Arden of Faversham
Encyclopedia
Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers
The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers is one of the Livery Companies of the City of London. The Stationers' Company was founded in 1403; it received a Royal Charter in 1557...
on 3 April 1592, and printed later that same year by Edward White. It depicts the murder of one Thomas Arden by his wife Alice Arden
Alice Arden
Alice Arden was the daughter of John Brigantine and Alice Squire, who conspired to have her husband, Thomas Arden of Faversham, murdered so she could carry on with a long-term affair with a tailor, Richard Moseby. The murder took place on 14 February 1551...
and her lover, and their subsequent discovery and punishment. The play is notable as perhaps the earliest surviving example of domestic tragedy
Domestic tragedy
In English drama, a domestic tragedy is a play in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle-class or lower-class individuals. This subgenre contrasts with classical and Neoclassical tragedy, in which the protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank and their downfall is an affair of...
, a form of Renaissance play which dramatized recent and local crimes rather than far-off and historical events.
The author is unknown. T.S. Eliot believed that Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd was an English dramatist, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama....
was the probable author. Some have claimed, through computer analysis, that it was William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
. The debate continues to interest academics.
Source
Thomas Arden, or Arderne, was a successful businessman in the early Tudor periodTudor period
The Tudor period usually refers to the period between 1485 and 1603, specifically in relation to the history of England. This coincides with the rule of the Tudor dynasty in England whose first monarch was Henry VII...
. Born in 1508, probably in Norwich, Arden took advantage of the tumult of the Reformation
English Reformation
The English Reformation was the series of events in 16th-century England by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church....
to make his fortune, trading in the former monastic properties dissolved by Henry VIII
Henry VIII of England
Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France...
in 1538. In fact, the house in which he was murdered (which is still standing in Faversham
Faversham
Faversham is a market town and civil parish in the Swale borough of Kent, England. The parish of Faversham grew up around an ancient sea port on Faversham Creek and was the birthplace of the explosives industry in England.-History:...
) was a former guest house of Faversham Abbey
Faversham Abbey
Faversham Abbey was a Cluny style monastery immediately to the north-east of the town of Faversham in the county of Kent in England.It was founded by King Stephen and his queen Matilda of Boulogne in 1148. A party of monks from Bermondsey Abbey provided the nucleus and the first abbot.The Abbey was...
, the Benedictine
Benedictine
Benedictine refers to the spirituality and consecrated life in accordance with the Rule of St Benedict, written by Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century for the cenobitic communities he founded in central Italy. The most notable of these is Monte Cassino, the first monastery founded by Benedict...
abbey 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 of Calais
Calais
Calais is a town in Northern France in the department of Pas-de-Calais, of which it is a sub-prefecture. Although Calais is by far the largest city in Pas-de-Calais, the department's capital is its third-largest city of Arras....
known as Black Will and Loosebag (called Shakebag in the play) 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, hoping 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. Loosebag escaped and was never heard of again. Other conspirators were hanged in chains. One - George Bradshaw, who was convicted 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 to Elizabethan readers through the account in Raphael Holinshed
Raphael Holinshed
Raphael Holinshed was an English chronicler, whose work, commonly known as Holinshed's Chronicles, was one of the major sources used by William Shakespeare for a number of his plays....
's Chronicles, although the murder was so recent, and so memorable, that it is also likely that it was in the living memory of some of the anonymous playwright's acquaintances.
Plot
The playwright followed the account in Holinshed's Chronicle fairly closely, not only in the sequence of events leading to the murder and trial, but also in the unusually complex thematics of the event. From the first scene, Arden is a markedly ambiguous character; he is shown to be intemperate, domineering, and deceitful, having just in essence stolen a piece of land from a fellow townsman named Greene. These touches of characterization do not, of course, alter the play's basic intent, announced on the title page, to show "the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman, the insatiable desire of filthy lust, and the shameful end of all murderers"; they do, however, reveal an ability to create complex characters decidedly above the norm for anonymous Elizabethan playwrights. A similar complexity is found in the murder scenes, which combine genuine tension, for instance in the assassins' attempts to find Arden on a foggy night, with almost bathetic humor, in their incompetent attempts on the man's life.Main characters
- Thomas Arden: Thomas Arden was a self-made man, he was formally the mayor of Faversham and was appointed as the king's controller of imports and exports. Arden made his will in the December 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 and brother of Susan, Alice's maid
- Black Will and Shakebag Hired murderers. In the play the pair fail a number of times to carry out the murder of Arden. Shakebag is shown to be the more evil of the two. It is possible the names are a satirical reference to William Shakespeare.
