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"Two households, both alike" in the indignities suffered by the women who occupy them: I appropriate this famous line from Thomas Heywood's more celebrated contemporary as a way to begin to analyze Katie Mitchell's stunning, feminist production of A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) at London's National Theatre in 2011. Mitchell's conceit was to stage the domestic tragedy as the story of two households, dark mirrors of one another, each with a woman at its center. Rather than offering a conventional reading of the tragedy, with its "main plot " concerning the Frankford marriage and its "subplot" concerning the Mountford siblings, Mitchell visually, aurally, and thematically twinned the two to create a new and nuanced whole. And instead of relying on Heywood's words alone to tell the tale of the play, Mitchell layered them with elaborate physical "language" drawn from theatrical realism, thereby revealing dimensions of the female characters and their circumstances that the text itself would leave unseen or unspoken. By pairing this early modern drama with modern stage practices, including hyper-realistic detail in setting and much of the acting placed alongside interludes of highly stylized movement, Mitchell's intervention in A Woman Killed with Kindness was a feminist revelation.
Gayle Rubin's influential essay, "The Traffic in Women," exposes and analyzes the age-old structures in which women have been regarded as objects and exchanged as "gifts" to create social kinship among men (36). She writes:
"Exchange of women" is a shorthand for expressing that the social relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to themselves or their male kin. In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves. (38-39)
I quote Rubin here because Mitchell's production brought her essay to mind; this passage could almost be a description of Heywood's play. His female characters are surely the objects of exchange between and among the more prominent male characters; indeed, both the main plot and subplot turn on such transactions. Though the social oppression of women has been "naturalized" in many cultures, including the one in which A Woman Killed with Kindness was...