Thomas Heywood's early melodrama A Woman Killed by Kindness - I’ll say you wept, I’ll swear you made me sad

I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire hand or at least the main finger” in “two hundred and twenty” (!) plays ( Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies , p. 38). He is more like a television writer. His most famous play, A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), is like a television melodrama, a weepy. It…