by Cassie Ash, Production Dramaturg
In 1551, in the small town of Faversham, Kent, a local businessman received a gift of land from his noble patron. He had married up, made wealthy friends in London, and now he controlled the coveted lands of Faversham Abbey, so things were looking good for Thomas Arden. Unfortunately, his style of business won him few friends, and his wife, Alice, began an affair with one Thomas Mosby. The Thomases shared one noble patron, but since Mosby started as a tailor, Arden especially disdained his upward mobility, having started out as a lawyer himself. For a while, Thomas Arden turned a blind eye to the trysting to maintain his in-laws’ powerful connections. In authorizing a new will leaving his entire estate to his wife, however, Arden also signed his death warrant: not more than two months passed before he did.
Alice conspired with her lover, her servants, and her neighbors to kill her husband; they enlisted the help of a local craftsman-cum-poison-dealer and two highway robbers. Arden survived three attempts on his life in Faversham, London, and the road between – somehow without increasing suspicion of impending doom – before being brutally murdered in his own home. An untimely snowfall left a trail of evidence from the body dump site that local law enforcement followed directly back to the crime scene. The conspirators were tried and executed, and the whole torrid affair found its way into public record through the Faversham Wardmote* Book and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles England, Scotland, and Ireland (Vol. 2, 2nd ed., 1587).
Almost forty years after the crime, sometime between 1587 and 1590, one or more playwrights adapted the story into Arden of Faversham.** A ballad retelling the story from Alice’s point of view was popular enough to appear in print in 1633. With no known performance history to indicate stage success, we might ask what made this particular crime so compelling. On one hand, we have its didactic appeal in chastising unfaithful wives, cautioning unwary husbands, and promising swift justice against wrongdoers; on the other, we have a cast of delightfully unsavory characters whose bumbling failures make us laugh right up until the moment they kill the comedy and the cuckold with a few sharp blows.
While much of its story is firmly rooted in the sixteenth century, the characters, themes, and power struggles in this play feel unsettlingly modern. Arden of Faversham offers recognizable archetypes: treacherous wife, self-centered husband, social-climbing lover, lovelorn servant, notorious villain, and disreputable artist. It broaches ideas of land ownership: destructive re-zoning, greedy landlords, and the displaced poor. It questions authority: personal, domestic, and civic. It has poisoned objects, slapstick comedy, crises of conscience, sex, gore, and just deserts. In brief: it has something for everyone.
The play itself poses interesting questions for scholars: who wrote it? why was this particular, provincial crime spotlit in Holinshed’s Chronicles? what made Alice’s story so compelling it inspired both a play and a popular ballad? Future blog posts will address questions like these. Meanwhile, Dan and his team are working hard to make sure the only question you leave the theatre mulling is ‘why, oh why, isn’t this play performed more?’.
Arden of Faversham runs April 2-18, 2015 at ATLAS Performing Arts Center. Buy Tickets Here!
*A ‘wardmote’ is the meeting of citizens of a ward (mote from moot, the assembly of people for judicial or legislative purposes), so by extension, a wardmote book is the official record of those meetings.
**The full 1592 title page reads: The Lamentable and True Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham in Kent. Who was most wickedly murdered, by the means of his disloyal and wanton wife, who for the love she bare to one Mosby, hired two desperate ruffians, Black Will and Shakebag, to kill him. Wherein is shewed the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman, the unsatiable desire of filthy lust and the shameful end of all murders.