Broken Lutes and Passionate Bodies in <i>A Woman Killed with Kindness</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas Heywood’s 1607 play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ends with the protagonist, Frankford, discovering the lute of Anne, the wife he has just banished for adultery. Grieved by the sight of the instrument that he conflates with his marriage and with Anne herself, Frankford exiles the lute along with his wife. When she receives the instrument, Anne plays a lament, then directs her coachman to “go break this lute upon my coach’s wheel, / As the last music that I e’er shall make” (16.69–70). Shortly following the destruction of the lute, Anne dies. Anne’s body and memory, clearly, are inextricably linked to the lute: in the drama, her body is a musical instrument that she can play, that can be played upon, and that can be destroyed. The lute as body metaphor is a common image in early modern English literature, and Heywood both uses and complicates the metaphor. The lute, first, demonstrates Anne’s impossible and paradoxical identity as a chaste wife, noblewoman, and possible prostitute. Moreover, the lute emphasizes Anne’s powerlessness over her own body, particularly her humours. Like other characters in the play, Anne had let her bodily passions control her, but when she breaks the lute, she breaks also her passions’ power over herself and others. Yet when she destroys the lute, she does not abandon music altogether, for music can bring about powerful social harmony. Instead, she plays her own body as a musical instrument, which makes her self-slaughter instructive rather than destructive. Her death is didactic for the audience—both onstage and in the theatre—that gathers around her deathbed, and suggests a variety of means of controlling the passions, some of them more deadly than others. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, Anne’s music is an exemplar of the extraordinary efforts necessary to quell the unruly passions that cause so much of the conflict in the play.
 La pièce de Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), se termine lorsque le personnage principal, Frankford, découvre le luth d’Anne, l’épouse qu’il vient de bannir pour cause d’adultère. Attristé par la vue de cet instrument qu’il associe à son mariage et à Anne elle-même, Frankford exile le luth en compagnie de sa femme. Lorsqu’elle reçoit l’instrument, Anne joue une complainte, puis fait écraser son luth sous les roues d’une diligence, renonçant ainsi à sa musique. Elle meurt peu après. Son corps et sa mémoire sont manifestement liés, de façon intime, au luth : dans le drame, son corps est un instrument de musique dont elle peut jouer, sur lequel autrui peut jouer, et qui peut être détruit. Le luth est une métaphore du corps courante dans la littérature anglaise de l’époque; Heywood utilise cette métaphore tout en la compliquant. En premier lieu, le luth figure l’impossible et paradoxale identité d’Anne : chaste épouse, noble dame et, virtuellement, prostituée. Qui plus est, le luth souligne l’incapacité d’Anne à contrôler son propre corps, surtout ses humeurs. Comme d’autres personnages de la pièce, Anne a perdu la maîtrise de ses passions charnelles, mais en détruisant le luth elle détruit aussi l’emprise de ses passions sur elle-même et sur les autres. Cependant, lorsqu’elle détruit le luth, elle ne renonce pas totalement à la musique, car la musique peut engendrer une forte harmonie sociale. Elle joue plutôt de son propre corps comme d’un instrument de musique, faisant de son suicide davantage une instruction qu’une destruction. Sa mort a une valeur didactique pour ceux qui le regardent (tant de la scène que des gradins du théâtre), assemblés autour de son lit de mort; il laisse entendre que plusieurs méthodes permettent de maîtriser les passions, certaines étant plus mortelles que d’autres. Dans A Woman Killed with Kindness, la musique d’Anne symbolise la peine extraordinaires pour imposér une discipline aux passions sans règle, à la source de tant de conflits dans la pièce.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".