Arden of Faversham

Title page of the firstquarto(1592)

Arden of Faversham(original spelling:Arden of Feversham) is anElizabethanplay, entered into the Register of theStationers Companyon 3 April 1592, and printed later that same year byEdward White.It depicts the real-life murder ofThomas Ardenby his wifeAlice Ardenand her lover, and their subsequent discovery and punishment. The play is notable as perhaps the earliest surviving example ofdomestic tragedy,a form of Renaissance play which dramatized recent and local crimes rather than far-off and historical events.

The author is unknown, and the play has been attributed toThomas Kyd,Christopher Marlowe,andWilliam Shakespeare,solely or collaboratively, forming part of theShakespeare Apocrypha.The use of computerizedstylometricshas kindled academic interest in determining the authorship. The 2016 edition ofThe Oxford Shakespeareattributes the play to Shakespeare together with an anonymous collaborator, and rejects the possibility of authorship by Kyd or Marlowe.

It has also been suggested that it may be the work ofThomas Watsonwith contributions by Shakespeare.

Sources

Arden's House inFaversham,Kent;
the scene of his murder

Thomas Arden,or Arderne, was a successful businessman in the earlyTudor period.Born in 1508, probably in Norwich, Arden took advantage of the tumult of theReformationto make his fortune, trading in the former monastic properties dissolved byHenry VIIIin 1538. In fact, the house in which he was murdered (which is still standing inFaversham) was a former guest house ofFaversham Abbey,theBenedictineabbey near the town. His wife Alice had taken a lover, a man of low status named Mosby; together, they plotted to murder her husband. After several bungled attempts on his life, two ex-soldiers from the former English dominion ofCalaisknown as Black Will and Shakebag were hired and continued to make botched attempts.Arden was finally killed in his own home on 14 February 1551, and his body was left out in a field during a snowstorm, in the hope that the blame would fall on someone who had come to Faversham for the St Valentine's Day fair. The snowfall stopped, however, before the killers' tracks were covered, and the tracks were followed back to the house. Bloodstained swabs and rushes were found, and the killers quickly confessed. Alice and Mosby were put on trial and convicted of the crime; he was hanged and she burnt at the stake in 1551. Black Will may also have been burnt at the stake after he had fled to Flanders: the English records state he was executed in Flanders, while the Flemish records state he was extradited to England. Shakebag escaped and was never heard of again. Other conspirators were executed andhanged in chains.One – George Bradshaw, who was implicated by an obscure passage in a sealed letter he had delivered – was wrongly convicted and posthumously acquitted.

The story would most likely have been known toElizabethanreaders through the account inRaphael Holinshed'sChronicles,although the murder was so notorious that it is also possible that it was in the living memory of some of the anonymous playwright's acquaintances.

Both the play and the story in Holinshed'sChronicleswere later adapted into abroadside ballad,"The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent".

Main characters

• Thomas Arden:Aself-made man,formerly the mayor of Faversham. Arden was appointed as the king's controller of imports and exports. He had made his will on 20 December 1550, a few months before his death.
• Alice Arden:Wife of Thomas Arden. Alice plots with her lover Mosby to kill Arden. Alice is shown to believe love transcends social class.
• Mosby:Alice's lover. Thomas Arden frequently belittles him for being atailor.His sister, Susan, serves Alice as a maid.
• Michael:The Ardens'butler-like servant. He becomes a pawn in the murder plot after he is promised Susan's hand in marriage.
• Black WillandShakebag:Murderers hired by Alice's trusted accomplice Green. Various complications foil several of their attempts to kill Arden. Shakebag is shown to be the more evil of the two.
• Franklin:Thomas Arden's best friend and travelling companion. On the road from London, he tells a tale of female infidelity. (Franklin has no real-life parallel and is purely a literary invention.)

Text, history and authorship

The play was printed anonymously in threequartoeditions during the period, in 1592 (Q1), 1599 (Q2), and 1633 (Q3). The last publication occurred in the same year as a broadsheet ballad written from Alice's point of view. The title pages do not indicate performance or company. However, the play was never fully forgotten. For most of three centuries, it was performed inGeorge Lillo's adaptation; the original was brought back to the stage in 1921, and has received intermittent revivals since. It was adapted into a ballet atSadler's Wellsin 1799, and into anopera,Arden Must Die,byAlexander Goehr,in 1967.

In 1656 it appeared in a catalogue (An Exact and perfect Catalogue of all Plaies that were ever printed) with apparent mislineation. It has been argued that attributions were shifted up one line; if this is true, the catalogue would have attributedArdento Shakespeare.Shakespeare had a great-grandfather named Thomas Arden, but he was from Surrey and died in 1546, and should not be confused with the Thomas Arden of the play.

The question of the text's authorship has been analyzed at length, but with no decisive conclusions. Claims thatShakespearewrote the play were first made in 1770 by the Faversham antiquarianEdward Jacob.Others have also attributed the play to Shakespeare, for instanceAlgernon Charles Swinburne,George Saintsbury,and the nineteenth-century criticsCharles Knightand Nicolaus Delius. These claims are based on evaluations of literary style and parallel passages.

