Arden of Faversham (original spelling: Arden of Feversham) is an Elizabethan play, entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 3 April 1592, and printed later that same year by Edward White. It depicts the real-life murder of Thomas Arden by his wife Alice Arden and her lover, and their subsequent discovery and punishment. The play is notable as perhaps the earliest surviving example of domestic 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 to Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, solely or collaboratively, forming part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha. The use of computerized stylometrics has kindled academic interest in determining the authorship. The 2016 edition of The Oxford Shakespeare attributes the play to Shakespeare together with an anonymous collaborator, and rejects the possibility of authorship by Kyd or Marlowe.[1]
It has also been suggested that it may be the work of Thomas Watson with contributions by Shakespeare.[2] [3] [4]
Thomas Arden, or Arderne, was a successful businessman in the early Tudor period. Born in 1508, probably in Norwich, Arden took advantage of the tumult of the Reformation to make his fortune, trading in the former monastic properties dissolved by Henry VIII in 1538. In fact, the house in which he was murdered (which is still standing in Faversham) was a former guest house of Faversham Abbey, the Benedictine 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 known as Black Will and Shakebag were hired and continued to make botched attempts.[5] 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 and hanged 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 to Elizabethan readers through the account in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, 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's Chronicles were later adapted into a broadside ballad, "The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent".[6]
The play was printed anonymously in three quarto 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'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, 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 attributed Arden to Shakespeare.[7] 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 that Shakespeare wrote the play were first made in 1770 by the Faversham antiquarian Edward Jacob. Others have also attributed the play to Shakespeare, for instance Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Saintsbury, and the nineteenth-century critics Charles Knight and Nicolaus Delius. These claims are based on evaluations of literary style and parallel passages.
Christopher Marlowe has 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 critics F. G. Fleay, Charles Crawford, H. Dugdale Sykes, and Brian Vickers, is Thomas 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 the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the United States, and Hugh Craig, director of the Centre for Linguistic Stylistics at the University of Newcastle in 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.[8] This was countered in 2008, when Brian Vickers reported in the Times Literary Supplement that his own computer analysis, based on recurring collocations, indicates Thomas Kyd as the likely author of the whole.[9] In a study published in 2015, MacDonald P. Jackson set out an extensive case for Shakespeare's hand in the middle scenes of Arden, along with selected passages from earlier in the play.[10] 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.[11] Freebury-Jones provides a sustained analysis of the evidence in favour of Kyd's sole authorship in a full-length monograph.[12]
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) in Evenley, Rutland.