The literature of crime and criminals in early modern England takes several forms. The main form is the printed pamphlet, typically a short quarto publication of eight to sixteen pages, costing a few pence. Another form is the broadside ballad, usually anonymous, printed on one side of a single sheet and accompanied by an image and an indication of the music to be used. A selection of plays about real-life domestic crime, including the well-known Arden of Faversham, attributed variously in recent years to Shakespeare and Kyd, have also survived. While they are few in number, and less topical than the pamphlets, they have attracted more critical attention than the other forms. The crimes featured in this writing—often involving murder but also including witchcraft, and disproportionally focused on women—were chosen for their sensational value and were in no way representative of the reality of crime in the period. While some pamphlet writers made claims for the truth of their accounts, and rival accounts of the more notable crimes using differing details did appear, the aims and social functions of this writing had less to do with providing information than with reinforcing the authority of the state, its laws, and its Protestant religion. Hence, many accounts of crimes, particularly in the earlier part of the period, are shaped by the need to demonstrate the role of providence in bringing about the discovery of the perpetrators. Crime, conflated with sin, was conceptualized as a moral rather than a social problem; criminals were often regarded as acting under the irresistible compulsion of the devil and once found guilty of a single lapse proceeding inevitably toward actions that damned them to hell. The idea of crime as a secular problem in which social and economic forces had a role to play was beginning to develop and becomes more evident in writing of the later 17th century. Certain crimes emerged as iconic in the period, particularly involving women who killed, and featured in a number of different print forms, for example, the murders by their wives of Arden of Faversham, Page of Plymouth, and George Sanders. The law differentiated by gender in cases of spousal murder; husband-murder was categorized as petty treason, hence punishable by burning at the stake for the wife, while wife-killing (much commoner in actuality but less prominent in literature) was simply homicide. Early modern crime writing largely reflects the structures of power in the society that produced it; evidence of questioning or challenging accepted attitudes toward issues of criminal responsibility does exist, but the era of pioneering journalism was a long way ahead.