“Frailty, thy name is woman”: Examining Female Infidelity, Chastity, and Consent in The Changeling and A Woman Killed with Kindness

Abstract: One of the most famous lines from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “frailty, thy name is woman” (1.2.150), does not necessarily aim to label women as simply the “weaker sex” but rather speaks to the perceived notion that female affection was considered inconsistent and disloyal. Other early modern English dramas of infidelity, specifically William Rowley and Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, use pairings of “good” and “bad” women to enable audiences to quickly distinguish virtuous women as those remain loyal to their husbands. However, in both plays, lines of consent are often blurred, and when looked at from a feminist perspective, it is clear that the female characters cannot be so easily labeled. At the conclusion of each plot, it does not matter to the husbands if their wives rejected the men pursuing them or if the suitors forced themselves on the women: the female characters are only allowed to keep their honor and reputation if they succeeded in remaining chaste. This paper will show how these plays reflect the contradictions of the so-called “woman problem” in early modern England. The “woman problem” referred to the examination and questioning of women’s roles in society and was seen in the conflicting expectations for women. Though women were limited to domestic roles and instructed to be somewhat submissive to the men in their lives (mainly their fathers and husbands), Queen Elizabeth’s role as the leader of the country suggested different. Ultimately, through their pairs of good and bad women, the two plays seem to enforce this time period’s strict ideas on female infidelity, chastity, submission, and consent. However, Rowley, Middleton, and Heywood are unable to form a perfect, admirable model of womanhood because they stereotype women and perpetuate misogynistic ideals of women’s inherent “frailty.”