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This select list provides in tabular form the key dates relating to Cardenio and Double Falsehood, from the first performance by the King’s Men in 1613, to professional theatre productions in New York and Stratford-upon-Avon in 2011, and beyond.

This chapter analyses Lewis Theobald’s adaptations of two early modern plays that survive in their original form, with the intention of providing evidence of the kind of treatment he might be expected to have given the lost Fletcher/Shakespeare Cardenio in adapting it as Double Falsehood (1727). Close examination of Theobald’s The Fatal Secret, based on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and The Tragedy of King Richard II, based on Shakespeare’s play, reveals a coherent pattern of adaptation to suit neoclassical norms of the early eighteenth-century theatre. He consistently cuts and rewrites to achieve neoclassical unities, decorum, and plausibility. He frequently retains original speeches but gives them to other characters for different purposes. Importantly, he nearly always writes his own scene- and act-endings. These various techniques provide suggestive evidence about how Double Falsehood may differ from its early modern original.

This chapter pursues conjectures by earlier scholars that the Jacobean play The History of Cardenio contained a subplot, traces of which survive in Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood, which is anomalously short. It gives reasons for believing that the original play contained more material from Don Quixote, related to the Cardenio story there, and then focuses on two scenes and four characters that seem to be relics of that subplot: the two Gentlemen in 4.2 and Fabian and Lopez in 2.1. It connects these characters to Quixote, Sancho, the Barber, and the Curate. It then uses a variety of stylometric tests to establish that four of the speeches of Fabian and Lopez were written by Shakespeare toward the end of his career, with a fifth apparently by Fletcher, and that the speeches of Henriquez in 2.1 contain large amounts of writing by Theobald.

Double Falsehood is a story of love, but also of loss. Theobald’s play alters many details from the assumed source of the original, the Cardenio narrative in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, available to Fletcher and Shakespeare in Shelton’s 1612 translation. This chapter argues that some of these changes are the result of altered understandings of the relationships between friendship, sexuality, and class as represented on the public stage, and particularly the loss of passionately physical expressions of male friendship, common in the earlier period. Those differences are traced across all these interrelated texts, and other relevant plays, in the service of illuminating a shifting politico-erotic territory in which substantial changes occurred in the relationships between homosociality, homoeroticism, and the figure of the ‘friend’.

This chapter examines the cross-dressing role for the female character Violante in Double Falsehood, based on episodes in Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, and asks whether this heroine’s theatrical transvestism may tie the early eighteenth-century version to its Jacobean source, the lost Shakespeare and Fletcher play Cardenio. The chapter examines the efficacy of Violante’s male disguise in both Shakespeare and Fletcher’s work and Theobald’s — efficacy with regards to successful deception, but also as a protective tool. Enveloping these questions is the broader question of gender and its relation to power. The question of Violante’s rape (or seduction) and subsequent attempted rape is central: in particular, the fascinating sequence in which Violante as a transvestite confronts her rapist and accuses him of ‘bobbing’ her, not as a woman — but as a boy.

This chapter considers Cardenio from a time-centred perspective; it examines the 2009 performance script of The History of Cardenio, Gary Taylor’s ‘creative reconstruction’ of the lost Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration, to compare that script’s treatment of time with prominent temporal characteristics of Shakespearean drama. Of a wide variety of such characteristics, two emerge as most germane to Cardenio: the play’s prevalent thematic interest in time, and the era’s emblematic and iconographic traditions associated with time. In particular, the chapter analyses the relationship between time and death, especially as figured in varying mementi mori, most notably the coffin in Cardenio. From these explorations, the chapter strives to illuminate some key aspects of the play itself (while acknowledging that the ‘play itself’ is yet evolving), and to aid in positioning the play within the broader framework of the Shakespearean canon.

This chapter focuses on the two known Jacobean performances of Cardenio. It provides new documentary evidence that one performance took place at the Aldermanbury home of Sir John Swinnerton, Mayor of London, attended by one or both of the ambassadors of the Duke of Savoy, and probably by other figures associated with them, including Sir Henry Wotton and Sir Richard Rich. It provides for the first time a full calendar of the movements of King James from 31 October 1612 to 20 May 1613, demonstrating that he probably did not see Cardenio until mid-February. It then connects Cardenio to the death of Prince Henry and to what is known about its early spectators. Finally, it re-examines Double Falsehood in the light of this early theatre history, and conjectures that Theobald’s adaptation was influenced by the reputation of D’Urfey’s Comical History of Don Quixote.

