The herald., 1897-08-08

permitted interviews with his mother
giving the other story publicity to pass
for several days without denial
Garden of Feversham"
The murder which is enacted before us
in Arden of Feversham' was commit
ted in 1851. Thomas Arden, or Ardern,
was mayor of that town in Kent, and
was murdered in his own parlor one
Sunday evening, with the aid of his wife,
Alice, by tailor called Mosbie, who was
her lover The actual assassins were
named Forest and Deighton; they were
concealed in closet behind Arden, with
whom Mosbie was supping, and, at a
catchword from the latter, they threw a
towel around Arden, pulled him to the
ground and stabbed him, his wife giving
the coup de grace. This is the story
closely followed in the play, which re-
tains the real names of the principal
characters, but calls the paid bandits
Black Will and Shakebag. There arc
several contemporary accounts differing
in matters of detail, but agreeing enough
to show us that the playwright selected
the features which would form the mos,
sinister nara tive, and that with singu-
lar skill. An aura of Lady Macbeth
hangs about Anne Arden, whom the fe-
Yer of a physical infatuation has mad
dened to a resignation of all common
prudence, but who, in spite of her ap-
palling wickedness, preserves a kind Of
instructive grandeur of which her vul-
gar associates are entirely destitute. To
this day. the thread of murderous des-
tiny that runs through the tragedy from
the first line to the last is actually awe
inspiring; and in those rough times
when the appeal to conscience could be
so rudely made alike to eye and ear, the
acting of 90 awful a picture of domestic
in trigue must have thrilled the citizens
and their wives with passion almost in
toierable. There is a complete absence
of preaching. The whole action was a
sermon, and there was no need to rub
in such a dreadful, bloody lesson.
Who wrote Arden of FeverSh amp
That is enc of the most puzzling ques.
tions which meet US in the whole chron-
icle of our literature. 1t was really acted
in 1885, it belongs to the very infancy OF
English drama; the unquestionable
date, 1892, relegateS it to the first group
of the Cambridge playwrights At that
time Marlowe had printed nothing but
"Tamburlaine." But in regularity of
construction, limpid flow of versification,
apparent accomplishment of every tech
nichal kind, Arden of Feversham'
seems at least fifteen years later than l.
can possibly be. Not a tradition, not a
suggestion, connects it with the name of
any author whatever. Mr. Fleay, on the
most slender evidence, attributes it to
Kyd, that shadowy precursor of Eliza
bethan drama whose name is s.
prominent, but whose actual indubita-
able works narrow themselves down to
a much garbled text of one solitary
tragedy of "Jeronymo." Kyd is not a
convincing sugg estion. More than hun
dred years ago a claim for Shakespeare
was started, and this has been repeate J
again and again. In recent times Mr
Swinburne has accepted this view, and
Mr. Bullen has hesitatingly suspected
that Arden in it's present state, has
been retouched here and there by the
hand" of Shakespeare. But Mr. Sidney
Lee, in his recent admirable summary
of Shakespearean biography, thinks thai
the young master from Stratford was al
the time otherwise engaged.
For my own part l am unable to see
.
Bullen, or of "a young mans work" with
Mr. Swinburne. Unless the accomplish
ment of this very early play has tempted
critics to claim the most illustrious au-
thorship for it, can hardly believe that
it would have occurred to any one to
mention the greatest of names in con-
nection with it. So far from seeming a
juvenile experiment, it appears to me to
I..o ct, Low in, itc rin
its adult acquaintance with the human
heart. Nor does it seem patched or re-
written on the contrary, it's popularity
is the smoothress with which it runs its
terrific course without flourish, with
out an episode, as if written in a single
night, at white heat. There is a stud
led avoidance of poetic diction-almost
the only piece of Elizabethan rhetoric Is
Alice's, where she says, on hearing that
her husband means to take horse:
o. that some airy spirit
Would in the shape and likeness of horse
Gallop with Arden cross the ocean,
And throw him from his back into the
waves.
The author Is too much intent on his
psychology and the precipitous evolution
of his plot, to loiter about, plucking
flowers of fancy. This is not much like
young man, least of all like young
Cambridge poet of 1882; and my own i'm
preston about this UNIQUE and extraor-
binary tragedy, so succinct lucid and
realistic is that it is the work of some
unattached writer whose other produc-
tions and whose name are lost to us,
some splendidly precocious phenomenon
that presently vanished of that hust-
ling stage. But that Shakespeare had
anything to do with it, even so far as con-
cerned the modelling of a single phrase,
I am less and less able to persuade my
self to believe. That we possess moth
ing more from the same pen need be no
great difficulty. A generation later an
equal isolation attends Robert Tailor,
the author of that remarkable comedy,
"The Hog Hath Lost His PEARL" and of