Arden of Faversham, an early true-crime murder farce - Oaths are words, and words is wind, / And wind is mutable.

Arden of Faversham (c. 1591, pub. 1592) is a true-crime play, a dramatization of a famous forty-year-old murder case.  An adulterous wife, Alice, and her boyfriend hire professional killers to off her wealthy husband.  For some reason a detailed account of this murder is included in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577 / 1587), the same some work of English history that Shakespeare and all the other playwrights were looting for material for history plays, which are also full of amazing murders but of kings.  Arden was just a prominent citizen, so this is a unique example of a genre that we, or some of us, still love today.

The first thing I see in the New Mermaids edition, for example, is the actual murder house, which stands today.  How exciting!

Arden’s House today.  Arden was murdered in the ground-floor room in the centre of the photograph.  The photo was taken by the editor of the book, Martin White.

I was delighted to find that Arden is also an early example of another still-popular genre, the dark comedy about incompetent criminals:

Then SHAKEBAG falls into a ditch

SHAKEBAG: Help, Will, help!  I am almost drowned.  (Scene xii, the Arden text has scenes but no acts)

The hired killers, and this is right out of the chronicles, are Black Will and Shakebag.  The murder plot is drawn out to feature-length by their bad luck and idiocy.  There are actually two plotlines aiming at Arden’s murder – Alice has backup plans – but everyone involved is an idiot.

The play is a farce of the kind we know and love in films like Fargo (Coen, 1996), also a “true story” as we know because the opening titles say so, and why would they lie, where the criminals bumble and someone ends up in the woodchipper.  A big difference in Arden is that the mass slaughter of the characters is mostly offstage and at the hands of the executioner.

This is not so far from a modern screenplay:

GREENE:  Will you two kill him?  Here’s the angels down,

And I will lay the platform of his death.

BLACK WILL:  Plat me no platforms!  Give me the money and I’ll stab him as he stands pissing against a wall, but I’ll kill him.  (ii)

A few lines later Black Will wishes that hitman were a recognized profession.  “I should be warden of the company.”  He is in prose here, but the killers can also be lyrical.

SHAKEBAG:  Black night hath hid the pleasures of the day,

And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth

And with the black fold of her cloudy robe

Obscures us from the eyesight of the world,

In which sweet silence such as we triumph.  (v)

Arden would be entertaining in prose, but a number of poetic passages are scattered around.  This soliloquy has gotten a lot of attention (Mosby is the scheming boyfriend):

MOSBY: Disturbed thoughts drive me from company

And dries my marrow with their watchfulness.

Continual trouble of my moody brain

Feebles my body by excess of drink

And nips me as the bitter north-east wind

Doth check the tender blossoms in the spring.

Well fares the man, howe’er his cates do taste,

That tables not with foul suspicion;

And he but pines amongst his delicates

Whose troubled mind is stuffed with discontent.  (viii)

And so on, becoming increasing devious as the speech proceeds.  With no evidence besides the text, Arden of Faversham has been attributed to everyone, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and others; sometimes, more plausibly, just this scene, or speech, is given to Shakespeare or Marlowe.  It has metaphorical language and surprising verbs and the kind of “Machiavellian” rhetoric I associate with Barabas and Richard III.  So, maybe.

Or maybe the anonymous hack was successfully imitating the star writers of his time.  That’s my guess, is that Arden is by a hack who outdid himself.  The language helps make Arden better than it could have been, but so do the surprisingly, unnecessarily complex characters, especially Alice, the wife.

ALICE  Tush, Mosby.  Oaths are words, and words is wind,

And wind is mutable.  (i)

Perhaps the author was not quite in control of the motives of his characters, but the result is a degree of ambivalence and ambiguity that elevates the story.  It is not Othello, no.  But it is pretty good.  Easy to recommend.

Next up: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a highlight of this entire project.