Women on the Early Modern Stage: A Woman Killed with Kindness, The Tamer Tamed, The Duchess of Malfi, The Witch of Edmonton

Emma Smith

feb 2014 · A&C Black

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This New Mermaids Anthology brings together four plays which centre around female characters on stage: A Woman Killed With Kindness (Thomas Heywood); The Tamer Tamed (John Fletcher); The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster) and The Witch of Edmonton (William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford) with a new introduction by leading scholar Emma Smith.

A Woman Killed with Kindness is a domestic tragedy of property and marriage, adultery and revenge, and strips bare two women's lives in one of the first tragedies ever to be written about ordinary people.

The Tamer Tamed is a free-wheeling and witty comedy in which the place and status of women, and the nature of marriage, are subjected to sustained attention, demonstrating one way in which early modern writers were able to challenge and invert social convention, and to at least imagine alternative modes of behaviour.

The Duchess of Malfi is a classic revenge tragedy and masterpiece of the Jacobean bizarre, featuring a severed hand, a wolf-man, and a poisoned Bible.

The Witch of Edmonton is a domestic tragedy in which Elizabeth Sawyer sells her soul to the Devil to revenge her neighbours.

These four early modern plays plays upset old certainties about gender ideology: less 'chaste, silent and obedient' and more diverse, eloquent, and complex.

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Emma Smith is a Fellow and Tutor at Hertford College, the University of Oxford, UK and has written widely on early modern drama, including most recently editing and introducing a collection of Five Revenge Tragedies. She has written The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare and The Cambridge Guide to Shakespeare. She is part of the editorial team for the new Riverside Shakespeare, on the editorial board for Literature Compass and Shakespeare Survey and a regular lecturer at the Globe theatre.