Adapting True Crime: George Wilkins’s The Miseries of Inforst Marriage, the Tragedy of Wardship, and the Early Modern Court of Wards and Liveries

Abstract

Walter Calverley’s 1605 murder of two of his children and attempted murder of his wife and infant sparked the early modern public’s imagination. George Wilkins’s The Miseries of Inforst Marriage adapts these grisly murders in a domestic tragedy model of wardship not marriage. I argue that Wilkins’s modification of the Calverley murders critiques wardship as administered under the Court of Wards and Liveries and the exploitative patriarchy allowed to flourish under this system. I will compare The Miseries of Inforst Marriage to two other contemporaneous treatments of the case and demonstrate where Wilkins is exaggerating or downplaying common aspects of the three works to communicate his condemnation of wardship.