Christopher Marlowehas also been advanced as an author or co-author. The strong emotions of the characters and the lack of a virtuous hero are certainly in line with Marlowe's practice. Moreover, Marlowe was raised in nearby Canterbury and is likely to have had the knowledge of the area evinced by the play. Another candidate, favoured by criticsF. G. Fleay,Charles Crawford, H. Dugdale Sykes, andBrian Vickers,isThomas Kyd,who at one time shared rooms with Marlowe.

Debates about the play's authorship involve the questions of: (a) whether the text was generated largely by a single writer; and (b) which writer or writers may have been responsible for the whole or parts. In 2006, a new computer analysis of the play and comparison with the Shakespeare corpus by Arthur Kinney, of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies at theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherstin the United States, andHugh Craig,director of the Centre for Linguistic Stylistics at theUniversity of Newcastlein Australia, found that word frequency and other vocabulary choices were consistent with the middle portion of the play (scenes 4–9) having been written by Shakespeare.This was countered in 2008, whenBrian Vickersreported in theTimes Literary Supplementthat his own computer analysis, based on recurringcollocations,indicates Thomas Kyd as the likely author of the whole.In a study published in 2015,MacDonald P. Jacksonset out an extensive case for Shakespeare's hand in the middle scenes ofArden,along with selected passages from earlier in the play.However, Darren Freebury-Jones argues that to attribute the play to Shakespeare is to ignore the numerous studies which have provided strong evidence for Kyd.Freebury-Jones provides a sustained analysis of the evidence in favour of Kyd's sole authorship in a full-length monograph.

In 2013 the RSC published an edition attributing the play, in part, to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare had an ancestor named Thomas Arden on his mother's side, but he died in 1546 (four years prior to the Thomas Arden in the play) inEvenley, Rutland.

Modern performance

• In 1955 the play was performed byJoan Littlewood'sTheatre Workshopat the Paris International Festival of Theatre as the English entry.
• In 1970Buzz Goodbodydirected a version for theRoyal Shakespeare Company(RSC), withEmrys Jamesas Arden andDorothy Tutinas Alice, atThe Roundhouse.
• In 1982Terry Handsdirected the work, withBruce PurchaseandJenny Agutter,at the RSC'sOther Place theatreinStratford-upon-Avon.
• In 2001 the play was performed for a summer season in the garden of Arden's house in Faversham, the scene of the murder.
• In 2004, the play was performed by theMetropolitan Playhouseof New York.
• In 2010 the play was performed at theRose TheatreinBanksideby Em-lou productions. Directed by Peter Darney, it was its first London run for a decade.
• In 2014, the Royal Shakespeare Company performed a production of the play; it ran at theSwan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.
• In 2015, the play was performed by theBrave Spirits TheatreatAtlas Performing Arts Center.
• In 2015, the play received a new interpretation by theHudson Shakespeare Companyof New Jersey as it was moved from the 1500s to the 1950s as part of theirShakespeare in the parksseries. The production was notable for matching the farcical plot with 1950s pop songs bySinatra,Elvis,Patsy Cline,andFats Dominoand making Arden's friend Franklin a woman, playing up sexual subtext inherent in their scenes.
• In May 2018, Maiden Thought Theatre performed it in their home town of Bremen (Germany), setting it to original music by Frances Byrd as a homage to the genre of Film Noir, playing out more of the comedic elements of the play. They, too, changed the role of Franklin to a female "Frankie", while setting up Faversham (restoring the original spelling, "Feversham" ) as a morally and deeply corrupt society.
• In 2019, the play was performed onBBC Radio 3(UK) with Ewan Bailey as Arden andAmaka Okaforas Alice, adapted and directed by Alison Hindell.
• In 2023, the play was performed Off-Broadway by Red Bull Theater in a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat, directed by Jesse Berger.

References

• Arden of Feversham: a study of the Play first published in 1592(1970) written and illustrated by Anita Holt
• C. F. Tucker Brooke, ed.,The Shakespeare Apocrypha,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1908.
• Max Bluestone, "The Imagery of Tragic Melodrama in Arden of Faversham," in Bluestone and Rabkin (eds.),Shakespeare's Contemporaries,2nd ed., Prentice-Hall, 1970.
• Catherine Belsey."Alice Arden's Crime."Staging the Renaissance.Ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Lena Cowen Orlin.Private Matter and Public Culture in Post Reformation England(especially Chapter One). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994.

External links

• Arden of FevershamatProject Gutenberg
• Edition of the playin Brooke'sShakespeare Apocrypha
• Abridged modernized online text of the play(William Harris, Middlebury College)
• The RSC Shakespeare– "The text of Shakespeare's possible scene, a plot summary for the whole play and a brief introduction byJonathan Bate."
• Account of the execution of the murderersinThe Newgate Calendar.
• The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Fevershamin the English Broadside Ballad Archive. University of California, Santa Barbara. (Includes ballad facsimile, text, and MP3 recording of the ballad sung unaccompanied)