Plot
The playwright followed the account in Holinshed's Chronicle fairly closely, not only in the sequence of events leading to the murder and trial, but also in the unusually complex thematics of the event. From the first scene, Arden is a markedly ambiguous character; he is shown to be intemperate, domineering, and deceitful, having just in essence stolen a piece of land from a fellow townsman named Greene. These touches of characterization seem to clash with the play's stated intent (itself perhaps an attempt to dupe the omnipresent official censors), announced on the title page as a didactic play which is to show "the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman, the insatiable desire of filthy lust, and the shameful end of all murderers"; they do, however, reveal an ability to create complex characters decidedly above the norm for anonymous Elizabethan playwrights. A similar complexity is found in the murder scenes, which combine genuine tension, for instance in the assassins' attempts to find Arden on a foggy night, with almost bathetic humor, in their incompetent attempts on the man's life.
Read more about this topic: Arden Of Faversham
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (17911872)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobodys previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (18121870)