Stage Tricks: Handling Props in Arden of Faversham
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.34966Abstract
In 1551 England, Alice Arden cuckolded and then murdered Thomas Arden of Faversham, a prosperous, if unscrupulous, merchant and landlord, in their own home. Alice Arden was tried and convicted of murder, sentenced to die, and burnt at the stake. In the 1570s Holinshed chronicled the crimes and sentencing related to Thomas Arden's murder, and some twenty years later an anonymous playwright dramatized the events in a domestic tragedy called Arden of Faversham. Performed on the Elizabethan, and newly secular English stage in the wake of the Reformation, Arden of Faversham employs what I call the Corpus Christi affect, a phenomenon from the outlawed medieval theatre, to play a trick on its staring and startled audience.
My focus is the play's spectacle--a poisoned crucifix, a painting that kills at a glance, a prayer book, shorn of its leaves--spectacle that insistently points at and exploits anxieties that motivate the iconophobes and the iconoclasts. I work with Andrew Sofer's account of semiotic and phenomenological attitudes towards stage properties in my analysis of Arden's props and the characters that handle them. I argue that while Alice's blasphemy, rebellion, and felony appear to be contained and condemned by her death sentence, the play stages its own subversive act by asserting the corpse of her husband as potentially salvific--the very means by which Alice performs her spiritual redemption.
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