frivolity. It was
not by pure chance that Copeau, with his impassioned, quasi-religious study of
the authentic theatre, chose this fervent, rustic Heywood play to launch his
counter-attack.
Copeau himself, in his Souvenirs du
Vieux-Colombier, says that the scenery, designed by Francis Jourdain, was in
a style ‘which drew its inspiration above all from economic necessity,’ but
if the line-cut reproduced in the theatre’s prospectus for 1914-15 is any
sample, the staging was remarkable, for 1913, in its adaptability and fidelity
to Elizabethan practice. It is
worth noting that Louis Jouvet was a member of the Vieux-Colombier company.
At the Malvern Festival in 1931, the play was staged as part of a season
of lessor-known English drama. The cast was a notable one, including Robert
Donat and Ralph Richardson. (Condensed from R W van Fossen’s
preface to the Methuen edition of the play)
A Woman Killed with Kindness
(1603) is both his best play and the best play of its kind.
Arden of Feversham and A
Yorkshire Tragedy had been striking attempts to use for serious purposes on
the stage certain calamities of domestic life; but these two tragedies rely more
upon horror than upon infelicity. In
A Woman Killed With Kindness there is
physical horror, no deed of blood, the stage is filled by the moving spectacle
of life and happiness irrevocably lost by the lapse of a woman who is sinful
without being wicked. It is a play true to its own level of life and justifies
the inspired observation of Lamb that Heywood was ‘a sort of prose
Shakespeare.
Although he achieved success in the chronicle history, the romantic drama
and the comedy of manners, he wrote his masterpiece in domestic drama, the kind
of work in which his candid sincerity and simple charity found their most
congenial expression . . . His unaffected simplicity has led to his being
underrated by critics who like dramatists of larger pretensions.
John Addington Symonds on Heywood
He has a sincerity, a tenderness of pathos, and an instinctive perception
of nobility, that distinguish him among the playwrights of the seventeenth
century. Like Dekker, he wins our confidence and love. We keep a place in our
affection for his favorite characters; they speak to us across the centuries
with the voices of friends . . .
The play in which he showed that he was not unable to produce a
masterpiece is A Woman Killed With
Kindness. All his powers of
direct painting from the English life he knew so well, his faculty for lifting
prose to the border-ground of poetry by the intensity of the emotion which he
communicates, his simple art of laying bare the very nerves of passion, are
here, exhibited in perfection. This
domestic tragedy touches one like truth. Its scenes are of everyday life.
Common talk is used, and the pathos is homely, not like Webster’s,
brought from far . . .
From A M Clark’s Biography of Heywood
He was attempting to reach is audience’s tears
by new means; for no domestic tragedy so far as we know had made the erring wife
lovable and the deceived husband dignified. Shakespeare himself is more conservative in tragedy and,
infinitely subtler though his treatment of motives may be, he does not essay new
problems of conduct or paradoxical situations. Except that it is uninformed by any message, is not
illustrative of any sociological criticism, and is more humane, A Woman Killed With Kindness—a tragedy of a middle-class
household—anticipates the bloodless tragedies of Ibsen.
In another way Heywood may be regarded as the forerunner of Richardson,
the school of sensibility, and the comédie
larmoyante of the eighteenth century.
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