The State of the Art: Locating Criticism of Arden of Faversham, 2000 to the Present

This essay outlines the shape of criticism of the play in the twenty-first century. It draws attention to changing attitudes towards the play’s interest in material culture and the way it intersects with pressing social questions, to growing interest in characterization and to questions of authorship. It also explores the development of earlier trends in criticism, as outlined elsewhere in the volume: ‘the difference between Arden the play and Arden the historical event; the inclusion of Arden among Shakespeare’s apocryphal plays; the emergence of Alice as a tragic victim; the political reading of domestic tragedy; and, finally, the sympathy between Arden and Shakespearean villainy’. Polly Findlay’s was probably the highest-profile production of the play since the turn of the century, but there have been several others; and the past two decades have seen three new major editions of Arden and a substantial revision, several monographs and a special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies on the genre of domestic tragedy which include extensive discussion of the play, and many articles besides. Across the different areas of critical attention, the essay analyses a period of separating the play out from other versions of the story of Arden’s murder, exploring its theatricality more fully and rebalancing what Kingsley-Smith calls the ‘overshadowing’ of the play by the historical account.