‘Marrow Prying Neighbours’: Staging Domestic Space and Neighbourhood Surveillance in Arden of Faversham

Arden of Faversham (1592) offered its audience unprecedented access to the staged private spaces of an early modern home. This article explores how the playtext figures the audience as ‘marrow prying neighbours’ invited to bear witness to domestic transgressions. It suggests that the staging of domestic space in an outdoor theatre creates in Arden a spatial representation of the ways in which greed, sexual transgression and criminal acts make the home permeable, threatening its occupants' self-sufficiency, undoing the authority of the householder, and finally rendering the private public, and the secrets of the home subject to the wider community.