Framing Wifely Advice in Thomas Heywood's A Curtaine Lecture and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

A curtain lecture is an imagined reconstruction of a private exchange between a man and a woman, typically a husband and wife in bed. This essay examines the use of the curtain lecture as a frame for viewing wifely speech in Heywood's A Curtaine Lecture and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. These texts represent an audience that interprets, or misinterprets, a woman's speech as a curtain lecture and therefore receives the speech negatively. Foregrounding the role of the audience in the interpretation of speech, these texts participate in the process of creating—and debating—the boundaries between women's licit and illicit speech.