Of the domestic tragedies, very much in fashion from 1597 to 1603, the few survivors show little advance over "Arden of Feversham." These presentations of hideous contemporary crimes maintain the protest initiated by that play against the conventionalities of "the ghost and revenge" drama, and echo its demand for realism. The satirical description of Tragedy in the induction to "A Warning for Fair Women" (1599) is particularly noteworthy as indicating the definiteness which the current conception of tragedy had assumed. The epilogue reiterates the cry of the realist in an era of romanticism:-- "Perhaps it may seem strange unto you all, That one hath not avenged another's death After the observation of such course: The reason is that now of truth I sing." A second of these plays, "Two Lamentable Tragedies" (1601), is a curious combination of the story of the babes in the wood and that of the recent murder of one Beech. A third, "A Yorkshire Tragedy," acted by Shakespeare's company about 1605, and published with his name (1608), is remarkable for its naked realism and the vividness and rapidity of some of its prose. With these plays may be grouped Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness" (1607, acted 1603), for, although it does not deal with real events, it lacks the usual accompaniments of tragedy, courts, kings, ghosts, and battles, and presents a story of current English life. Its themes are the common ones of adultery and revenge, but it gives them an entirely novel treatment, the husband refusing to take vengeance on his guilty wife, who dies repentant and forgiven. After a fashion soon to become general, there is an underplot which, like the main plot, presents a problem of social ethics, the question of the sacrifice of chastity to save a brother's honor. Similar problems are common in contemporary comedy, and the play might be classed indifferently as a domestic tragedy or a tearful comedy. It is Heywood's masterpiece and exemplifies the qualities that won him the affection of Lamb, "generosity, courtesy, temperance in the depth of passion, sweetness, in a word, and gentleness." The wife falls too easily and repents too sentimentally to be of much interest, but the character of Frankfort is finely conceived and, especially in the great scene of the discovery, executed with a power and truth of feeling rarely combined outside of Shakespeare. In a very similar play, "The English Traveller," written long afterwards, Heywood speaks of two hundred and twenty plays in which he had a main finger. Some of these lost plays must have further exemplified the method of "A Woman Killed with Kindness"; but his success failed to encourage other dramatists to attempt domestic themes and to abandon the tragic conventions. Such realism as his was left to comedy, and tragedy continued to seek its stories in romance or history.