Cardenio

William Shakespeare and John Fletcher (1613)

Historical Records

The surviving documentation regarding Cardenio consists of two records of payments made to John Hemings for court performances. The records read as follows (reproduced in Hammond, 105-6):

• Itm paid to Iohn Heminges vppon lyke warrt: dates att Whithall | ix0 die Iulij 1613 for him soelf and the rest of his fellowes | his Mates servauntes and Players for presenting a playe | before the Duke of Savoyes Embassadour on the viijth daye \ of June 1613 called Cardenna the some of | vjli xiijs iiijd.

• Itm paid to the said Iohn Heminges vppon the lyke warrt: | dated att Whitehall xx0 die Maij 1613 for presentinge | sixe severall playes viz one playe called a badd beginninge | makes a good endinge, One other calle ye Capteyne, One | other the Alcumist. / One other Cardenno. / One other | The Hotspurr: / And one other called Benidicte and | Betteris All played wthin the tyme of this Accompte viz. | pd - Fortie powndes, And by waye of his Mats rewarde | twentie powndes In all | lxli. /.

Theatrical Provenance

The play was performed by the King's Men at court in the 1612-13 season, with performances on May 20th and June 8th 1613. The company was at this time performing at both the Globe and the Blackfriars.

Probable Genre(s)

The play is listed as a "History" in Moseley's entry in the Stationers' Register. Lewis Theobald's 1727 play Double Falsehood, which may be an adaptation of a version of Cardenio (see below), is a sentimental romantic tragicomedy. The "Cardenio" episodes of Cervantes' Don Quixote are framed within a parodic romance, but it is debatable whether elements of the parody were retained in the play.

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Based on the title, and on the plot extant in Double Falsehood, most scholars agree that Cardenio is a dramatisation of the "Cardenio" episodes from Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. Thomas Shelton's translation of the first part of the novel was published in 1612 and available to the King's Men as a direct source.

In Cervantes, the deluded Alonso Quesada rechristens himself Don Quixote, knight errant, and with his "squire" Sancho Panza embarks on a chivalric quest through contemporary Spain. During their adventures, they encounter a madman called Cardenio, who has been living in the hills since his betrayal by his noble friend, the Duke Fernando. Fernando had promised marriage to the modest Dorothea, but forsaken her in his pursuit of Cardenio's love, Luscinda. Dorothea similarly lives in the hills, disguised. The Cardenio narrative is interwoven with Quixote's adventures, and Dorothea is recruited by neighbours of Don Quixote to persuade him to return home. Eventually, Cardenio is reconciled to Luscinda and Fernando to Dorothea.

In 1727, Lewis Theobald's play Double Falsehood premiered at Covent Garden, and it was published the following year. Theobald's play, which purports to be "Revised and Adapted" from an original play by Shakespeare, dramatises the Cardenio story only with no mention of the Don Quixote plot. Here, the action is streamlined. Henriquez (Fernando) rapes Violante (Dorothea) and attempts to forcibly wed Leonora (Luscinda), but is prevented by Julio's (Cardenio's) interruption. Julio and Dorothea meet in the wilderness, and the eventual reconciliation is brought about by Roderick, Henriquez's elder brother.

Tiffany Stern has argued that Cardenna could theoretically refer to Cardena in Spain, and thus bear no connection to the Cervantes story (556-57).

References to the Play

On September 9th 1653, Humphrey Moseley entered into the Stationers' Register "The History of Cardenio. By Mr Fletcher. & Shakespeare". The play was not referred to again in the seventeenth century. It should be noted that "& Shakespeare", occurring after a full stop, may be an afterthought. The entry is repeated in an assignment of copyrights sold to Jacob Tonson the Younger on 5 April 1718 (Hammond 81).

The next documented occurrence related to the play was the first performance of Lewis Theobald's play Double Falsehood at Covent Garden on December 13th 1727. Theobald's preface makes no explicit mention of Cardenio by name (character or play), but acknowledges the play's source in Cervantes. He claims to have three manuscript copies of the play, including one

"of above sixty years' standing, in the handwriting of Mr Downes, the famous old prompted; and as I am credibly informed, was early in the possession of the celebrated Mr Betterton, and by him designed to have been ushered into the world" (reproduced in Hammond 167-8).

If true, this suggests that a version of the play was owned by the Duke's Company immediately following the reopening of the theatres in 1660. The afterlife of Cardenio stems from Theobald's play.

Critical Commentary

Critical commentary has largely concentrated on establishing whether or not Theobald's play is a genuine adaptation of a Shakespeare/Fletcher play, an adaptation of a different work, or a forgery.

