SOURCE: Henderson, Diana E. “Many Mansions: Reconstructing A Woman Killed with Kindness.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 26, no. 2 (spring 1986): 277-94.

In the following essay, Henderson explains the importance of home in Heywood's most famous play.

“Domestic tragedy” has been defined in a myriad of ways, particularly often in terms of the protagonist (of ordinary status and capacity) or the conflict (between family members or a married couple).¹ One element contained in the name itself remains in the background—domus, the home. The “rich circumstantiality of an English country house” in A Woman Killed has been mentioned as an important device in establishing the play's immediacy with its audience, as a material concern in the subplot, and as an indication of a new bourgeois realism in the drama.² But Heywood's home is even more: it provides a base for transforming essentially static social precepts and Christian homily into a...