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Patricia Hyde. Thomas Arden in Faversham: The Man Behind the Myth. Faversham: Faversham Society, 1996. Pp. xii + 612. £42.00.
It is unfortunate that only specialists in English Renaissance drama seem to know the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1592). Virtually any audience could enjoy its bizarre and macabre account of the real-life murder of a landowner and businessman by his wife, her lover, some of their servants, and various knaves named Black Will, Shakebag, and Greene in 1551. The playwright, at various times surmised to be Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Kyd, culled most of his details from the chroniclers John Stow and Raphael Holinshed, the most salacious of which hinted that the husband encouraged his spouse's infidelity to advance his career. However, Patricia Hyde is interested not in the play but in publishing (and, to some extent, analyzing) all of the historical records concerning Thomas Arden "in the hope that it will give [the people of Faversham] a greater understanding of and respect for their sixteenth-century forbears" (vi). The historical person, it seems, has little in common with the pathetic tyrant onstage.
Hyde's enormous book reproduces "full and accurate transcripts of all the relevant documents" (xii) concerning Thomas Arden and the people who surrounded...