Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- A note on the text
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Of rings, and things, and fine array’: marriage law, evidence and uncertainty
- 2 ‘Unmanly indignities’: adultery, evidence and judgement in Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness
- 3 Evidence and representation on ‘the theatre of God's judgements’: A Warning for Fair Women
- 4 ‘Painted devils’: image-making and evidence in The White Devil
- 5 Locations of law: spaces, people, play
- 6 ‘When women go to Law, the Devil is full of Business’: women, law and dramatic realism
- Epilogue: The Hydra head, the labyrinth and the waxen nose: discursive metaphors for law
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - ‘Unmanly indignities’: adultery, evidence and judgement in Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- A note on the text
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Of rings, and things, and fine array’: marriage law, evidence and uncertainty
- 2 ‘Unmanly indignities’: adultery, evidence and judgement in Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness
- 3 Evidence and representation on ‘the theatre of God's judgements’: A Warning for Fair Women
- 4 ‘Painted devils’: image-making and evidence in The White Devil
- 5 Locations of law: spaces, people, play
- 6 ‘When women go to Law, the Devil is full of Business’: women, law and dramatic realism
- Epilogue: The Hydra head, the labyrinth and the waxen nose: discursive metaphors for law
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In August 1596, the Vice-Chancellor's room at Queens' College, Cambridge, took on the unexpected character of a ‘bawdy court’. Bridget, wife of John Edmunds, a Cambridge university employee, was brought to the Vice-Chancellor's court on a charge of adultery with William Covile of Queens' College. Over the next month, neighbours, colleagues and household servants deposed; after a brief period of protesting innocence, Bridget confessed and turned witness for the prosecution along with her husband; John sued for a judicial separation.
This chapter is a reading of Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness, in the light of contemporary perceptions of adultery and practices of investigating and proving it within the household and in court. I use the Edmunds case as my point of entry into this study, because it provides remarkable analogies with, and suggestive insights into, the process that Heywood dramatises. The dramatic exploration of the social process of collecting proof brings into focus certain distinctly early modern perceptions of privacy and publicity, shown to be at play in the dramatic as well as the legal material. But the drama's self-conscious treatment of evidence suggests an affinity between theatrical and evidentiary representation, and helps establish the necessary inwardness of proof. Meanwhile, the focus on sexual misdemeanour and its specifically nuanced punishment becomes, for Heywood's play, a way of defining its own generic affiliations and investments; civility becomes at once a function of class sensibility and of genre.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama , pp. 55 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006