Thomas Heywood: Selected Plays

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Thomas Heywood was one of the most prolific Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights — he claimed involvement in over 220 plays — and this selection by Bullen draws on his domestic tragedies, most importantly A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603). A Woman Killed with Kindness is one of the finest examples of domestic tragedy in English, following a husband who responds to his wife's adultery with a form of punishment more devastating than violence: removing himself from her presence until she dies of shame. The play is genuinely moving and shows the Jacobean period's capacity for tragic seriousness about private life as well as public catastrophe.