Arden of Faversham 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 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. It has also been suggested that it may be the work of Thomas Watson with contributions by Shakespeare.
Main characters
Thomas Arden: Thomas Arden was a self-made man, he was formerly 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.
Franklin: Thomas Arden's best friend and traveling companion. On the road from London, he begins telling a tale of female infidelity.
Text, history and authorship
The play was printed anonymously in three quarto editions during the period, in 1592, 1599, and 1633. 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 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. 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, favored 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: whether the text was generated largely by a single writer; and 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 having been written by Shakespeare. 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. 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. 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 in Evenley, Rutland.
In 2010 the play was performed at the Rose Theatre in Bankside by Em-lou productions. Directed by Peter Darney, it was its first London run for a decade.
In 2015, the play received a new interpretation by the Hudson Shakespeare Company of New Jersey as it was moved from the 1500s to the 1950s as part of their Shakespeare in the parks series. The production was notable for matching the farcical plot with 1950s pop songs by Sinatra, Elvis, Patsy Cline, and Fats Domino and 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, 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 as a morally and deeply corrupt society.
In 2019, the play was performed on BBC Radio 3 with Ewan Bailey as Arden and Amaka Okafor as Alice, adapted and directed by Alison Hindell.
