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  • A Woman Killed with Kindness ed. by Margaret Jane Kidnie
  • Eleanor Lowe
Margaret Jane Kidnie, ed. A Woman Killed with Kindness, by Thomas Heywood. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp xviii, 301. Paperback £14.99. ISBN: 9781904271581.

This is the first edition of A Woman Killed with Kindness since Martin Wiggins's edition for Oxford World's Classics in 2008. Margaret Jane Kidnie's new edition of the play reminds readers of Lukas Erne's point that Heywood was 'The second most published playwright [after Shakespeare]' with forty-nine editions to his name (according to Erne's calculations), and that his 'prominence in print is easily overlooked' (69). Kidnie notes that Heywood never published his work in folio (unlike that of some of his contemporaries) which 'in part' explains how 'Only about one-tenth of Heywood's putative 220 plays are extant', despite Francis Meres noting him as being 'the best for comedy' in 1598 (64–5). Heywood wrote the play at a crucial moment of national and theatrical disruption: soon after Henslowe made the final payments for the writing of the play, Elizabeth I died. The theatres closed and remained so through a period of plague, after which Worcester's men became the Queen's men and moved north of the river (72).

The introduction provides an accessible discussion of a range of issues pertinent to the play's subject matter and context (such as household dynamics, marriage and adultery, and the source material), as well as consideration of Heywood's writing and the circumstances of the play's earliest performances. The edition does well to be mindful of both the play as a printed text (and its evolution in print) and as a performed script. Discussion of staging issues is thorough and clear. The edition is interested in both modern and original performance possibilities, supplemented with helpful reflection on Heywood's stagecraft and performance history. There is a full discussion of the play's performance history with images from six different productions, from the earliest in 1913 (directed by Jacques Copeau) to the National Theatre production in 2011 (directed by Katie Mitchell). Kidnie includes succinct information concerning both textual and performance issues throughout the on-page annotations.

There is also a helpful section on the play's sources and its status as a 'domestic tragedy' (including a history of that discussion and its usefulness as a label). Kidnie points out that 'Ideologically and theatrically, the term "domestic tragedy", at least as it relates to Heywood's play, seems simultaneously too vague and too constraining' because the term has unhelpful modern associations which might [End Page 207] eclipse early modern understandings of the household (54). She pays particular attention to the subplot, which scholars have for a long time dismissed, and Kidnie demonstrates how well it comments on and reflects the main plot.

Kidnie's analysis of Q1 draws attention to indications that 'Heywood changed his mind about a few details as he wrote the script' (106): for example, the naming of Sir Charles Mountford's sister as Jane instead of Susan in scenes 3 and 14, and the opening stage direction which announces the entrance of Anne Frankford by her maiden name of Acton (106). Kidnie points out that some of these changes and inconsistences 'provide a useful glimpse into the creative process'; elsewhere, she argues that Heywood's difficult handwriting was a potential cause of confusion and textual complication which led to errors in printing, such as in four examples concerning the specialist hunting terminology in scene 3 (108).

The title page of Q2 (together with discrepancies between its content and that of Q1) occupies the heart of the textual discussion. The 1617 edition describes itself as 'The third Edition' and Kidnie identifies the numbering of editions as a 'relatively new publishing trend' (111). She posits three possible scenarios to explain this detail, before presenting the differences between Q2 and Q1, and finally proposing the theory that both Q1 and Q2 are based on an original quarto labelled Q0 which came before both extant printed texts. Kidnie identifies several issues that Q2 resolves within Q1 which relate to 'both narrative fiction and metre' (for example, an incorrect...

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