53 pages • 1 hour read
AnonymousArden of Faversham
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1592A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device wherein an author gives an oblique hint about something that will happen later. In Arden of Faversham, the circumstances of Arden’s murder are foreshadowed throughout the play. The first instance comes when Arden is scolding Mosby for wearing a sword, which only the nobility was allowed to carry. He tells him to instead wield “your bodkin, / Your Spanish needle, and your pressing-iron” (1.312-313). Later, when Mosby contributes to Arden’s murder, he says, “There’s for the pressing-iron you told me of” (14.229). The historical figure Thomas Arden was bludgeoned to the head; depending on how the director of the play wanted to depict Mosby’s strike at Arden, they could easily feature a pressing-iron in the murder scene, making Arden’s earlier words foreshadow his death.
Arden’s interactions with Reede also feature foreshadowing. Reede curses Arden to die on the same plot of land that Arden holds from him, Faversham Abbey: “The plot of ground which thou detains from me […] Be ruinous and fatal unto thee! […] there be butchered by thy dearest friends” (8.32, 34-35). Though Alice and her co-conspirators aspire to murder Arden when he is away from home, he ends up being killed in his home—thus the setting in which he should feel most secure is the most dangerous. When Arden is initially attacked by Will, he cries, “Mosby! Michael! Alice! What will you do?” (14.227) Those who Arden thinks are his dearest friends are those who bring about his death.
Allusion
Like much early modern literature, the play contains consistent allusions to Greek and Roman myth. The early modern period is sometimes called “the Renaissance,” which means “rebirth.” This period features a revival of interest in Greek and Roman antiquity. While early modern Europe was largely Christian by faith, the literature of the period contained many allusions to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.
Though the play contains many such allusions, one of the most memorable is when Alice alludes heavily to classical myth during her praise of Mosby:
There is no nectar but in Mosby’s lips!
Had chaste Diana kissed him, she like me
Would grow lovesick, and from her wat’ry bower
Fling down Endymion and snatch him up
Then blame not me that slay a silly man
Not half so lovely as Endymion (14.142-147).
Alice speaks in iambic pentameter—10 syllable lines featuring five feet of one unstressed and one stressed syllable—introduced into English by Geoffrey Chaucer and potentially based on Latin hexameter. Diana is the Roman equivalent of the Greek Artemis, the virgin goddess of the moon and the hunt. In Roman mythology, Diana falls in love with the mortal Endymion, a paragon of beauty. Like Endymion, Alice believes that Mosby is beautiful enough to seduce even a goddess who had famously sworn herself to virginity.
Denouement
The play features an Epilogue wherein Franklin—one of the only characters who live to the end—addresses the audience directly, using the second person “you.” Franklin’s direct address serves to tie off loose ends about the fates of secondary characters such as Will and Shakebag.
Franklin’s denouement also complicates the viewer’s potential sympathy for Arden. He says, “this above the rest is to be noted” (Epilogue.9), indicating that his coming words are more important than the resolution of plot points he gave before. He continues, “Arden lay murdered in that plot of ground / Which he by force and violence held from Reede” (Epilogue.10-11). The scene with Reede is easily skipped over, as it is the only scene in which Reede appears, but clearly, it is meant to be a key factor in how viewers see the play. Franklin’s denouement indicates that this is not a story with clear protagonists and antagonists but, much like real life, a cast of characters that are all somewhere in the middle.
As if to solidify that point, Franklin addresses the play’s real-life origins:
Gentleman, we hope you’ll pardon this naked tragedy
Wherein no filèd points are foisted in
To make it gracious to the ear or eye;
For simple truth is gracious enough
And needs no other points of glozing stuff (Epilogue.14-18).
Franklin is correct in that this tragedy is “naked” compared to other early modern English tragedies. It has no secondary plot: no “filèd points” “foisted in.” As the denouement makes clear, this tragedy seeks to distinguish itself because it is a true story, and the real story of Arden’s murder needs no embellishment.
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