ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an outline of new evidence of William Shakespeare's part-authorship of the play. Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare have all, at one time or another, been proposed as sole author of Arden of Faversham. The extent to which all the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean features of Arden of Faversham fall into patterns matching the objective findings of the computerized Hugh Craig-Arthur F. Kinney tests of favored and non-favored lexical words and function words strongly supports the conclusion that Shakespeare contributed substantially to the play. The idea of collaboration between Shakespeare and Marlowe stirs the imagination, but in the case of Arden it is, on the Craig-Kinney evidence, highly unlikely, since the blocks of text outside the middle section emerge as more akin to Shakespeare than to Marlowe—and also as more akin to Shakespeare than to Kyd.
