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:

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.

Probable Genre(s)

The play is listed as a "History" in Moseley's entry in the Stationers' Register. If the play was indeed based on the Cardenio episodes of Don Quixote (see below), the play might best be characterised as tragicomedy.

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

It is assumed that the play is a dramatisation of the Cardenio episodes of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Thomas Shelton's translation of Part 1 of the novel, which includes the Cardenio narrative, was published in 1612. In Cervantes, the deluded knight Don Quixote and his comic squire Sancho Panza embark on a chivalric quest through contemporary Spain. They encounter a lunatic madman in the hills named Cardenio, who recounts the history of his betrayal by a friend of rank, Fernando, who wooed Cardenio's love, Luscinda. Cardenio ran mad upon this misadventure. Also in the hills is a young maid, Dorotea, the forsaken former paramour of Fernando, now disguised as a boy. The story is interwoven with Quixote and Sancho's own adventures, and is finally resolved with the reconciliation of both pairs of lovers. The shape of the Cardenio narrative may be reflected in Lewis Theobald's 1728 play Double Falsehood.

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. 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, which dramatised the Cardenio story and claimed to be a reworking of an old, lost play by Shakespeare.

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. A less vocal, but important, strand of criticism debates whether or not a play called "Cardenio" ever existed.

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.

Works Cited

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

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.

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.

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