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| A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays
ISBN: 9780191539886
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature; Fiction;
Arden of Faversham * A Woman Killed with Kindness * The Witch of Edmonton * The English Traveller In about 1590, an unknown dramatist had the idea of writing a tragedy about the lives of ordinary people, instead of the genre's usual complement of kings and queens and politicians. His play, Arden of Faversham, inaugurated a new genre of 'domestic' drama, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage, crime, and property rather than war and power. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend, only to find that he takes unusual reprisals. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected and unwelcome changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts; a critical introduction that outlines the way all four plays raise powerful and complex questions about the English society in which their tragic events unfold; wide-ranging notes; a chronology of the plays from their sources to recent performance; and appendices relating to two of the plays: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Heywood write The English Traveller. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Dekker was a popular, prolific writer who had a hand in at least 40 plays, which he wrote for Philip Henslowe, the theatrical entrepreneur. In the plays that seem to be completely by Dekker, he shows himself as a realist of London life, but even his most realistic plays have a strong undertone of romantic themes and aspirations. The Shoemaker's Holiday (1600), for example, glorifies the gentle craft of the shoemaker, and the character Simon Eyre speaks in an extravagant, hyperbolic style that is far from realistic. Dekker also wrote such prose pamphlets as the Bellman of London (1608) and The Gull's Hornbook (1609), the latter an entertaining account of the behavior of a country yokel and dupe in London. He died in debt. (Bowker Author Biography) |
