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Henryson's Testament of Cresseid and Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

John J. McDermott
John J. McDermott*
Affiliation:
Gonzaga University
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Extract

In Thomas Heywood's drama, A Woman Killed with Kindness, John Frankford, an injured lover, causes his wife's death when he intensifies her remorse by his unexpected kindness to her; and when he has perhaps unwittingly killed her with his kindness, he promises ruefully to memorialize her by a gravestone marked with letters of gold. As far back as a study by J. A. Symonds in 1884 and as recently as an important article by W. F. McNeir in 1959, a number of scholars have offered possible sources for Hey wood's play: certain medieval miracle plays, a tale in the Gesta Romanorum, the works of Illicini, Sermini, Bandello, Belleforest, Painter, Fenton, Gascoigne, Whetstone, Greene, Shakespeare, the native homiletic tradition, and earlier English domestic tragedies, have each during the last three-quarters of a century found proponents with varying intensities of conviction who have offered one or the other of them as more or less important sources for Hey wood's drama.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Spring 1967 , pp. 16 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1967

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the Research Council of Gonzaga University for a grant which enabled me to complete this study.

References

1 I am indebted throughout this article to the convenient discussion and running bibliography of source studies on the play by Fossen, R. W. Van in the introduction to his edition of Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, Revels Plays Series (London, and Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. xvii-xxvii.Google Scholar

2 Koeppel, E., Quellen-Studien zu den Dramen Ben Jonson's, John Marston's, und Beaumont und Fletcher's, Munchen Beiträge zur Romanischen und Englischen Philologie, xi (1895), 136 Google Scholar, was the first to suggest that Painter's fifty-eighth story provided the hint for Heywood's main plot. Martin, R. G.,‘A New Source of A Woman Killed with Kindness,' Englische Studien, XLIII (1911), 229–233 Google Scholar, first pointed out the close correspondences between Painter's forty-third story and Heywood's drama.

3 Van Fossen, pp. xx-xxi.

4 Ibid. , p. xxi. I personally must question whether Heywood's hero is as unconcerned with preserving his honor as Van Fossen suggests, and consequently I wonder whether the tone of Heywood's play is in fact totally different from that of his sources; but resolving this doubt would demand a full-scale investigation of Heywood's characterization of John Frankford, which is not the concern of the present study. The essential point here is that the tone of Heywood's play does notably differ from that of Painter's tale.

5 Ibid. , p. xxii

6 The Testament of Cresseid in The Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson , ed. by H. Harvey Wood (Edinburgh and London, 1933), p. 123,11. 519-522. All quotations in this paper from Henryson's poem are taken from this edition. Subsequent line references will be given in the body of the text.

7 Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness , ed. Van Fossen, sc. xvii, 11. 136-140.

8 Bibliographical data in this paragraph have been taken from Wood,‘Introduction' to The Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson , p. xxv.

9 Tatlock, J. S. P.,‘The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, especially in Shakespeare and Heywood,’ PMLA, xxx (Dec. 1915), 725.Google Scholar

10 Tatlock, p. 718; Wood, p. xxv.