Arden of Feversham

by Martin White (Editor)

New Mermaids are modernized and fully-annotated editions of classic English plays. Each volume

The playtext, in modern spelling, edited to the highest bibliographical and textual standards
Textual notes recording significant changes to the copytext and variant readings
Glossing notes explaining obscure words and word-play
Critical, contextual and staging notes
Photographs of productions where applicable
A full introduction which provides a critical account of the play, the staging conventions of the time and recent stage history; discusses authorship, date, sources and the text; and gives guidance for further reading.

Edited and updated by leading scholars and printed in a clear, easy-to-use format, New Mermaids offer invaluable guidance for actor, student, and theatre-goer alike.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Classics, Read For School, School, Fiction, College

144 pages, Paperback

First published November 18, 1982

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Reviews

[Autum · Rating 4 out of 5]

The drama is messy fr

[Issicratea · Rating 5 out of 5]

My initial inspiration to read this play was entirely serendipitous. I went to Faversham in Kent a few days ago—atmospheric place—and saw the house in which the murder the play dramatizes took place. Arden of Faversham also ties in well with some of my recent academic preoccupations (early modern crime and punishment in relation to gender, though in Italy rather than England). Then, as soon as I started reading up on the play on the web, I realized it was actually highly topical—the Royal Shakespeare Company is performing it in Stratford this year for the first time since 1982, and parts of it seem to be edging their way into the Shakespearian canon, largely on the basis of computerized linguistic analysis carried out in the last few years.

I’m glad chance led me to this play. I found it very intriguing, and I can see why the RSC is reviving it. It dramatizes a murder that took place in 1551, which seems to have exerted an extraordinary fascination over the English public for some decades to come and to have inspired quite a significant body of literature, between chronicles, ballads, and this play. The victim was Thomas Arden, a one-time mayor of Faversham; the culprits a motley crew of conspirators including Arden’s wife Alice; her lover, Mosby; a painter; a goldsmith; two servants in Mosby’s household; and two disgruntled ex-soldier hit men with the irresistible names of Black Will and Loosebag. Because some of the culprits were in Arden’s own household, the case was treated as “petty treason”—the domestic equivalent of political treason—and a special court was set up to try the murderers, who were all executed in various grisly ways.

The play, first published forty years after the crime, in 1592, and probably based on the lengthy account of the murder in Holinshed’s Chronicles, is a very dark piece. Apart from the moralizing invented character of Franklin, Arden’s friend, everyone is pretty tainted, from the jauntily feral hit men to the volatile, besotted Alice to Clarke the painter with his magnificent arsenal of poisonous portraits and crucifixes (which sadly never materialize on stage). Everyone is extraordinarily corrupt and corruptible, piling into the murder conspiracy with about as much deliberation and forethought that most of us put into accepting an invitation to a barbecue. Even Arden, the victim, is shown to be callous in his business dealings, though pitiful in his hapless love for his treacherous wife. The characters have quite a lot of complexity—not just Alice, Arden, and Mosby, but even relatively minor figures like Michael, the conscience-torn servant. I would think there would be a lot of meat here for a director; it’s possible to imagine all kinds of ways in which the central love triangle could play out on stage.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the authorship speculation when reading this play (apart from a young Shakespeare, the main big name suspects seem to be Marlowe and Kyd). As a layperson, I found the contention that Shakespeare wrote at least some of the central scenes in the play very plausible (there’s a good essay by Ros King setting out the arguments for this in the recent Oxford Handbook to Tudor Drama). The language is certainly wonderful at points, and there’s a stunningly complex and dramatic scene in this central segment between Alice and Mosby, which deepens their characterization—his, in particular—quite vertiginously, and which I imagine could be very powerful on stage. If Shakespeare was involved in the authorship—and presumably the acting—of the play, he certainly had a sense of humor (just in case we doubted it). The name of the second professional assassin, Loosebag in the historical sources, becomes Shakebag in Arden of Faversham. The first retains his original name, Black Will.

[paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

thought it was really funny how he did not realise that literally everyone tried to kill him, and proceeded to invite the killers into his home, believe it was a prank when they first tried and failed to murder him, and then was still surprised when they attempted it a second time...

[ada ☽ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Black Will has got to stop talking about how many people he‘s violently killed and then failing in the most absurd ways possible to finish is job…

[The Nutmeg · Rating 3 out of 5]

...I don't think Shakespeare wrote this, guys.

If he did, it was either 1) when he was having an off day, or 2) before he knew how to write genius plays. (And I mean, genius has to start somewhere.)

I just thought it was kinda...simplistic.

(Watch me come away from my next class session with my head spinning at the complexity and subtlety of the drama. XD)

[Megan McElhone · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s giving a soap opera plot but with a bit more innuendo and a lot more arguments about class

[Trevor Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was floored by how modern this play felt. It somehow mixed humor with domestic tragedy and murder all while keeping the plot interesting. I went into the play knowing how it ends, but the author played with this expectation cleverly. Arden’s murder was infamous in England, so I suspect that any Renaissance audience member would have the same foreknowledge I had. The author targeted this by baiting the reader into thinking every one of the murder schemes would be the real one, only for each to fail at the critical moment. We laugh at the murderers’ staggering incompetence and stop thinking about the gravity of the situation. Then when the real murder happens at the climax the audience is stunned. Not only is the execution more violent than any I have seen in other Renaissance plays, the final blow comes from Arden’s wife, who seemed like only a mastermind in the background to that point. I am not often entertained by these sorts of old plays, but this one was gripping. I hope it gets a modern film adaptation someday.
10/10

[sj · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for uni, honestly very enjoyable and easy to follow. violent in a fun way, someone says “stab him till his flesh be as a sieve” - fun image

[meow meow]

done nothing today but sit and read this in one go bless up

[Lucy Barnhouse]

Sublimely weird, full of religious symbolism, political intrigues, significant London neighborhoods, and inefficient murderers.

[jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

what a clusterfuck. an enjoyable read, so hopefully the paper i have to write about it won’t be too long😬

[Tiernan Dunagan]

Second time I've actually done the reading. Kind of... Ok so I watched the play on YouTube and read along. Like an audio book. Sure.. it counts...

[.]

I’m really unsure how to rate this, as I definitely enjoyed it but there are a lot of issues I have with it. In my university class it’s getting tiring to read all this work that treats women as trash.

[Kemi · Rating 3 out of 5]

i hate reading for my degree but this was actually bearable 😁
i support womens rights and (some) womens wrongs!!

[Florence Ridley · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Mosby has no haters I am dead.

[Yorgos · Rating 3 out of 5]

A readable but not particularly inspiring true-crime play, notable mostly for being the first domestic tragedy and possible connections to Shakespeare. Fun enough; 3/5.

Dramaturgically (warning spoilers these paragraphs): This play is very frustrating. First we sit through a scene where the conspirators plot and connive; then theoretically It's On (!!!), and the Platonic ideal of an audience clutches at rosaries in horror, and hopes Arden gets away, and then (!!!) Arden gets away; this happens five or six times. Compounding this structural difficulty is that, at the time, everyone knew the circumstances of his death, and all modern readers have seen the woodcut inscription showing that he died in his house with his wife there, so everyone already knows for five out of the six tries that it's not going to work. This is a problem for the author(s);
Q: Do they address this adequately?
A: No. The effect is that this play is very frustrating. I didn't necessarily want evil to triumph, but the evil in this play is so incompetent I just wanted them to get it over with already. Even critics I consider WAY over-sympathetic to this play admit that this is a problem--I'll just quote Tom Lockwood introducing the New Mermaids edition:

