- Title
- The case of Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley and Lord Bothwell: initiating the literature of husband-murder in sixteenth-century England
- Creator
- Smith, Rosalind
- Relation
- Notes and Queries Vol. 59, Issue 4, p. 498-501
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjs185
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- ALICE ARDEN, Anne Saunders, and Eulalia Page were notorious in late sixteenth-century England as women who murdered their husbands, motivated by their adulterous desire to marry their lovers. In each case, the women were not directly involved in the act of murder, but orchestrated complex plots involving their lovers, friends, and servants that both resulted in successful murders and laid the ground for their discovery through the betrayal and confession of their co-conspirators. Each case produced multiple textual redactions across the forms of chronicle accounts, pamphlets, ballads and domestic tragedies, outlining the circumstances of each murder and presenting diverse, often surprising, approaches to feminine guilt and criminal agency. The complex textual afterlives of these cases can be read as early instances of the mode of early modern true crime, where certain crimes were rewritten in different forms across decades in extended publication events.Although Arden of Faversham was murdered in 1551, and the murder was noted in the 1551 Breviat Chronicle and related at greater length in the Wardmote Book of Faversham, the first widely circulated print account of the circumstances leading to his death occurred in Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1577 and 1587, drawing upon and embellishing an earlier manuscript account of the crime.The crime was retold in Stow’s Annals and the anonymous 1592 play, Arden of Faversham, but its redactions in pamphlet and ballad form were circulated largely in the seventeenth century.As the Eulalia Page murder occurred in 1593, it is commonly understood that the 1573 Anne Saunders murder initiated the early modern true crime publishing phenomenon of multiple redactions. However, this article argues that another case of adultery and husband-murder predated the Saunders case and also produced multiple accounts of the crime across different forms: the 1567 murder of Lord Darnley in a plot allegedly orchestrated by Mary Queen of Scots.
- Subject
- Alice Arden; Anne Saunders; Eulalia Page; Mary Queen of Scots
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1302557
- Identifier
- uon:20499
- Identifier
- ISSN:0029-3970
- Language
- eng
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