Excessive Goods and Excessive Melodrama

The overabundance of goods on stage is meant to be absurd. In her essay, Orlin discusses the extent of the wide array of props, noting its peculiarity. The unusual nature of this amount of stage details suggest that Heywood is doing this purposely, perhaps to make a point about the absurdity of the supposed the link between food and sin that the two readings illustrate.

Anne’s story mirrors (or maybe more accurately caricatures) Braithwaite’s argument that “Luscious fare is the fuell of every inordinate concupiscence. Nothing so much feeds it, nor insensates the understanding by delighting in it” and that only “by your spare life is lust extinguished” (140). After she is married, Anne is surrounded by all manner of fine consumables; Orlin details how the stage is filled with “table, stools, carpet, tablecloth, napkins, salt, bread…” (Orlin 146). Following Braithwaite’s dictum, after soaking in the ‘luscious fare’, Anne is then consumed with lust and is driven to sin against her husband. Since it was this excess of goods that ignited her sinful ways, Anne then takes the logical step to ‘extinguish her lust’ by sparing herself from food, even if the cost is her life.

The absurdity of Anne’s life ending in melodramatic self-inflicted starvation sits nicely along side the absurd amount of goods on stage in the beginning of the play. Both are part of a satirical critique of the perceived link between food and immorality.