But if Arden must die, and an audience must know this, how then can the play generate the tension and suspense necessary to draw in that audience? [...] Arden of Feversham anticipates the technical solution employed in Hamlet in the ongoing commentary of its characters on Arden's increasingly unlikely survival. [...] the play, conscious of its slowness, itself voices and anticipates what many audiences feel being performed; as M.C. Bradbook writes, they can become 'positively irritated that [Alice] should not succeed' in her wishes. For it is not, of course, that the play cannot kill Arden, but that it has the formal daring to delay his death

I disagree. In the first place, just because Arden's characters anticipate and echo the irritation of the audience does not mean that it has actually dealt with the fact that the audience is irritated by the play. I had this problem with Logicomix, which anticipated objections to itself, and then put those objections in the comic too. This felt and feels like writing "sorry lol this essay sux i wrote it last night" at the top of an assignment you're submitting--Arden of Feversham is so irritating even its characters are annoyed! This problem is likewise not solved by the play's simply being formally unusual (or "innovative," depending on how generous you're feeling). I should also say that Lockwood looses me with this Hamlet comparison which I can't help feeling is a little bold. He quotes Empson's analysis of how Shakespeare dealt with the problem of predictability and frustration, but even if you think Hamlet's continual discussion with the audience about his hesitation is what makes the play dramaturgically viable, it's still a serious stretch to say that this play pulls off or has even attempted to employ such a strategy.


Language: The play's language is interesting if not incredible. Probably its best feature is that it features a lot of "straight talk." This is a play mostly in verse, but the characters speak with a rare directness, especially the villains "Give me the money and I'll stab him as he stands pissing against a wall, but I'll kill him" [II.94-5]. Every now and then, the play attempts some high verse, which I was impressed by exactly one instances: "Black night hath hid the pleasurers of the day, / And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth / And with the lack fold of her cloudy robe / Obscures us from the eyesight of the world / In which sweet silence such as we [i.e. cutthroats] triumph" [V.1-5]. Lockwood & I & I'm sure anyone reading this will notice that sometimes this play has characters start scenes with lines that are completely out of character for the sake of setting the mood--Arden gives a similar little ditty on daylight (p. 70).

Maybe the best feature of the language and of the play as a whole is the physicality and bodily-ness of its language, especially its violent language. Scene 1 (the longest and by far best (IMO) scene of the play, (and not the one Shakespeare might have written)), is very rich with this stuff (following quotes all sc. 1):
1. "that injurious ribald [...] Shall on the bed which he thinks to defile / See his dissevered joints and sinews torn, / Whilst on the planchers [planks] pants his weary body, / Smeared in the channels of his lustful blood."
2. "My marrow-prying neighbors blab, / Hinder our meetings when we would confer.
3. "The next time that I take thee near my house, / Instead of legs I'll make thee crawl on stumps
4. "Arden, now thou has belched and committed / The rancorous venom of thy mis-swoll'n heart"
&c. This continues through the book but Scene 1 has the best of it, sometimes mixing with money imagery: "For every drop of his detested blood / I would have crammed in angels [coins] in thy fist" [XIV.67-68] I should also mention the play's best line: "Then stab him till his flesh be like a sieve" [XIV.119].

I've seen critics mine this play good for Alice's "language of mutability;" for the dining-based relationship between Alice & Arden & all the implications this has on the domestic life of the period & the domestic drama of the period; or for its language of land and exchange; for early Capitalism & the internalization of the market and so on and so on. If the play is amenable to this kind of analysis, that's great, but it doesn't overcome the fundamental problem that this play is just not all that good. If all you read was criticism of this play you'd think it was a masterpiece, but it's not.


