The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play

This book is about the search for a lost play. Celebrating the quatercentenary of publication of the first translation of Don Quixote, it is the first collection of essays entirely devoted to The History of Cardenio, a play based on Cervantes and probably written in that same year. It was said to be written by Shakespeare and the young man who was taking his place, John Fletcher, the most successful English playwright of the seventeenth century. The book brings together leading scholars, critics, and theatre practitioners to discuss the lost (or partially lost) play. It also re-examines Lewis Theobald's 1727 Double Falsehood, allegedly based on Cardenio. A range of approaches -new archival evidence, employment of advanced computer-aided stylometric tests for authorship attribution, early modern theatre history, literary and theatrical analysis, musicology, and recent theatrical productions and adaptations - produces new research findings about the play, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the early modern relationship between Spanish and English culture. The book establishes the dates, venues, and audience for two performances of Cardenio by the King's Men in 1613, and identifies glimpses of the play in several seventeenth-century documents. It also provides much new evidence and analysis of Double Falsehood, which Theobald claimed was based on previously unknown manuscripts of a play by Shakespeare. His enemies, especially Pope, denied the Shakespeare attribution. Debate has continued ever since. While some contributors advocate sceptical caution, new research provides stronger evidence than ever before that a lost Fletcher/Shakespeare Cardenio can be discerned within Double Falsehood. Uniquely, this collection combines archival research and literary analysis with accounts of recent theatrical experiments, which explore the Cardenio problem by reviving or adapting Double Falsehood, and demonstrate that such practical theatrical work throws valuable light on some of the problems that have obstructed traditional scholarly approaches. It thus offers a new paradigm for the creative interaction of scholarship and performance.

About the Author :
David Carnegie is Research Professor of Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is co-editor of the Cambridge edition of The Works of John Webster, and has published widely on Elizabethan drama and stagecraft. He has also worked professionally as a director, dramaturg, and critic, and directed the first full production of Gary Taylor's 'creative reconstruction' of Double Falsehood entitled The History of Cardenio. Gary Taylor is George Matthew Edgar Professor of English at Florida State University. He is general editor of prize-winning, innovative Oxford editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works and Middleton's Collected Works, as well as a prize-winning book on Shakespeare in performance, Moment by Moment by Shakespeare. In addition to his twenty-two scholarly books, he has written for newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, been widely interviewed on radio and television, and spoken at major theatres in the UK, USA, and Canada. His reconstruction of The History of Cardenio has been developed through workshops and readings at many theatres, including Shakespeare's Globe (London), the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, the American Shakespeare Center, and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C.

Review :
"Marks a major step forward in the discussion, with an impressive variety of viewpoints and a good mixture of imaginative and carefully empirical scholarship." --Comparative Drama "This collection of essays offers a valuable and comprehensive assessment of what Cardenio might have been like, ideas as to how its other features might be recovered, and, importantly, a history of the play's performance." -- Renaissance and Reformation