SOURCE: Gutierrez, Nancy A. “The Irresolution of Melodrama: The Meaning of Adultery in A Woman Killed with Kindness.” Exemplaria 1, no. 2 (fall 1989): 265-91.

In the following essay, Gutierrez contends that Heywood's play is not a tragedy but a melodrama with an open-ended conclusion that provides no solution to the problem of adultery.

Since genre is a mediating concept “between the individual work and its culture,”¹ it seems appropriate to apply to Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), a play whose critical history is notable for its many arguments about genre, the critical perspective that Stephen Greenblatt calls a “poetics of culture.”² Rather than perceiving literature as autonomous and fixed, this methodology strives to consider each text, not as a static artifact, but as a living expression of its time, depicting values and problems of its period, and commenting on them: “literature does not ‘reflect’ a life, static and...