This New Mermaids anthology brings together four plays which centre around female characters on stage: A Woman Killed With Kindness (Thomas Heywood); The Tamer Tamed (John Fletcher); The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster) and The Witch of Edmonton (William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford) with a new introduction by leading scholar Emma Smith.

A Woman Killed with Kindness is a domestic tragedy of property and marriage, adultery and revenge, and strips bare two women's lives in one of the first tragedies ever to be written about ordinary people....