‘Romancing the Handbook’: Scenes of Detection in Arden of Faversham

In 1551 England, Alice Arden cuckolded and then murdered Thomas Arden of Faversham, a prosperous, if unscrupulous, merchant and landlord, in their own home. Alice Arden was tried and convicted of murder, sentenced to die, and burnt at the stake. In the 1570s Holinshed chronicled the crimes and sentencing related to Thomas Arden's murder, and some twenty years later an anonymous playwright dramatized the events in a domestic tragedy called Arden of Faversham. Performed on the Elizabethan, and newly secular English stage in the wake of the Reformation, Arden of Faversham employs what I call the Corpus Christi affect, a phenomenon from the outlawed medieval theatre, to play a trick on its staring and startled audience. My focus is the play's spectacle--a poisoned crucifix, a painting that kills at a glance, a prayer book, shorn of its leaves--spectacle that insistently points at and exploits anxieties that motivate the iconophobes and the iconoclasts. I work with Andrew Sofer's account of semiotic and phenomenological attitudes towards stage properties in my analysis of Arden's props and the characters that handle them. I argue that while Alice's blasphemy, rebellion, and felony appear to be contained and condemned by her death sentence, the play stages its own subversive act by asserting the corpse of her husband as potentially salvific--the very means by which Alice performs her spiritual redemption.

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Close to Home

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198846574.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 68-104

Author(s):

Alex Eric Hernandez

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Source Material ◽

Major Theme ◽

Crime Narratives ◽

The Creation ◽

And Performance ◽

True Crime ◽

Arden Of Faversham

This chapter explores many of the domestic elements that were central to the creation of bourgeois tragedy in Georgian Britain, focusing especially on George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) and his posthumous adaptation of Arden of Faversham (1759; with John Hoadly). The chapter begins by broadening the archive of the genre’s source material, situating its eighteenth-century repertoire alongside the true crime narratives it in many cases adapted, as well as early Stuart predecessors, Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), and Restoration she-tragedy. It thereby claims that the genre represents important advances in realism as it was practiced onstage that worked to exploit the intimacy of the home and stage during the period. This chapter also examines a major theme in contemporaneous theorizations of the genre by considering what it means for a play to “strike close to home,” linking that trope to changes in affect, aesthetics, and performance during the period.

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How Many Playwrights Wrote Arden of Faversham? The Samuel Rowley Connection

Notes and Queries ◽

10.1093/notesj/gjaa029 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 67 (2) ◽

pp. 223-230

Author(s):

MacDonald P Jackson

Keyword(s):

Arden Of Faversham

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Arden of Faversham

Shakespeare Survey ◽

10.1017/ccol0521256364.014 ◽

1983 ◽

pp. 121-134 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Alexander Leggatt

Keyword(s):

Arden Of Faversham

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Finding ‘anonymous’ in the digital archives: The problem of Arden of Faversham

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities ◽

10.1093/llc/fqy075 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (4) ◽

pp. 855-873 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Gary Taylor

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Data Driven ◽

Digital Archives ◽

Dramatic Works ◽

Commercial Theater ◽

Arden Of Faversham

AbstractThis investigation re-examines debates about the authorship of the play Arden of Faversham, first published (anonymously) in 1592, and sometimes attributed to Shakespeare, Kyd, or Marlowe. More generally, it seeks to explain why modern data-driven attribution methods, which have created consensus about the authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy and other seventeenth-century plays, have failed to produce consistent results for plays written for the London commercial theaters in the years up to 1594. It proposes that attribution problems in that period can be better understood if plays are tested against authorial canons that include non-dramatic as well as dramatic works, using algorithms based on the evidence of n-grams and collocations, which seem not to be genre-dependent. It tests a sample passage from Scene 10 of Arden against the digital canons of fifteen writers known or suspected to have been writing for the commercial theater in the period 1585–92, using primarily EEBO-TCP. All tests identify the author as the poet, translator, and playwright Thomas Watson (1555–92). These data do not establish Watson's authorship of the entire play but open several new lines of enquiry for Arden and other anonymous and collaborative early plays.

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