X. A Woman Killed with Kindness

Abstract

Among the playwrights of the Elizabethan age, Thomas Heywood stands in a peculiar position. He is not as interesting as Webster or Chapman; he is far below Jonson or Marlowe or Lyly in artistic power; he has proved less attractive to scholars than Massinger or Beaumont and Fletcher or Marston. He wrote too much, it is said, and he was too eager to flatter the 'prentices to care about the quality of his work, either as poetry or as drama. Charles Lamb, to be sure, called him a prose Shakespeare, but Lamb could find something kind to say about any Elizabethan, and men like Heywood and Dekker were of that gentle and friendly disposition which would particularly endear them to Elia. And yet one play of Heywood's, A Woman Killed With Kindness, is reprinted in every anthology of plays of the period, always as a masterpiece of its kind. If literary immortality consists in having written a work which is always in print, of being known by name and by at least the title of that work to all historians of literature, Heywood has achieved immortality with A Woman Killed With Kindness.