The play was printed anonymously in three
quarto editions during the period, in 1592 (Q1), 1599 (Q2), and 1633 (Q3). The last publication occurred in the same year as a broadsheet ballad written from Alice's point of view. The title pages do not indicate performance or company. However, the play was never fully forgotten. For most of three centuries, it was performed in
George Lillo's adaptation; the original was brought back to the stage in 1921, and has received intermittent revivals since. It was adapted into a ballet at
Sadler's Wells in 1799, and into an
opera,
Arden Must Die, by
Alexander Goehr, in 1967. In 1656 it appeared in a catalogue (
An Exact and perfect Catalogue of all Plaies that were ever printed) with apparent mislineation. It has been argued that attributions were shifted up one line; if this is true, the catalogue would have attributed
Arden to Shakespeare. Shakespeare had a great-grandfather named Thomas Arden, but he was from Surrey and died in 1546, and should not be confused with the Thomas Arden of the play. The question of the text's authorship has been analyzed at length, but with no decisive conclusions. Claims that
Shakespeare wrote the play were first made in 1770 by the Faversham antiquarian
Edward Jacob. Others have also attributed the play to Shakespeare, for instance
Algernon Charles Swinburne,
George Saintsbury, and the nineteenth-century critics
Charles Knight and Nicolaus Delius. These claims are based on evaluations of literary style and parallel passages.
Christopher Marlowe has also been advanced as an author or co-author. The strong emotions of the characters and the lack of a virtuous hero are certainly in line with Marlowe's practice. Moreover, Marlowe was raised in nearby Canterbury and is likely to have had the knowledge of the area evinced by the play. Another candidate, favoured by critics
F. G. Fleay, Charles Crawford, H. Dugdale Sykes, and
Brian Vickers, is
Thomas Kyd, who at one time shared rooms with Marlowe. Debates about the play's authorship involve the questions of: (a) whether the text was generated largely by a single writer; and (b) which writer or writers may have been responsible for the whole or parts. In 2006, a new computer analysis of the play and comparison with the Shakespeare corpus by Arthur Kinney, of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in the United States, and
Hugh Craig, director of the Centre for Linguistic Stylistics at the
University of Newcastle in Australia, found that word frequency and other vocabulary choices were consistent with the middle portion of the play (scenes 4–9) having been written by Shakespeare. This was countered in 2008, when
Brian Vickers reported in the
Times Literary Supplement that his own computer analysis, based on recurring
collocations, indicates Thomas Kyd as the likely author of the whole. In a study published in 2015,
MacDonald P. Jackson set out an extensive case for Shakespeare's hand in the middle scenes of
Arden, along with selected passages from earlier in the play. However, Darren Freebury-Jones argues that to attribute the play to Shakespeare is to ignore the numerous studies which have provided strong evidence for Kyd. Freebury-Jones provides a sustained analysis of the evidence in favour of Kyd's sole authorship in a full-length monograph. In 2013 the
Royal Shakespeare Company published an edition attributing the play, in part, to William Shakespeare. ==Modern performance==