Text, history and authorship
The play was printed anonymously in three quartoBook size
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from "folio" , to "quarto" and "octavo"...
editions 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 in George Lillo
George Lillo
George Lillo was an English playwright and tragedian. He was a jeweler in London as well as a dramatist. He produced his first stage work, Silvia, or The Country Burial, in 1730. A year later, he produced his most famous play, The London Merchant...
's adaptation; the original was brought back to the stage in 1921, and has received intermittent revivals since. It was adapted into a ballet at Sadler's Wells in 1799, and into an opera, Arden Must Die, by Alexander Goehr
Alexander Goehr
Alexander Goehr is an English composer and academic.Goehr was born in Berlin in 1932, the son of the conductor and Schoenberg pupil Walter Goehr. In his early twenties he emerged as a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers. In 1955–56 he joined Oliver Messiaen's...
, in 1967.
In 1656 it appeared in a catalogue (An Exact and perfect Catalogue of all Plaies that were ever printed) unlikely assigned to be an interlude
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
by Richard Bernard
Richard Bernard
Richard Bernard was an English Puritan clergyman and writer.-Life:Bernard was born in Epworth and received his education at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1592, obtained his BA in 1595, and an MA in 1598. He was married in 1601 and had six children...
, while on the line above it the comedy The Arraignment of Paris, performed in 1581, was similarly unlikely a tragedy assigned to Shakespeare. It has been argued that the attributions were shifted up one line, and that Shakespeare was the intended claimed author of Arden.
The question of the text's authorship has been analyzed at length, but with no decisive conclusions. Claims that Shakespeare wrote the play were first made in 1770 by the Faversham antiquarian Edward Jacob
Edward Jacob
Edward Jacob was an antiquary, naturalist and mayor from Kent, the son of Edward Jacob, surgeon of Canterbury, mayor of that city in 1727, who died in 1756. He married twice. His first wife was Margaret Rigden, whom he married on 4 September 1739, she being the daughter of John Rigden of...
. Others have also claimed for Shakespeare, for instance Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
, George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury , was an English writer, literary historian, scholar and critic.-Biography:...
, and the nineteenth-century critics Charles Knight
Charles Knight (publisher)
Charles Knight was an English publisher and author.-Early life:The son of a bookseller and printer at Windsor, he was apprenticed to his father...
and Nicolaus Delius. These claims may be rejected as impressionistic, although it is not inconceivable that Shakespeare had a hand in certain scenes.
There are two circumstantial connections with Shakespeare that hint at his involvement either as an actor or a writer. First, the Lord Chamberlain's players, the company with whom Shakespeare performed, staged the play at least once. It has been speculated that Shakespeare might have taken the part of Shakebag, who, atypically for a ruffian, often speaks in verse rather than prose. Second, the play's publisher, Edward White, also published an edition of Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, and possibly George Peele, believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy, and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were...
.
Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
has also been advanced; the strong emotions of the characters and the lack of a strongly marked 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, favored by critics F. G. Fleay
Frederick Gard Fleay
Frederick Gard Fleay was an influential and prolific nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholar.Fleay, the son of a linen draper, graduated from King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge , where he received mathematical training that was key to his later achievements...
, Charles Crawford and H. Dugdale Sykes, is Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd was an English dramatist, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama....
, who at one time shared rooms with Marlowe. However, without more knowledge of the text's history than is possessed at present, all ascriptions are bound to be speculative in nature.
