by Kelly Elliott, Contributing blogger
Title Page from The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, second edition, vol. 3
I used to be a big Law and Order fan. One of the components of the show that always titillated me was that it advertised itself as showing crimes that were ripped from the headlines. It was thrilling and scary to know that the dramatization I was watching on TV was very close to what happened in real life. I suppose I wasn’t alone in this feeling since Law and Order was on the air for twenty years and produced many spin-off series based on the same premise of using real life crime to create televised drama. I suspect that early modern English audiences also wished to be entertained by stories of scandalous true crime scenarios if we use the story of Thomas Arden’s death as an example.
The Faversham murder is outlined in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, second edition. Holinshed’s second edition was printed in 1587, thirty-six years after Arden’s murder and only a few years before scholars think the play Arden of Faversham was written and performed. Both the first edition (printed in 1577) and the second editions of Chronicles were a collaboration between many authors, both Protestant and Catholic, which allowed for a multi-focused description of English, Scottish, and Irish history at that time. The second edition included revisions and updates including the Faversham murder. The historical accuracy of the Chronicles is questioned, but we do know that many Elizabethan authors used this text as a source material for artistic works including Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, William Shakespeare, and the unknown author(s) of Arden of Faversham.
The house where Thomas Arden lived and died.
Why the Faversham murder was included in the second edition and not the first is unknown; why it was included at all is also unknown. One reason could be that it was topical to the time Holinshed and his team edited the second edition. In his introduction to the New Mermaids revised edition of Arden, Tom Lockwood speculates that social and political events happening in the 1580s renewed an interest in an already fascinating story – one that still would have been in living memory for some Londoners. He sees parallels between the early modern English idea that a man’s home was his castle and the events in the crime and, therefore, the play. Arden’s ability to rule his particular castle is questionable: he usurps lands belonging to his neighbors, he is unable to govern his wife and servants, and his inaction allows another to overthrow his position as head of the house. All of these actions lead his neighbors, his wife, her lover, and his servants to attempt his assassination. When you look at these events through a larger political lens, more possible parallels appear. The punishment for murder of a man by wife or servant (considered petty treason) at that time had a similar punishment to a man or woman committing high treason against a sovereign – the wife/woman was burned alive and the servant/man was hanged. If they had committed high treason, they also would have been quartered. Lockwood compares Arden to the historical plays popular in the 1590s, such as Shakespeare’s Richard III or Henry V, because both deal with issues of rule, legitimacy, and national identity: “the family could stand as an image of the nation as a whole, in which image transgression of its structures was severely punished” (xv). Instead of looking to the distant past to make sense of their present, Elizabethan audiences in the 1590s might have turned to more recent events to explain their anxieties about their country. This anxiety may also explain why Holinshed felt this particular crime should be included in the second edition of Chronicles.
Between the popularity of the history plays and Arden of Faversham, Elizabethan audiences seemed to seek something from their entertainment. Whether it was comfort and reassurance or thrills and scares we can’t know for sure. However, the wish to experience history through entertainment mediums seems to be something we have in common with the Elizabethans. And, while I’m not an expert on the sociological implications of movies and television productions that are based on real life events, I suspect that, like Arden, the true historical event being portrayed reflects on current occurrences somehow. Finding similarities between themes in plays written over four hundred years ago and current social concerns is an exercise that many scholars and theatre practitioners like to do; I wonder what connections Brave Spirits audiences will make between this production of Arden of Faversham and today’s societal and political anxieties.
Arden of Faversham runs April 2-18, 2015 at ATLAS Performing Arts Center. Buy Tickets Here!
Lockwood, Tom. “Introduction.” Arden of Faversham. Unknown. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2007. vii-xxx. Print.
*** For more information on Holinshed’s Chronicles visit The Holinshed Project (http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/)