The case for forgery is upheld by Harriet C. Frazier, Jeffrey Kahan and, most fully, by Tiffany Stern. Skeptics point to inconsistencies in Theobald's description of the sources he possessed, and the lack of evidence that anyone ever saw them, and to Theobald's failure to include it in his own subsequent edition of Shakespeare. The contemporary skepticism of Alexander Pope, who ridiculed Theobald in his Dunciad with explicit reference to Double Falsehood, is cited as evidence that the attribution was not taken seriously even in the 1720s. Hammond's evidence that the Tonsons owned a catalogue including Moseley's reference to Cardenio suggests that Theobald could have been aware of the lost play. Stern points out that Theobald frequently turned to Don Quixote for material, and that his editorial work included Fletcher as well as Shakespeare, accounting for apparent similarities in style.

The case for Theobald's honesty was first advanced by Gamaliel Bradford Jr. in 1910, and has been supported by John Freehafer, Stephan Kukoski, Jonathan Bate, A. Luis Pujante, Gary Taylor and Richard Proudfoot, among others. Key points in the argument include the apparent unawareness of a lost play about Cardenio, and thus the improbability of Theobald independently creating a play on the subject; linguistic parallels with Shakespeare and, most significantly, with Fletcher, who Theobald only belatedly acknowledged as a possible collaborator; and the likeness of the play to others performed around 1613 (notably Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen). Theobald's exclusion of the play from his edition of Shakespeare is usually explained as a result of Pope's attacks, with the preface to the second issue of the published play suggesting that Theobald himself was losing confidence in the attribution. A report of 31 March 1770 reports that the "original Manuscript" of Double Falsehood was stored in the Museum of Covent Garden Playhouse, and it is conjectured that Theobald's manuscripts may have perished when the building burned down on 19 September 1808.

If Theobald is to be taken at his word, the further possibility remains that he was working from a Restoration adaptation of the play rather than from a Jacobean original. Comparison of the collaborative The Two Noble Kinsmen with William Davenant's 1668 adaptation of the play as The Rivals indicates the scale of revision deemed necessary for a Restoration audience, excising Shakespeare almost entirely. Few critics claim that substantial chunks of Shakespeare or Fletcher's poetry remains in Double Falsehood.

In 2010, Double Falsehood was published in the Arden Shakespeare, the first treatment of the play in a full critical edition as part of a Shakespeare series. Subsequent critical discussion has been polarised as a result of this decision. The publication also prompted debate in the mass media, as well as several productions of Double Falsehood and reconstructions of Cardenio, most notably by Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

For What It's Worth

A discredited argument, advanced by Charles Hamilton in 1994, is that the untitled manuscript play known variously as The Second Maiden's Tragedy, The Lady's Tragedy or The Maiden's Tragedy is Cardenio. Hamilton's argument depends on that play's source in Don Quixote, in a story interwoven with (but independent of) the Cardenio plot; and on Hamilton's identification of the handwriting in the manuscript with Shakespeare's extant signatures. Hamilton's case has met with little academic support, but The Second Maiden's Tragedy is still occasionally revived under the title Cardenio.

While several productions entitled Cardenio have been performed in recent years, such as those by Gregory Doran, Gary Taylor and Stephen Greenblatt, it should be borne in mind that these are conjectural reconstructions based on a combination of Shelton's Don Quixote and Theobald's Double Falsehood, and thus bear no direct historical relation to the lost play.

Works Cited

Bate, Jonathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador, 1998.

Bradford Jr., Gamaliel. "The History of Cardenio by Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare." Modern Language Notes 25 (1910), 51-6.

Frazier, Harriet C. A Babble of Ancestral Voices: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Theobald. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.

Freehafer, John. "Cardenio, by Shakespeare and Fletcher". PMLA 84.3 (1969), 501-13.

Hamilton, Charles (ed.). Cardenio, or The Second Maiden's Tragedy. Lakewood: Col., 1994.

Hammond, Brean (ed.). Double Falsehood. London: Methuen, 2010.

Kahan, Jeffrey (ed.). Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies and Forgeries: 1710-1820. 3 vols. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.

Kukowski, Stephan. “The Hand of John Fletcher in Double Falsehood.” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991). 81-9.

Proudfoot, Richard. Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Canon. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning, 2001.

Pujante, A. Luis. "Double Falsehood and the Verbal Parallels with Shelton's Don Quixote." Shakespeare Survey 51 (1998), 95-105.

Stern, Tiffany. "'The Forgery of some modern Author'?: Theobald's Shakespeare and Cardenio's Double Falsehood." Shakespeare Quarterly 62.4 (2011), 555-93.

Site created and maintained by Peter Kirwan, University of Nottingham; updated 29 December 2011.