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 the University of Massachusetts
University of Massachusetts
This article relates to the statewide university system. For the flagship campus often referred to as "UMass", see University of Massachusetts Amherst...
in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, and Hugh Craig, director of the Centre for Linguistic Stylistics at the University of Newcastle
University of Newcastle, Australia
The University of Newcastle is an Australian public university that was established in 1965. The University's main and largest campus is located in Callaghan, a suburb of Newcastle in New South Wales...
in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
, found that word frequency and other vocabulary choices were consistent with the middle portion of the play having been written by Shakespeare. http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/39476.php
However, in 2008, Brian Vickers reported in the Times Literary Supplement that his own computer analysis, based on recurring collocation
Collocation
In corpus linguistics, collocation defines a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation is the expression strong tea...
s, indicates Thomas Kyd as the likely author.
Modern performance
- In 1955 the play was performed by Joan LittlewoodJoan LittlewoodJoan Maud Littlewood was a British theatre director, noted for her work in developing the left-wing Theatre Workshop...
's Theatre WorkshopTheatre WorkshopTheatre Workshop is a theatre group noted for their director, Joan Littlewood. Many actors of the 1950s and 1960s received their training and first exposure with the company...
at the ParisParisParis is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
International Festival of Theatre as the English entry. - In 1970 Buzz GoodbodyBuzz GoodbodyMary Ann "Buzz" Goodbody was an English theatre director.She was educated at Roedean and the University of Sussex. A product of the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Goodbody regarded herself as a radical and a revolutionary who was involved in the feminist movement...
directed a version for the RSCRoyal Shakespeare CompanyThe Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
, with Emrys JamesEmrys JamesEmrys James , was a Welsh Shakespearean actor. He also performed in many theatre and TV parts between 1960 and 1989, and was an Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company...
as Arden and Dorothy TutinDorothy TutinDame Dorothy Tutin DBE was an English actor of stage, film, and television.An obituary in The Daily Telegraph described her as "one of the most enchanting, accomplished and intelligent leading ladies on the post-war British stage...
as Alice, at The RoundhouseThe RoundhouseThe Roundhouse is a Grade II* listed former railway engine shed in Chalk Farm, London, England, which has been converted into a performing arts and concert venue. It was originally built in 1847 as a roundhouse , a circular building containing a railway turntable, but was only used for railway...
. - In 1982 Terry HandsTerry HandsTerence David Hands is an English theatre director. He ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for 20 years during one of its most successful periods.-Early years:...
directed the work, with Bruce PurchaseBruce PurchaseBruce Purchase was a New Zealand-born actor known for his roles on stage and television. Born in Thames, New Zealand, he won a scholarship to study acting in England, training at RADA, and went on to become a founding actor-member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre...
and Jenny AgutterJenny AgutterJennifer Ann "Jenny" Agutter is an English film and television actress. She began her career as a child actress in the mid 1960s, starring in the BBC television series The Railway Children and the film adaptation of the same book, before moving on to adult roles and relocating to Hollywood.She...
, at the RSC's Other Place theatreThe Other Place (theatre)The Other Place was a black box theatre on Southern Lane, near to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. It was owned and operated by the Royal Shakespeare Company....
in Stratford-upon-AvonStratford-upon-AvonStratford-upon-Avon is a market town and civil parish in south Warwickshire, England. It lies on the River Avon, south east of Birmingham and south west of Warwick. It is the largest and most populous town of the District of Stratford-on-Avon, which uses the term "on" to indicate that it covers...
. - 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 2010 the play was performed at the Rose TheatreThe Rose (theatre)The Rose was an Elizabethan theatre. It was the fourth of the public theatres to be built, after The Theatre , the Curtain , and the theatre at Newington Butts The Rose was an Elizabethan theatre. It was the fourth of the public theatres to be built, after The Theatre (1576), the Curtain (1577),...
in BanksideBanksideBankside is a district of London, England, and part of the London Borough of Southwark. Bankside is located on the southern bank of the River Thames, east of Charing Cross, running from a little west of Blackfriars Bridge to just a short distance before London Bridge at St Mary Overie Dock to...
from 8 June-7 July by Em-lou productions, in its first London run for a decade.
External links
- Edition of the play in Brooke's Shakespeare 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 by Jonathan BateJonathan BateJonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism...
." - Account of the execution of the murderers in The Newgate CalendarThe Newgate CalendarThe Newgate Calendar, subtitled The Malefactors' Bloody Register, was a popular work of improving literature in the 18th and 19th centuries....
.