Shakespeare in Arden: Pragmatic Markers and Parallels

Summary

The question of who wrote Arden of Faversham remains open. In 1656, publisher Edward Archer (or an associate) assigned the play to Shakespeare in a ‘Catalogue’ appended to his edition of Massinger, Middleton and Rowley’s The Old Law, or A new way to please you.² Five years later, bookseller Francis Kirkman re-designed the ‘Catalogue’, but this time left the Arden author’s name blank. In 1770, Faversham antiquary Edward Jacob produced an edition of the play ‘With a Preface; in which some Reasons are offered, in favour of its being the earliest dramatic Work of Shakespear’. In defence of this attribution, Jacob’s ‘Preface’ listed a series of verbal parallels between Arden and Shakespeare’s works.³ A little over a century later, Algernon Charles Swinburne deemed the play ‘no man’s youthful hand but Shakespeare’s’.⁴ In the later twentieth century, MacDonald P. Jackson proposed that the central scenes of the play (in particular, scene 8) belonged to Shakespeare.