scholarly journals Exploring Verbal Relations between Arden of Faversham and John Lyly’s Endymion

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Darren Freebury-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Arden Of Faversham ◽  
Verbal Relations

scholarly journals Stage Tricks: Handling Props in Arden of Faversham

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernice Mittertreiner Neal
Keyword(s):  
Death Sentence ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Medieval Theatre ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
English Stage ◽  
Stage Properties ◽  
Arden Of Faversham

In 1551 England, Alice Arden cuckolded and then murdered Thomas Arden of Faversham, a prosperous, if unscrupulous, merchant and landlord, in their own home. Alice Arden was tried and convicted of murder, sentenced to die, and burnt at the stake. In the 1570s Holinshed chronicled the crimes and sentencing related to Thomas Arden's murder, and some twenty years later an anonymous playwright dramatized the events in a domestic tragedy called Arden of Faversham. Performed on the Elizabethan, and newly secular English stage in the wake of the Reformation, Arden of Faversham employs what I call the Corpus Christi affect, a phenomenon from the outlawed medieval theatre, to play a trick on its staring and startled audience. My focus is the play's spectacle--a poisoned crucifix, a painting that kills at a glance, a prayer book, shorn of its leaves--spectacle that insistently points at and exploits anxieties that motivate the iconophobes and the iconoclasts. I work with Andrew Sofer's account of semiotic and phenomenological attitudes towards stage properties in my analysis of Arden's props and the characters that handle them. I argue that while Alice's blasphemy, rebellion, and felony appear to be contained and condemned by her death sentence, the play stages its own subversive act by asserting the corpse of her husband as potentially salvific--the very means by which Alice performs her spiritual redemption.

Close to Home

2019 ◽  
pp. 68-104
Author(s):  
Alex Eric Hernandez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Crime Narratives ◽  
The Creation ◽  
And Performance ◽  
True Crime ◽  
Arden Of Faversham

This chapter explores many of the domestic elements that were central to the creation of bourgeois tragedy in Georgian Britain, focusing especially on George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) and his posthumous adaptation of Arden of Faversham (1759; with John Hoadly). The chapter begins by broadening the archive of the genre’s source material, situating its eighteenth-century repertoire alongside the true crime narratives it in many cases adapted, as well as early Stuart predecessors, Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), and Restoration she-tragedy. It thereby claims that the genre represents important advances in realism as it was practiced onstage that worked to exploit the intimacy of the home and stage during the period. This chapter also examines a major theme in contemporaneous theorizations of the genre by considering what it means for a play to “strike close to home,” linking that trope to changes in affect, aesthetics, and performance during the period.

Arden of Faversham

1983 ◽  
pp. 121-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Leggatt
Keyword(s):  
Arden Of Faversham
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