Networks and Dramatic Form in Arden of Faversham

ikely first staged in 1589 or 1590, and first printed in 1592, Arden of Faversham comes in the wake of the theaters’ shift away from the abstract or symbolic characterization typical of morality plays and Tudor interludes. Characters like Virtue and Envy have no backstories: universal rather than particular, they exist outside of history, in an eternal unchanging time that medieval and early modern audiences regarded not as a lesser but rather as a greater state of reality. Such characterization, which “involves a fundamental rhetorical separation between the play world and the real world,” was nearly ubiquitous in professional drama until the mid-1580s. David Bevington writes that “almost all pre-Marlovian plays in the sixteenth century which bear convincing evidence of popular commercial production are in fact moralities or hybrids.” According to the data compiled in British Drama: A Catalogue, roughly half of the plays for which we have extant scripts or reliable evidence from 1567 to 1584 feature allegorical characters. But from 1584 to 1590—or from John Lyly’s Galatea to Arden of Faversham—only two of thirty-five plays incorporate personified characters into the main action.