Authorship: I've had a look at major arguments on both sides and I'm just not convinced there's good enough evidence for definitive attribution of even the quarrel scene to Shakespeare. Parts of Macdonald P. Jackson's 'Shakespeare and the Quarrel Scene' read like an exercise in a statistics textbook on how NOT to do experimental design. He also insinuates that the scene is good, which I disagree with, and that Arden's dream is about as good as Clarence's dream in Richard III ("Arden's unconscious sends him messages that his conscious mind has suppressed"), which I do not feel guilty for laughing at publicly here. I don't want this review to be too statsy but the numeric evidence reminds me of nothing so much as the paleographical "evidence" for attribution of the D hand in the Thomas More manuscript to Shakespeare--shaky. Much more convincing is the literary evidence, maybe the best piece of which is that the quarrel scene contains the only use of a "rough winds do shake the darling buds of may" image outside of Shakespeare (who uses it frequently) according to Caroline Spurgeon. Other figures of speech and stylistic quirks very common in Shakespeare & very rare outside of him exist here, and some speeches are paralleled closely in other known early shakespeare plays &c &c. But I don't think a burden of proof has been met here. Personally I also just don't want it to be true: the verse is as stiff as Elizabeth Cary's, and it would mean that the Shakespeare who wrote that Othello would "renounce his baptism, / All seals and symbols of redeemed sin, / His soul is so enfetter'd to her love" also wrote "I will do penance for offending thee / And burn this prayerbook, where I here use / The holy word that had converted me. / See, Mosby, I will tear away the leaves / And all the leaves, and in this golden cover / Shall thy sweet phrases and thy letters dwell." Blugh.


Anyway it was a fun read I guess.

[Resa · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enchanting 17th century novel about a clueless husband, a conniving wife, and buffoonish villains.

The devilish wife is named Alice and she will stop at nothing in order to get her innocent husband, Arden, killed.

This simple play will make you enraged at Alice for her ridiculous changing moods. Alice is a reincarnation of Lady Macbeth and has the same enormous power on you. (There is a debate that this play was written by Shakespeare, and I agree, if only for the strong similarities between the two characters.)

You will definitely enjoy this wonderful play!

[Christy]

Aside from Macbeth, my favorite play! Methinks a woman wrote it; hence, the author's name: anonymous.

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing super special about this, plot was a bit crazy. Just a bit dull in general though.

[Fred · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this play! I wasn’t expecting to - it was a very pleasant surprise. It is based on the real-life murder of Thomas Arden, whose house still exists in Kent. He was murdered by his wife, Alice Arden, and her lover, Mosby - although, as chronicled in this play, there are a whole host of people trying to kill him who are either being paid by Alice or out for motives of their own. The real-life Alice Arden was 16 years old when she married the 40-year-old Arden…and as sympathetic as Arden is in moments in the play, the author makes clear how ruthless he was with land-hoarding too. This play makes us wonder if Alice was rather vulnerable…she ends the play extremely downtrodden and we almost sympathise more with her than Arden.

The premise in one go: the wife and her lover plot to kill the husband. Various comic attempts to kill him fail. Finally, he does die - and they all get executed.

What struck me was how funny this play was - for the first three quarters anyway! Alice hires two assassins, Black Will and Shakebag, who are a more outrageous version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are so funny - Scene 12 in particular (when they get lost in the fog) exemplifies this. A lot of this play is not very tragic. It is a largely episodic journey through various failed attempts to kill Arden, and these attempts are more farcical and comic than they are sinister. At one point, as said, they miss him purely due to fog. Another time, Black Will has debris fall on his head from a bedroom above just as he’s about to strike Arden in the street. And another painter - Clarke - who is a vaguely disgruntled tenant who Alice manages to get onside - he suggests at one point giving Arden a painting with poisonous materials on it! Like, how the hell was that going to work? (It’s a deliberately stupid method.)

And THEN - after these various Blackadder-esque shenanigans come to an end - Arden does eventually die. It hits the fan. Alice immediately realises what she has done. She symbolically tries and fails to clean the blood. She feels immediately overwhelmed and sobs at her crime. All the conspirators are arrested - and Black Will and Shakebag get one scene each before the play’s end. In these scenes (in Shakebag’s in particular!), we realise just how ruthless they were. It’s no longer funny, what they’ve been up to. It’s haunting and guilt-tripping - as we have been complicit in it earlier by finding it hilarious. But all this hilarity has led to a man’s death.

