Protestant Manliness in Arden of Faversham

In a development familiar to scholarship on early modern drama, recent attempts to historicize Arden of Faversham have multiplied rather than clarified the possible meanings of the play-text. Many of these readings contribute substantially to our understanding of historical and cultural contexts, while they perhaps leave the actual artistic and psychological details of the text under-examined. ¹ Lena Cowen Orlin has offered, in "Man's House as His Castle in Arden of Feversham, " a historical discussion whose psychological ramifications are extremely suggestive, and more recently, in Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England, an exhaustively researched (and in some ways astonishing) analysis of the historical records of the lives of the men and women who figure in, or have relevance to, the action of the play; ² the latter reading in particular will remain a landmark of cultural commentary on the play's social context. On a more modest scale, David Attwell, in "Property, Status, and the Subject in a Middle-class Tragedy," describes how Arden "contributes to the consolidation of the goals of bourgeois civil society." ³ In doing so, he crucially qualifies Catherine Belsey's seminal argument that Alice's rebellion and pursuit of Mosby suggest "an allegory of the transition to the liberal-humanist family" and away from the "ecclesiastical" and "absolutist modes of control" exemplified by Arden, ⁴ since Attwell, as Julie R. Schutzman has observed, "deploys the same categories as Belsey—those of a fading feudal order and a nascent capitalism—but reads Alice's desire for Mosby as a rebellion against a privatized, restrictive notion of family, one in which she is already embroiled." ⁵ Garrett A. Sullivan partially counters Attwell's argument, for in the face of Attwell's insistence that Arden offers a "depiction of unrestrained [proto-bourgeois] appetitiveness," Sullivan suggests that

the play . . . looks backward longingly to ideologies (nearly) lost, in particular to the ideal of paternalism . . . [and] posits a continuum between Arden's neglect of both his responsibilities as governor of a household and his responsibilities as governor of the larger estate. ⁶

While they do not insist on the "nostalgic" reading, both Schutzman and Orlin agree with Sullivan insofar as they identify a failure of responsibility within Arden, albeit with different emphases. According to Schutzman, "As Arden chooses to remove his gaze from the scene of his wife's adultery, his position shifts from surveyor to object of surveillance, a position to which . . . weak husbands (that is, husbands who failed to 'control' their wives) were particularly vulnerable." ⁷ Orlin agrees with those who sense in Arden "limited culpability in his own murder" and asserts that the "ideological tautology at the heart of [the play] is that Alice's rebellion itself validates her charge against Arden of 'misgovernment' (13.113)"; thus " Arden of Feversham is focused strictly on its protagonist's sovereign domestic role and locates its claim to tragedy in his disastrous domestic rule." ⁸ Indeed, for Orlin "the trick of Arden of Feversham is that it succeeds both in raising its nonroyal protagonist to a tragic stature and in rendering his murder aesthetically acceptable." ⁹ In contrast, Frances Dolan argues that the play cannot be considered Arden's tragedy: "however implicated, he is a victim and . . . a social position, a marker rather than an agent." ¹⁰ Agency would seem to belong more to Alice, and in fact Viviana Comensoli believes that "the audience is invited to sympathize with [Alice's] need to create a more desirable private space" and that this "rejection of female subordination gives voice to a radical discourse of desire" ¹¹ —a reading which in a sense returns us to Belsey's claim that "the play presents Alice Arden's challenge to the institution of marriage as an act of heroism." ¹²

Even this brief survey of critical commentary on the play suggests the density and complexity of interpretive possibilities in the text; I will return to key points...