Finding Her Conscience: Auditing Female Confession in A Warning for Fair Women

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• Finding Her Conscience: Auditing Female Confession in A Warning for Fair Women
• Cheryl Birdseye (bio)

The anonymous A Warning for Fair Women dates from the late-sixteenth century and was based on the real murder of George Sanders by George Browne (who was in love with Sanders’s wife, Anne) in 1573. Significant attention has been paid to the play’s authorship, notably the possibility of Thomas Heywood, by Charles Dale Cannon, Joseph Quincy Adams, and, most recently, Gemma Leggott. The rest of this article will assume Heywood as playwright.¹ Details surrounding Sanders’s murder were recorded in a pamphlet by Arthur Golding, A briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Saunders, a worshipfull Citizen of London (1573), which documented material from the trial, in addition to the confession and scaffold prayer of Anne Sanders who was found guilty of conspiring with Browne. In addition to the pamphlet, at least one ballad was composed to retell Anne’s story, “The wofull lamentacon of mrs. Anne Saunders,” which focuses on her confession and desire for forgiveness.² A Warning for Fair Women presents an interesting variation from these accounts, reflecting the ambiguity surrounding Anne’s guilt, which had been hinted at by Golding at the start of his pamphlet: “some were brought in a blinde beliefe, that either she was not giltie at al, or else had but brought hir selfe in danger of lawe through ignorance, and not through pretenced malice” (11). The play’s penultimate act features a curious exchange of fantastical anecdotes between the trial’s witnesses and the Lords who will preside over the hearing. One of these stories, shared by Master James, reflects on another case of petty treason and is strangely prescient of another tract that would be written just over a decade later in Heywood’s An Apology for Actors:

Ile tell you (sir) one more to quite your tale,A woman that had made away her husband,And sitting to behold a tragedAt Linne a town in Norffolke,Acted by Players travelling that way,Wherein a woman that had murtherd hersWas ever haunted with her husbands ghost: [End Page 57] .............................................................She was so mooved with the sight thereof,As she cryed out, the Play was made by her,And openly confesst her husbands murder.

(xv. 2036–48)

Master James’s remarkable account considers the possibility of compulsive, unwilling auditor reactions and sits conspicuously within a play that was inherently interested in audience response and, particularly, the experience of women—those onstage as well as the spectators. Heywood’s defense of the theatre likewise touches upon the unique opportunities for audience unconscious engagement, namely the power of performances to expose the perpetrators of forgotten crimes. Heywood describes what must surely be the same performance in Lynn, Norfolk, featuring “a woman who, insatiately doting on a young gentleman, had (the more securely to enjoy his affection) mischievously and secretly murdered her husband” (245). The performance had a strange effect upon a particular member of the audience:

a townswoman (till then of good estimation and report) finding her conscience (at this presentment) extremely troubled, suddenly screeched and cried out Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatening and menacing me.

(245)

Heywood notes that, as they attended the affected woman, asking the reason for her distress, nearby auditors heard her admit that “seven years ago she, to be possessed of such a gentleman (meaning him) had poisoned her husband, whose fearful image personated it self in the shape of that ghost: whereupon the murderess was apprehended” (245). Heywood’s account of the incident is notable for several reasons, not least because it focuses on the experience of those around the woman at the time and not the response of the actors, nor indeed much detail on her trial (other than that she was “after condemned”) (245). The attention is focused entirely on the surprise of other playgoers and their role in enquiring after the reason for her response. Heywood describes the incident as a “home-born truth” (244), a phrase reminiscent of Tragedy’s Epilogue in A Warning for Fair Women: “Beare with this true...