Arden of Faversham

Abstract

Arden of Faversham is a seductive play with which to begin to trace the relationship between images of the household and domestic dramas, and is a strikingly material play in the sense that it insists upon the significance of its locations, pointedly naming places and linguistically producing spaces on the stage. The place in which events occur generates, shapes, affects or complicates action. The detail of place in the play is uniformly precise. The image plays upon the audience's sense of the relationship between what they see on stage and the private life of the characters that they must imagine, and maps this distance between public action and private intimacy onto the seen and unseen spaces of the household. The two most carefully localised episodes in the play are the scenes in Franklin's London house and the murder itself. The house in Arden of Faversham is a space that is ‘governed’ in the physical sense rather than the patriarchal one.