Killing (a Woman) with Kindness: Duplicitous Intertextuality and the Domestication of Romance

Abstract

The proverb that gives Thomas Heywood’s play its title and the injured husband words to express his mastery at once of his wayward wife and of his own crudely vengeful impulses suspends an obvious contradiction, which metaphorical application tends to mitigate in the direction of paradox. The prominent references to apes in several early variants confirm that, as befits its position within the discourse of folk-wisdom, the saying is grounded in (pseudo-)natural history — that is, in the literal — with ‘kindness’ retaining a strong trace of its root meaning (‘natural affinity’).² Yet the nature of proverbs is to use language figuratively, and the movement away from the literal is facilitated, in most occurrences of this one, by the absence of the animal analogy. When Shakespeare endows young lovers with an affection that will actually prove fatal, he varies the proverb almost beyond recognition: if Romeo were her pet bird, Juliet would ‘kill’ him, not with ‘kindness’ but with ‘much cherishing’ (Rom., II.ii.183). By contrast, Shakespeare’s wife-tamer, Petruchio, though he is in fact the death of the shrew within Katherina, is certainly not speaking literally when he boasts, ‘[t]his is a way to kill a wife with kindness’ (Shr., IV.i.208).³

‘To kill with kindness (as fond apes do their young)’¹

‘This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof’.

(Ham., III.i.113-14)