Arden of Faversham - Text, History and Authorship

Text, History and Authorship

The play was printed anonymously in three quarto editions during the period, in 1592 (Q1), 1599 (Q2), and 1633 (Q3). 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 (An Exact and perfect Catalogue of all Plaies that were ever printed) unlikely assigned to be an interlude by Richard Bernard, while on the line above it the comedy The Arraignment of Paris, performed in 1581, was similarly unlikely a tragedy assigned to Shakespeare. It has been argued that the attributions were shifted up one line, and that Shakespeare was the intended claimed author of Arden.

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 claimed for Shakespeare, for instance Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Saintsbury, and the nineteenth-century critics Charles Knight and Nicolaus Delius. These claims may be rejected as impressionistic, although it is not inconceivable that Shakespeare had a hand in certain scenes.

There are two circumstantial connections with Shakespeare that hint at his involvement either as an actor or a writer. First, the Lord Chamberlain's players, the company with whom Shakespeare performed, staged the play at least once. It has been speculated that Shakespeare might have taken the part of Shakebags, who, atypically for a ruffian, often speaks in verse rather than prose. Second, the play's publisher, Edward White, also published an edition of Titus Andronicus. However, it has also been jokingly suggested that as the two murderers are called Black Will and Shakebag it is more likely to have been written by some enemy of Shakespeare's. Shakebags is only named briefly in the immediate source of the tale, Raphael Holinshed's account of the real-life crime of 1551, and it seems that the name of the original counterpart, taken from the Faversham court records, was actually "Loosebag". According to Penny McCarthy, researcher of literary patronage, it was Holinshed who transformed the story to include allusions to Shakespeare, as a gesture to his patron, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Dudley was also patron to the actor, Shakespeare. Holinshed selected the case, from the many murders available as subject matter, because the name of the victim was Arden and Shakespeare's mother's family name was Arden; the change of name from "Loosebag" To "Shakebags" was a more overt reference. However it was the anonymous playwright who gave Shakebags the bombastic verse to speak and arranged for his flight to Southwark, London's theatrical district.

Christopher Marlowe has also been advanced; the strong emotions of the characters and the lack of a strongly marked 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 and H. Dugdale Sykes, is Thomas Kyd, who at one time shared rooms with Marlowe. However, without more knowledge of the text's history than is possessed at present, all ascriptions are bound to be speculative in nature.

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.

However, in 2008, Brian Vickers reported in the Times Literary Supplement that his own computer analysis, based on recurring collocations, indicates Thomas Kyd as the likely author.

In 2013 the RSC will publish an edition attributing the play, in part, to William Shakespeare.