Arden of Faversham

Summary

We do not know who wrote Arden of Faversham, but we know that it belongs to the late 1580s or early 1590s, a period when new and often ambitious talents were appearing and when dramatic genres were being self-consciously shaped and reshaped. It was a time when playwrights were staking out their territory, as Marlowe does in his Prologue to Tamburlaine the Great, a play roughly contemporary with Arden:

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

We’ll lead you to the stately tent of War,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms

And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

View but his picture in this tragic glass

And then applaud his fortunes as you please.

The play is going to be exotic, heroic, exalted in language, tragic in dignity. The author of Arden of Faversham gives us a similar statement, staking out a very different territory:

Gentlemen, we hope you’ll pardon this naked tragedy

Wherein no filèd points are foisted in

For simple truth is gracious enough

To make it gracious to the ear or eye;

And needs no other points of glozing stuff.

(Epilogue, 14–18)