‘’Sblood, Sir, She Swoons’: Fainting and Feinting in A Woman Killed with Kindness

The diverse and often contradictory significations of fainting sprawl across early modern discourse. Sermons used the word ‘faint’ to describe both a lapse of faith and a desire for God’s aid; medical treatises associated passing out with both physical illnesses and mental unrest; and narrative texts increasingly portrayed swooning as shameful in men but virtuous in women. In the playhouse, it is sometimes difficult to tell if female characters are faking their faints, destabilising any ability to interpret them accurately.
Focusing on Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603), this paper will examine the manifestations and implications of the fainting female on the early modern stage. Contrite adulteress Anne Frankford seems profoundly conscious of the affective potential of falling unconscious. Although genuinely physical and eventually fatal, Anne’s illness is also actively induced and performed; she ostentatiously stage-manages her food refusal, inviting the community to watch her prostrate herself for her husband’s forgiveness. Her swoons – and the other characters’ responses to them – become set pieces in her orchestrated display of wifely submission, blurring the lines between physical and emotional, self-effacement and self-assertion, fainting and feinting.