The overall power of this play lies not just in its ambiguity (though it has that in abundance - do we sympathise with Arden or Alice? Alice is vulnerable and in a terrible, power-unbalanced marriage. Arden is a ruthless dealer of land…but has moments of kindness, and is also a gullible prat. He is more pitiable than villainous) - but also in its shocking ending. For as long as the murder attempts didn’t actually kill him, the play can afford to be farcical and lighthearted. Then reality hits us like a brick wall once Arden does die. His death catapults the play out of the comic realm and squarely into the tragic.

This forms an ironic link with Clarke’s stupid painting-murder-method earlier. The idea that looking at stuff (the spectacle of art) is dangerous. Our viewing of and enjoyment in the farcical theatre has led to these shenanigans going too far - and they have ended in catastrophe. That is this play’s power. It’s grand. I had no idea it would be this interesting.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written (probably) by Thomas Watson with maybe some scenes by the young tyro William Shakespeare, Arden of Feversham is an interesting "domestic tragedy" (a genre that Shakespeare, if it is him, didn't really do again, unless you count Othello) which is largely comic for Acts 1-4, then builds up to the (over-fast) murder and retribution in the last Act.

Alice, Arden's wife, is an early version of the femme fatale (reminiscent of The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Last Seduction, Malice, To Die For, etc), who gets simply too many people involved in a convoluted (and slightly mad) murder plot, then worries why it all goes wrong. She is a pretty good, and I suspect foxy if played right, version of the femme, and one can see how she managed to control the (frankly rather dumb) men around her. Only Franklin, her husband's "best friend", really sees through her.

Arden himself is an anomaly: loved by certain people, but the politics of the time (it is specifically set early in Edward VI's reign, and Arden is the beneficiary of the Lord Protector Somerset's anti-monastic redistribution) means that he has pissed off, and dispossessed, a lot of local smaller tenant farmers, some of whom are happy just to curse him, but more are willing to murder him for revenge or a smallholding.

As I say, after a comedic failure repeatedly to murder Arden, the last Act gets violent, and then Alice gets all Lady Macbethy incredibly quickly, and moves from femme fatale to murderer to mad lady to repentant Christian in the course of three short scenes.

Is this the work of a young Shakespeare? Bits of it (lines, speeches, moments) have a real Shakespeare feel, and Gary Taylor (no less) thinks about a third of it might be by young William, but very few whole scenes feel like Shakespeare. It's certainly better than The Two Gentlemen of Verona (but then, what isn't?), and I get the impression Shakey might have done a rewrite on some bits. I'm not an expert, however, and relying on my "feel" doesn't get us there.

I'd love to see a show of this: a Postman Rings Twice/Body Heat show: intense, hot, stalky. That'd do it.

[Monty Ashley]

Oxford says that Shakespeare may have written scenes four through seven, or possibly four through eight. They might be right. The writing is much fancier in those scenes.

The play itself is cheerfully tawdry. Arden's wife wants to get rid of him so she can be with this other guy, and they hire two scumbags named Black Will and Shakebag to kill him. Then a series of coincidences repeatedly save Arden from being murdered, and a lot of comedy ensues. I assume. I mean, I guess it could be played straight, but it seemed to me while reading it that these two fell down a lot, which is usually a sign of a comedy.

There are a couple of other accomplices, and eventually Arden does get murdered and everyone involved immediately gets caught and executed. It's based on a real story, which is fun, but the basic concept of somebody accidentally avoiding being murdered repeatedly probably predates this play.

I think this was pretty popular in its day (1591), although I can't find the source of that belief at the moment. It allegedly invented the genres of both "domestic tragedy" and "black comedy," depending on who you ask, so that's pretty impressive no matter who wrote it.

I enjoyed it, but it didn't really feel Shakespearean most of the time. Still, it's nice to check in on the other plays of the era.

