Arden of Faversham | On Late Posts and Domestic Violence

First, two things. 1) I had this crazy notion in my head that I was not supposed to make a post the week I present in class, even though there was nothing to make me think that was the case. Not one of my better moments, that. 2) Here's a post for last week anyway, for your reading enjoyment.

So, the Arden of Feversham. I'm going to relate this to my presentation on domestic violence in early modern England, but I ask that you forgive me for not citing my sources. The books I used are all sitting in the library's stack of returns, and all I have to go off of is my presentation notes. Again, one of my less brilliant moments. Anyhow. It strikes me that I fail to see Arden as an instigator of violence in the play, while Alice obviously is. Unless, of course, you see Alice's marriage to Arden while she truly loves Mosby a justifiable reason to commit murder. Much of the domestic violence which occurred in early modern England was provoked by a woman's behavior in the household (a husband could beat his wife if she did anything that was not to his liking, and the severity of the abuse often reflected how great of an error the man thought the woman had made. And Arden certainly knows that Alice is cheating on him. He suspects it in the very beginning, and it remains, at the very least, a suspicion throughout the play. Yet Arden doesn't seem to think violence towards her. In fact, he dismisses his wife's adulterous behavior in the play's opening; when Franklin states, "It is not strange / That women will be false and wavering" (1.20-21), Arden responds, "Ay, but to dote on one as he / Is monstrous, Franklin, and intolerable" (1.22-23).

Instead, the focus of Arden's ire is Mosby. He loathes Mosby. Or rather, he loathes that his wife is cheating on him with Mosby. Yet the violence which Arden wishes upon Mosby remains contained to the domestic landscape:

And that injurious ribald that attempts

To violate my dear wife's chastity--

For dear I hold her love, as dear as heaven--

Shall on the bed which he thinks to defile

See his dissevered joints and sinews torn,

Whilst on the planchers pants his weary body.

Smeared in the channels of his lustful blood" (1.37-43)

The play is almost neat and tidy in this way. In the beginning, the potential murders are confined to the house. Arden wants to kill Mosby in the bedroom. Mosby wants to kill Arden with a poisoned painting in the house. Alice tries to kill Arden with a poisoned meal (why does Franklin carry an antidote around with him?). However, the more the murder plot spreads, the messier it gets. Greene is convinced to murder Arden, and Black Will and Shakebag are hired by Greene. And then Michael gets in on the murder schemes. And each time it spreads farther from the house and to someone new, the attempts become less neat, less precise, and in the end, everyone is caught.

Does this play condone household violence while condemning violence which spreads outside the domestic landscape? Perhaps. Certainly, Franklin seems to think, by his offhand comment about women, that a husband should exercise the right to keep his wife in line. His methods prove to be roundabout, but I cannot shake the notion that he seems to think that Arden's dismissal of his wife's guilt is a mistake. Yet as soon as the violence spreads out of the house, everything goes awry, and it enters a realm where the violence is not permitted to any extent. Hm.

Also, a side note. Alice is traditionally, in literature, a name given to adulterous, or at least openly sexually active women, no? I am thinking in particular of Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Prologue. There is great significance in the naming of Alice in this play, then, yes?