21 March 2008¶ Primary Source Thursdays: A Woman Killed with Kindness

Yes, I am a day late. And this will probably be short. I think it might be stupid to try to write something productive in my one week off between terms, but I thought since I was also trying to write a syllabus that I’d tack some daily writing on — good habits and all, you know. Well, I ain’t got them good habits yet. As an elementary school report card would say, they’re “emerging.”

I read the first five of the seventeen scenes in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and liked it as much as I thought I would, which is to say, considerably. I like most plays of this vintage, so that comes as no surprise. I am surprised as how deftly Heywood has established his characters even right off the bat. Reading the dramatis personae I was afraid it would be a mess of characters all of whom sound alike on the page. On the contrary, even when the personalities are similar as is the case with Sir Charles and Sir Francis, their relationships and their rather quickly developing antagonism make them distinct. It isn’t the constant flipping of pages back to the opening to remember who is related to whom. Not every play with a large set of characters is so easily read.

I was especially interested in the closing lines of scene 41. The man Jenkins is pulled away from his lunch to wait on a friend of Master Frankford’s. After he grumbles about it, he turns to the audience and gives a brief monologue:

You may see, my masters, though it be afternoon with you, ‘tis but early days with us, for we have not dined yet. Stay but a little; I’ll but go in and help to bear up the first course and come to you again presently.

Yes, there’s some fun fourth-wall breaking going on, but while that’s interesting, it’s not novel. Richard III’s opening monologue/soliloquy is equally fourth-wall breaking, if not explicitly (unlike Hamlet, who’s dialog seems much more internal). This is much more Knight of the Burning Pestle in that the audience is brought into the production. In Knight the audience actually participates (well, a scripted part of the audience, but they’re playing the audience), but this is different. Who are we? We’re seeing into the servant’s quarters (it’s like Upstairs/ Downstairs, only two hundred years earlier) but more than that: we are there.

But no. Jenkins is aware that we’re not there, since he recognizes that our time and his time are different. We cannot actually be where we are, nor he where he is. Is Jenkins aware of his own fictionality? Maybe. In my reading, he hasn’t yet returned. Perhaps he’ll take a chorus role, but that’s not yet apparent. Not by scene 5 at least.

So I’ll have to read more and post more later. There’s more interesting stuff going on, like all the objectification of women in i.55-72 or Sir Charles’ wonderful shift in blame from self to others in scene 5. But that’s more than I have time for today. I’ll try to post once more about this play next week.

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1 Scene breaks from Fraser and Rabkin’s Drama of the English Renaissance I: The Tudor Period. I hope they’re standard. If this weren’t just a blog post, I’d probably look it up.

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