The question of who wrote Arden of Faversham remains open. In 1656, publisher Edward Archer (or an associate) assigned the play to Shakespeare in a ‘Catalogue’ appended to his edition of Massinger, Middleton and Rowley’s The Old Law, or A new way to please you.2 Five years later, bookseller Francis Kirkman re-designed the ‘Catalogue’, but this time left the Arden author’s name blank. In 1770, Faversham antiquary Edward Jacob produced an edition of the play ‘With a Preface; in which some Reasons are offered, in favour of its being the earliest dramatic Work of Shakespear’. In defence of this attribution, Jacob’s ‘Preface’ listed a series of verbal parallels between Arden and Shakespeare’s works.3 A little over a century later, Algernon Charles Swinburne deemed the play ‘no man’s youthful hand but Shakespeare’s’.4 In the later twentieth century, MacDonald P. Jackson proposed that the central scenes of the play (in particular, scene 8) belonged to Shakespeare.