Review – A Woman Killed with Kindness, National Theatre

Questioner: You’re directing A Woman Killed with Kindness again but this time at the National Theatre tell us something about it.

Katie Mitchell: Well it’s an early seventeenth-century domestic tragedy by Thomas Heywood. It’s about John Frankford and his wife Anne. He invites Wendoll into his home to act as a companion. He tells him that anything in his house is at Wendoll’s disposal which he take literally.

Early Modern Elizabethan and Jacobean views of fasting or self-starvation were often hearkened to old Medieval views which considered a woman’s fasting a visual cue to a woman’s obedience, chastity, and honour. Eating, binging, or gluttony were considered to be fundamentally connected with sexuality. Gluttony will inevitabily lead to lust, as we see here. Several tract writers suggest female fasting should be a part of a woman’s education as it would make her to be a better wife and mother.*