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Arden of Faversham, Shakespearean Authorship, and 'The Print of Many'

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Arden of Faversham, Shakespearean Authorship, and 'The Print of Many' Chapter 9 Arden of Faversham, Shakespearean Authorship, and 'The Print of Many' JACK ELLIOTT AND BRETT GREATLEY-HIRSCH he butchered body of Thomas Arden is found in the field behind the Abbey. After reporting Tthis discovery to Arden's wife, Franklin surveys the circumstantial evidence of footprints in the snow and blood at the scene: I fear me he was murdered in this house And carried to the fields, for from that place Backwards and forwards may you see The print of many feet within the snow. And look about this chamber where we are, And you shall find part of his guiltless blood; For in his slip-shoe did I find some rushes, Which argueth he was murdered in this room. (14.388-95) Although The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed and his editors records the identities and fates of Arden's murderers in meticulous detail (Holinshed 1587, 4M4r-4M6v; 1587, 5K1v-5K3v), those responsible for composing the dramatization of this tragic episode remain unknown. We know that the bookseller Edward White entered The Lamentable and True Tragedy ofArden ofFaversham in Kent into the Stationers' Register on 3 April 1592 (Arber 1875-94, 2: 607 ), and we believe, on the basis of typographical evidence, that Edward Allde printed the playbook later that year ( STC 733). We know that Abel Jeffes also printed an illicit edition of the playbook, as outlined in disciplinary proceedings brought against him and White in a Stationers' Court record dated 18 December 1592 (Greg and Boswell 1930, 44). No copies of this pirate edition survive, but it is assumed to have merely been a reprint of White's; Jeffes was imprisoned on 7 August 1592, so his edition must have appeared prior to this date. James Roberts printed a second edition for White in 1599 (STC 734). White presumably transferred the rights to publish the play to Edward Allde in 1624, and Edward's widow Elizabeth issued a third edition in 1633 (STC 735). 1 1 On the early publication history of the play, see the Introductions to the Malone Society Reprints and Revels Plays editions (Macdonald and Smith 1947, v-vii; Wine 1973, xix-xxiv). 140 JACK ELLIOTT AND BRETT GREATLEY-HIRSCH The three extant editions of Arden ofFaversham bear no indication of authorship or of the aus- pices under which the play was first produced. This is not uncommon for plays printed from 1580 to 1599, even those associated with professional companies: out of 84 such playbooks printed during this period, 54 (or 63 per cent) do not identify their authors, and 21 (or 25 per cent) men- tion neither author nor repertory. (These figures, derived from the online DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, exclude academic and closet drama, translations, dramatic interludes, inns-of-court plays, pageants, and occasional entertainments.) Despite the lack of company ascription and records of performance prior to the eighteenth century, critics generally assume that Arden ofFaversham belongs to the professional theatre. For Alexander Leggatt, the ability of the writer of Arden ofFaversham 'to open a vein of realism in Elizabethan drama' shows a height- ened level of professionalism and a remarkable familiarity with the drama of the time, given that 'realism is a sophisticated form, and realism as he practises it is often complex and mysterious', and he noted parallels with Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI (Leggatt 1983, 133). Will Sharpe describes 'whoever wrote Arden of Faversham' as 'one of the most innovative and daring talents the Renaissance theatre ever saw' (Sharpe 2013, 650). Likewise, Martin White's assessment of the 'undoubted strengths of the play', including 'the complexity of its characterization, the linking of language and themes, the interweaving of public and private issues, and the constant awareness of the potential of the theatrical experience', lead him to conclude 'that the author was a master play- wright' (White 1982, xiii). In his recent edition of the play, Martin Wiggins challenges this prevailing critical consensus, arguing that the author 'was not a theatre professional', but rather 'an enthusiastic amateur' (Wiggins 2008, 285-6). MacDonald P. Jackson offers a careful rebuttal of Wiggins's argument (Jackson 2014a, 104-13). Even if Wiggins is right, he does not go so far as to categorize the play as closet drama, acknowledging that the author of Arden of Faversham was 'far more likely to have been a man' writing 'in the milieu of the developing commercial theatre' (Wiggins 2008, 284). If Arden ofFaversham is a closet drama, it is an unusual, if not unique, example: it lacks the charac- teristic neo-Senecan 'high style' and declamation, and, while closet drama is frequently con- cerned with familial subjects, Arden of Faversham's 'native, bourgeois, homely settings and characters' (Hackett 2013, 156)-the generic features of domestic tragedy-are at odds with the tragedies of state more typical of the closet drama and better suited