[Katie Greenwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd never heard of this play before seeing it on my reading list. Whilst I liked it, it still isn't my favourite. I've always had an issue fully enjoying plays. The only one I really like is Macbeth. I think it's partially to do with having to read all the stage directions and then if they're from around the Shakespeare era I need to check definitions of words every few lines.

I liked the story of this and found it easy to follow. I enjoyed certain characters in this too. It's like a love pentagram with different people wanting to switch partners and going about it via murder and backhanded means. I felt so sorry for The Arden of Faversham. Everyone had it in for him.

Supposedly the author of this play was never named but many have theorised that it's one of Shakespeares.

www.a-novel-idea.co.uk

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anonymous play has been attributed, on little or no evidence, to many of the major dramatists of the time, including Shakespeare. It is difficult to confirm or rule out any of the suggestions because the subject matter is so different from the earlier plays, resembling more the Jacobean than the Elizabethan drama. It is a domestic tragedy about the conspiracy of a wife and her lover to murder her husband, and takes place at a lower bourgeois level of society, with no kings, nobles, or mythical personages involved. The play ends in a kind of epilogue with the capture and punishment of everyone involved. It was in three of the four anthologies I am working through, Kinney, Fraser and Rabkin, and the Works of the British Dramatists; it is also on the Elizabethan Drama website, and in a collection I downloaded of Shakespeare apocrypha. I had not read it previously.

[mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for class

Arden of Faversham is an Elizabethan play that tells the story of a man's tragic murder, which is based on a true crime that happened during this time.

The plot of the book follows Alice Arden's desire to be with her lover, Mosby, and the lengths she will go through to get rid of her husband, Thomas Arden. The book also has a lot of suspense, betrayal, and some darkly humorous moments as the characters’ murder attempts go hilariously wrong...

The book also focuses on ordinary people, rather than kings or nobles, which was rare for its time. The characters are flawed and relatable, showing how jealousy and greed can destroy lives. It’s a fascinating read that can be used to look at human desires and mistakes.

[Ilia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An Elizabethan erotic thriller, made extra spicy because based on a true story of a wife murdering her husband. A Coen Brothers element comes in through the excellently named ruffians Shakebag and Black Will, who spend the majority of the runtime comically trying and failing to do the deed. That is intercut with the quarrels between Alice and her lover Mosby, as they waver over their devotion to each other and their commitment to the murder plot. That is the play at its most psychologically acute, providing an interesting insight into contemporary expectations of marriage, gender roles and social class.

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid play, especially when considered outside of the greats of the period. The movement of the tragic action is definitely different than the more known tragedies of the period, especially in terms of pacing. The play does lack in its portrayals of things beyond character, where other plays in the period succeed in conveying settings and atmospheres. Since the play hones in on the characters, the characters are diverse and dynamic, with each main character really existing in the drama.

[Jack Crouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

arden's wife alice, having an affair with mosby, decides to convince and encourage most of the play's characters to kill arden, who, through random lucky circumstances, repeatedly avoids death until an unlucky dice roll. it's written in unusually plain (it's thought to be a reported text, reconstructed from memory) but sometimes very effective language and focuses on the 3 main characters' psychologies. lots of attention is given to characters' social status. i recommend it.

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting 16C play based off a local legend in Kent. The characters are quite funny and unpredictable of life. Black Will is particularly memorable:

"For a cross word of a tapster I have pierced I've barrel after another with my dagger and held him by the ears till all his beer hath run out".

What a scoundrel.

The drama is very straightforward and unadorned. I can imagine that it was very entertaining and thrilling at the time, especially since it's based off a true case in living memory.

[Emory Harty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was immediately captivated by Alice’s badassery in trying to kill off her husband so she can live in peace with her lover (never liked Arden anyway), but then it just got so repetitive with everyone trying to kill him and then missing their opportunity or someone showing up and catching them out or people chickening out and ruining the plan… so that by the end I was just plain bored by it all. Nothing really sticks out from this play and I’m sure I’ll forget the entire plot by next week.