Japan to premiere a lost Shakespeare play based on a real murder

Shoichiro Kawai, an honorary professor at the University of Tokyo, will direct and provide a new translation for the first Japanese production of "The Arden of Favenham" in November.

The play, which likely premiered around 1590, depicts a wife and her lover attempting to hire a hitman to kill the former mayor of Favenham, a town in England. The plot is based on a real crime that occurred in England roughly 40 years before the play's creation.

While the existence of the work was known for a long time, recent linguistic research suggests a high probability that William Shakespeare authored it. This led to the play's inclusion in the New Oxford Shakespeare in 2016. Kawai translated the work for a Kadokawa Bunko edition released in March this year.