Arden of Faversham

‘He must leave to live that we may love’ Arden of Faversham is based on the murder of Thomas Arden in Faversham in 1551 by his wife, Alice. The play depicts Alice Arden’s increasingly desperate attempts to kill her husband so as to be with her lover, Mosby. It is a collaborative play, but also Shakespeare’s earliest ‘domestic tragedy’. Complete with explanatory notes, a full chronology, and author biography, Iman
Sheeha’s introduction explores Arden of Faversham’s place within the genres of tragedy and true crime, as well as how the play portrays gender, class, race, household service, and neighbourly relationships.
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Author Biography

Iman Sheeha is a Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Brunel University of London. She is the author of Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy (2020). Her research has appeared in Shakespeare Survey, Early Theatre, Shakespeare, Cahiers Élisabéthains, Early Modern Literary Studies, and American Notes and Queries. Her work has either appeared or is forthcoming in several edited collections of essays,
including People and Piety: Devotional Writing in Print and Manuscript in Early Modern England (2019) and Shakespeare and Misogyny, and Reading the Coastline in Shakespeare’s Britain. Terri Bourus is Professor of Theatre and
Professor of English at Florida State University. She is a General Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare and the author of Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet (2014). She has written essays on stage directions, the performance of religious conversion, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio, the role of Alice in Arden of Faversham, and Middleton’s female roles. Bourus is an Equity actor, and has directed and acted in, two very different productions of
Hamlet, both based on Q1. Gary Taylor is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University. He is a General Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare and has written, edited, and co-edited numerous other volumes including The Oxford
Handbook of Thomas Middleton (2012), Moment by Moment by Shakespeare (1985), and Reinventing Shakespeare (1989). He general-edited the Signs of Race and History of Text Technologies series, founded the interdisciplinary History of Text Technologies program at FSU, and has written about the practice and theory of editing in various periods and genres. Taylor has also worked to communicate contemporary literary theory and criticism to a mass audience
in newspapers, radio, TV, museums and theatres in North America and the UK.