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

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

Art · Conviction · Drama · Kindness · Literature · Miracle · Remorse · Theology · Wife · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism