by Cassie Ash, Production Dramaturg
The literary afterlives of Thomas Arden’s death include local legal records, Holinshed’s Chronicles, the play currently showing at the Atlas, a broadside ballad, and a 1730s play also called Arden of Feversham [sic].
Strangely enough, despite knowing the real names of the characters involved in the original crime, a veil has fallen over the creator of each of its performative afterlives. The authorship of the Renaissance play is a well-known academic debate; the broadside ballad was almost certainly written decades before its extant 1633, unattributed publication date; the 18th century play is attributed to George Lillo, but only performed and published posthumously, with likely alterations (or, possibly, entirely adapted) by John Hoadly. For our purposes, the Lillo play is mostly interesting for the costumes in my last post, so let’s focus on the ballad.
Woodcut from ‘The Complaint and Lamentation…’ STC 732.
Essentially, the ballad’s music became the base for a series of early modern cover songs. Only instead of reworking the melody of a popular song, troubadour news-mongers were writing new lyrics to an old tune. Ballads were an accessible and cheap form of infotainment, performed ‘in the streets by those who hawked them […] consumed by those with neither spending money nor reading skills’ (Dolan 7). ‘Fortune my Foe’ experienced a vogue in the 1590s which produced laments from two husband-killers: Alice Arden and one Mistress Page of Plymouth; another for Anne Wallens appeared in 1616. (In time for this Brave Spirits production, Zach Roberts* inverted early modern practice and composed a new setting for Mistress Arden’s lamentation. More below!)A ballad titled ‘The complaint and lamentation of Mistress Arden of Faversham in Kent, who for the love of one Mosbie, hired certain ruffians and villains most cruelly to murder her husband; with the fatal end of her and her associates. To the tune of, Fortune my Foe’ was printed in 1633. That tune was well known since at least the late 1580s – around the time Arden was written and printed. Bits of the original lyrics and the melody were sung, whistled, parodied, and alluded to in plays by Beaumont, Brome, Fletcher, Jonson, Samuel Rowley/Dekker/Day, and Shirley (Simpson 228-9). ‘Fortune My Foe’ was often ‘coupled with solemn or lugubrious accounts of murder, natural disasters, warnings to the impious, deathbed confessions, and the like’ (ibid. 225).
The Faversham and Plymouth murders are similar, in that an unhappy wife enlists the help of at least one other man to murder her husband. Both succeed with their crimes, both proceed to suffer the full might of the law. Their most significant shared trait is that the ballads are written in the voice of the dead. Frances Dolan argues that the threat of imitation of, or merest hint of approval for the treasonous actions of these women was so dangerous, their stories could only be told after their executions (49). Sure, the ballads mention the reasons for the murder, and even report on the methods, but they do so only with the clearest possible tone of apology and regret. The listener is free to be entertained without needing to do any critical thinking on their own: obviously the ladies were in the wrong, and they were justly punished, and in hindsight everyone can see where things went awry.
A play, however, has more flexibility in its moralizing: ‘it can represent petty treason without subverting its own purposes and conventions. It does not need, therefore, to present its murderous wives as safely dead or to retreat from the contradiction that they embody’ (ibid. 51). While we’re pretty sure none of you will be deviously inspired after watching the Brave Spirits Arden of Faversham, we do hope you’re be entertained, and consider the many implications of keeping such a story alive.
Support this (and a future) production through our Indiegogo campaign! Any donation at or above $10 rewards you with a free download of Zach Robert’s ballad cover mentioned above.
Check out our trailer on Youtube, where you can hear a preview of Zach Robert’s ballad.
And come see us live and in person at Atlas! Show tonight at 8pm; more performances next weekend!
Dolan, Frances E. Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press, 1994.
Simpson, Claude M. The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers U Press, 1966.
*Produced and Arranged by Zach Roberts
Vocals – Carolyn Kashner
Drums – Mike McCollough
Keyboard – Zach Roberts
Audio Engineer – Damian Herring of Subterranean Watchtower Studios