to its readership, 'Tragoedia cothurnata, fitting kings' (The Spanish Tragedy 4.1.154). Critics have given insightful readings of Arden of Faversham as a domestic tragedy (Adams 1943; Orlin 1994; Berek 2008). Moreover, a search of DEEP shows that all of the extant playbooks printed from 1580 to 1599 and designated by modern scholars as closet drama explicitly name their authors. The only external evidence for authorship appears in a catalogue of playbooks appended to his 1656 edition of Thomas Middleton's The Old Law (Wing M1048) by the publisher Edward Archer. This list attributes Arden of Faversham to Richard Bernard, a clergyman and author of a popular edition of Terence's plays in both Latin and English. Alongside ascriptions that are accurate, Archer's list has others that are highly unlikely or impossible. W. W. Greg thought that at least some of the errors were compositorial in nature, resulting from a misalignment of the columns when the table was set for print, such that Archer may have intended to designate Shakespeare as the author of Arden of Faversham, since his name appears in the misaligned entry directly above it. Even if Archer meant this, the evidence is unreliable because although Archer 'shows occa- sional signs of rather unexpected knowledge', according to Greg, 'his blunders ... are so many and so gross that very little reliance can be placed upon any particular ascription' (Greg 1945, 135). With the external evidence unreliable, scholars have turned to close analysis of the play's style for internal evidence of its authorship. Several of the major figures actively writing for the profes- sional London theatre during the 1590s, including Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, Christopher ARDEN OF FAVERSHAM AND 'THE PRINT OF MANY' 141 Marlowe, and Shakespeare, have been proposed as author( s) ofArden ofFaversham (Kinney 2009a, 80-91; Sharpe 2013, 650-7), with Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare emerging as the primary sus- pects. Our purpose here is to subject Arden of Faversham to rigorous statistical and computa- tional analysis using the most advanced and recent techniques. Before turning to the results of this analysis, we will give our rationale for text selection and preparation, outline the methods employed, and explain their strengths and weaknesses. Text Selection and Preparation Computational authorship attribution needs a corpus of machine-readable (that is, electronic) texts, what we will call our authors-corpus, which are searched for stylistic patterns in order to generate authorial profiles that may be compared with a correspondingly generated profile for the text to be attributed. In an ideal universe, such an authors-corpus would consist only of well- attributed, sole-authored texts of sound provenance, with each of the individual authors repre- sented by equally sized bodies of writing. The full body of surviving English drama of the 1580s and 1590s is far from this ideal. Many playbooks in print-the primary form in which these plays come down to us-were anonym- ously published and/or collaboratively written (Masten 1997; Hirschfield 2004; Nicol 2012; Jackson 2012a). External evidence for plays' authorship is seldom unambiguous and often unreli- able. Whether by accident or fraud, publishers named the wrong authors on their playbooks. Early modern commentators were as prone to err as we are, as with Archer's list or the gross inac- curacies oflater cataloguers such as Edward Phillips. Some external evidence is simply inscrut- able: scholars continue to puzzle over what Philip Henslowe meant by the letters 'ne' inserted alongside records of particular performances in his Diary (Foakes 2002, xxxiii-xxxv). 2 The texts of 1 and 2 Tamburlaine the Great exemplify the problem. Early printed editions of these plays name no author, nor do the plays' entries in the Stationers' Register. The only external evidence for Marlowe's authorship appears in The Arraignment ofthe Whole Creature at the Bar of Religion, Reason, and Experience (STC 13538.5), a theological treatise published in 1632, decades after the play's composition, in which the marginal gloss 'Marlow in his Poem' appears alongside a passage describing episodes in the Tamburlaine story (2H4v). It is not without irony that the source of this Marlovian attribution is itself frequently misattributed: until scholars noted a mar- ginal direction to 'See my Preface before Origens Repentance' (T1v) identifying Stephen Jerome as the author, The Arraignment was erroneously ascribed to Robert Henderson and Robert Harris, both mistaken for Robert Hobson, the volume's editor, who signed his dedication 'R. H.'. Thus 'By the most conservative standards of cataloguing', Lukas Erne remarks, 'Tamburlaine would in fact have to be regarded as an anonymous play' (Erne 2013b, 64 n. 25). The difficulties of establishing authorial canons are surveyed in relation to Shakespeare in the chapters by Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane ('Canon and Chronology', Chapter 25) and Gabriel Egan ('A History of Shakespearean Authorship Attribution', Chapter 2) in this volume.
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