The Role of the Reluctant Harbinger in Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness

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• The Role of the Reluctant Harbinger in Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness
• Joseph L. Kelly (bio)

Arden of Faversham (Anonymous 1592) and A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood 1607), two very different plays that exemplify the distinctive sub-genre of “domestic tragedy,” both feature a unique supporting role, each of which serves a similar purpose—that of a reluctant harbinger.

In the respective plays, each serves the household of a country gentleman. The one, Thomas Arden’s personal friend and counselor on the trip to London, Franklin. The other is Master John Frankford’s manservant, Nicholas. Soon after the plays begin, both counselor and manservant find themselves thrust into unexpectedly onerous dilemmas, chiefly pertaining to the infidelity of the respective gentlemen’s wives with a household rival. Both voluntarily but reluctantly engage the seemingly bootless effort to inform and protect either the insouciant friend or disbelieving master, as the case may be.

Largely invented, neither role as written appears in the source material, nor do other domestic tragedies of the period feature roles that similarly augur disguised ill for the principal character.¹ Critical commentators tend to treat the roles as primarily incidental to the plot and ancillary to the main characters’ actions rather than as influential agents, serving simply as instruments for commentary on the action rather than as plot participants.² That the role stands apart, even aloof, from the plays’ other characters allows each to maintain a close, informed, and conflict-free relationship with the master of the established provincial household. This, in turn, lends a measure of audience credibility with which to serve as commentator and confidant to reinforce moments of anticipation and irony in the unfolding dramatic plot.

Thus, I argue that these seemingly forgotten characters uniquely serve the narrative of either play as an often compromised front line of defense for the greater household, as well as a crucial plot device, that strengthens these respective plays’ immediate audience impact as well as their enduring theatrical influence. Franklin, despite his frequent but unheeded [End Page 23] warnings, fails to prevent his friend Arden’s murder conspired by his wife Alice and her lover Mosby. Yet, in the end, despite his reluctance along the way, Franklin becomes the play’s essential instrument of final justice and retribution. Nicholas, the manservant, reluctantly reveals a solely witnessed affair between his master’s wife and her lover Wendoll in Woman Killed. His discovery and disclosure initiate the cascade of events that drive the play’s climax and conclusion.

I

I presented this paper at the Death and Domesticity Conference in the fall of 2018. A wide variety of distinguished scholars gathered for the rare opportunity to share their scholarly enthusiasm for that distinctive subgroup of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century tragic drama known as “domestic tragedy,” the significance and influence of which too often sits unrecognized within the rich theatrical history of the time. Domestic tragedy diverged in subject matter from the customary focus on legend, history, wealth, and nobility to contemporary, personal, and family relationships within land-owning household enterprises. H. H. Adams first distinguished these plays in his 1943 study English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, 1575–1642. Adams’s definition yet remains a durable starting point from which to collectively situate these enduring milestones of early English drama.

The subtitle of Adams’s foregoing treatise declares it “an Account of the Development of the Tragedy of the Common Man, showing the Great Dependence on Religious Morality, illustrated with striking examples of the Interposition of Providence for the Amendment of Men’s Manners.” That is, after the fashion of a homily, the playwright constructs the domestic tragedy as a “moral demonstration [at every stage of which] the hand of Providence can be discerned” (Adams 103).

At the center of two full days of oral conference essay presentations stood full-length stage productions of two classic domestic tragedies presented by the Resurgens Theatre Company—Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness. The Conference specifically chose these plays as not only distinguished examples of the genre, but those that illustrate Adams’s claim for the homiletic nature of domestic tragedy.

However, I...