Research Post 6

Welcome to post 6 of the resource potion of this blog. I would like to, with this post, begin moving into my list of more "specific" sources regarding my research topic on Arden of Faversham. That is, I want to start moving away from sources like Dolan, Fletcher, and Gowing, which discuss a broad spectrum of topics using a wide variety of both primary and secondary sources, and instead begin talking about journal and book articles talking about very focused aspects of Renaissance theater, particularly Arden of Faversham. The first source along these lines is: Staging the Renaissance, edited by David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass.

I always like compilations of essays, especially those that are divided into essays on the early modern stage and essays on specific plays. And guess what? Staging the Renaissance is composed just like this! I enjoy these compilations the most because I (more often than not) can find an essay on the specific play I am researching (in this instance, Arden of Faversham) juxtaposed alongside essays on a variety of aspects of the early modern English theater and society. This makes it incredibly easy to be looking through one essay, such as Catherine Belsey's "Alice Arden's Crime," and think of something such as:

It's interesting that Belsey argues that Alice Arden's true crime, in the play, is her challenge to patriarchal authority, not so much the fact that she murders someone, especially given that Alice's character was likely played by a male (read: boy) actor. What implications arise from the challenge to the patriarchy being presented by a male actor?


I can then just flip over to Lisa Jardine's essay, "Boy Actors, Female Roles, and Elizabethan Erotocism," and see if there's anything discussed in the essay that I could use in my own work. In this case, unfortunately, there's not much, if anything, in Jardine's essay that I could see as beneficial to my research, but I am just demonstrating a point: that Staging the Renaissance is a resource that has a lot to offer for those of you who are looking for more information regarding early modern theater. And for those of you who are interested, you can find the table of contents, as well as some of the content itself, courtesy of Google Books here.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk a little more specifically about Belsey's article, since I actually am using her essay in my current research. So, first, here is a brief synopsis of what I saw to be the focus of the work. In this essay, Belsey argues that the true nature of Alice Arden’s crime in Arden of Faversham is not the murder of her husband but rather the challenge to marriage and patriarchal authority which she presents by committing such a murder. Belsey addresses this issue by attending to two contexts: the historical/societal, and the textual. In the first, she namely focuses on the murder as it is presented in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland as well as the trends (or lack thereof) of violence by women in early modern England. In the second, she reads Arden of Faversham to demonstrate such facets of early English culture as they appear in the play.

Now, my plan for this article is to expose how the homosocial male bond, which was valued as greater than marriage (see research posts 3 and 4, on Montaigne and Bacon), ironically allows for Alice’s challenge through not only the murdering of her husband but also through the destruction of the homosocial male bond. Though Belsey does not consider the homosocial bond between Arden and Franklin (no one has, really, as far as I know), instead focusing on Alice, I still think my essay and hers will work well in conjunction with one another. Belsey argues that Alice challenges the patriarchy through her murder, and I would agree. I will simply show that part of this is that she is also destroying the privileged male-male bond, and also that the privileged male-male bond is what allows for Alice's crime to unfold in the way it does.

I hope to get at least one more resource post done before the end of the weekend (hopefully two!), as well as one regular, weekly post. So stay tuned (or whatever the equivalent is for the internet... stay online? Humor's not my strong point).