Protestant Manliness in Arden of Faversham

Abstract

In a development familiar to scholarship on early modern drama, recent attempts to historicize Arden of Faversham have multiplied rather than clarified the possible meanings of the play-text. Many of these readings contribute substantially to our understanding of historical and cultural contexts, while they perhaps leave the actual artistic and psychological details of the text under-examined. 1 Lena Cowen Orlin has offered, in "Man's House as His Castle in Arden of Feversham, " a historical discussion whose psychological ramifications are extremely suggestive, and more recently, in Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England, an exhaustively researched (and in some ways astonishing) analysis of the historical records of the lives of the men and women who figure in, or have relevance to, the action of the play; 2 the latter reading in particular will remain a landmark of cultural commentary on the play's social context. On a more modest scale, David Attwell, in "Property, Status, and the Subject in a Middle-class Tragedy," describes how Arden "contributes to the consolidation of the goals of bourgeois civil society." 3 In doing so, he crucially qualifies Catherine Belsey's seminal argument that Alice's rebellion and pursuit of Mosby suggest "an allegory of the transition to the liberal-humanist family" and away from the "ecclesiastical" and "absolutist modes of control" exemplified by Arden, 4 since Attwell, as Julie R. Schutzman has observed, "deploys the same categories as Belsey—those of a fading feudal order and a nascent capitalism—but reads Alice's desire for Mosby as a rebellion against a privatized, restrictive notion of family, one in which she is already embroiled." 5 Garrett A. Sullivan partially counters Attwell's argument, for in the face of Attwell's insistence that Arden offers a "depiction of unrestrained [proto-bourgeois] appetitiveness," Sullivan suggests that

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