Shakespeare and Arden of Faversham
D. McCarthy · Notes and Queries · 2013
EVER since 1770, when Edward Jacob claimed in a preface to a reprint of Arden of Faversham that it was one of William Shakespeare’s first plays,1 numerous researchers have debated the issue of its authorship. In 1880, Algernon Swinburne agreed with Jacob, writing that ‘either this play is the young Shakespeare’s first tragic masterpiece, or there was a writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the stage who excelled him as a tragic dramatist’.2 Later, he referred to it as, ‘the possible work of no man’s youthful hand but Shakespeare’s’.3 In 1898, Shakespeare biographer, Sidney Lee, noted that while ‘there is no external evidence in favour of Shakespeare’s authorship’, its ‘dramatic energy is of a quality not to be discerned in the work of any contemporary whose writings are extant’.4 More recently, scholars have used major literary search engines as a tool in an effort to determine authorship of the work. In a 2006 article for Shakespeare Quarterly, MacDonald P. Jackson used the Literature Online Database to show that the appearance of a number of ‘Shakespearean’ phrases and certain literary devices ‘overwhelmingly support his [Shakespeare’s] authorship of the quarrel scene’ from Arden of Faversham.5 In 2009, Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney published their computer-based stylistic analysis of the play and concluded that ‘Arden of Faversham is a collaboration, Shakespeare was one of the authors, and his part is concentrated in the middle section of the play’.6