This chapter is devoted to the Spanish and French plays that adapted the story of Cardenio for the stage and coped with the same difficulties faced by Fletcher and Shakespeare (if they are the authors of the play performed at the English Court in 1613): i.e., how to transform the narrative structure of the fortunes and misfortunes of the four Cervantes lovers into a dramatic plot, and to decide if Don Quixote and Sancho must or must not be present in a tragicomedy devoted to Cardenio, Luscinda, Fernando, and Dorotea. The chapter analyses Guillén de Castro and Pichou’s answers to these challenges focussing on specific scenes, especially the embarrassing scene of the marriage between Luscinda and Fernando, both already engaged and married elsewhere by an exchange of vows.

This chapter examines the changes effected in the Spanish translation of Double Falsehood (1987, repr. 2007) by its translator Charles David Ley. On the one hand, Ley replaced the Theobald title with that of Historia de Cardenio (by Shakespeare and Fletcher) and went back to Cervantes for the original names of the characters. On the other, he questioned some aspects of Theobald’s text and altered some passages in his rendering, mainly in the form of substitution and suppression of Theobald’s supposed additions to the lost original. All these textual changes — which are compared with those made by Gary Taylor in his reconstruction of The History of Cardenio — suggest how Ley’s personal interest in, and empathy with, the lost play led him to attempt to recover it, however minimally.

This chapter examines the destabilization of Shakespeare’s influence in a cultural mobility project conducted in the USA, Spain, and elsewhere. Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee wrote a play entitled Cardenio, and subsequently Greenblatt circulated various source texts to fund satellite plays throughout the world. Looking closely at one of these productions, written by Jesús Eguía Armenteros in Spain, the chapter examines the interest in the quixotic themes of dreams and reality in Spain in contrast to the interest in Elizabethan theatrical conventions in the Boston production. The inspiration for creativity that Shakespeare as a brand name enables is confronted with Cervantes’s legacy in Spain when the project is based on a subplot from Don Quixote. The project ultimately transitions and decentres authority from the playwrights and scholars involved, and gives it to the characters within the story.

This chapter is an account by Bernard Richards of the writing of his acting version of Cardenio, which was put on at Queens’ College, Cambridge, various theatres in Devon, and the Edinburgh Festival in 2009. It argues that Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood is inadequate as a dramatic text, since it seems to be missing some crucial scenes. Richards provides his rationale for six new scenes he wrote to fill out the action. These scenes were partly based on the relevant chapters in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, although Richards, like Shakespeare and other Jacobean dramatists, did not feel compelled strictly to adhere to the source. Richards explains why he dropped a song from the Theobald version and substituted one by Robert Johnson that was probably used in the original 1613 production of Cardenio. The chapter concludes that the play was probably not among Shakespeare’s best, but must have been an adequate evening’s entertainment.

This review addresses the bold adaptation of Theobald’s Double Falsehood under the title Cardenio by Bernard Richards that was staged by students of Queens’ College, Cambridge, in March 2009. The contention of Richards that Double Falsehood is rendered narratively incoherent by its omission of several actions led him to write supplementary scenes to explicate the early relations of Julio and Henriquez and to bring into close focus the rape of Violante and the abduction of Leonora from the nunnery in a coffin. The added episodes greatly extend the role of Henriquez, though perhaps more in the sado-religiose spirit of the Gothic novel than of early eighteenth-century theatre. An accident-prone winter date for the performances robbed the cast of its Duke, and led to the transformation of Camillo into Camilla, but the actors rose to the occasion and fully vindicated their hazardous enterprise.

In January 2011, MokitaGrit produced the first professional production of Double Falsehood since the eighteenth century. This review pays particular attention to the implications of producing Double Falsehood as a piece in its own right rather than as the basis for reconstruction of Cardenio. A combination of relative textual fidelity and creative non-verbal decisions allows the play to be entertainingly staged, drawing out class divisions that underpin the dynamic between the lovers and amongst their parents. In making a case for the effectiveness of Theobald’s play on the modern stage, the production usefully, if unintentionally, encouraged audiences to move away from questions of authenticity and authorship to consideration of the extant play’s theatrical worth.

This chapter considers the theatrical challenges of reimagining Double Falsehood/Cardenio for production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where Gregory Doran, the author, is the Chief Associate Director. Having directed a number of Fletcher plays for the company, including The Tamer Tamed, The Island Princess, and the Shakespeare collaboration All is True (Henry VIII), Doran became fascinated by the mysterious Cardenio, developing his adaptation of Theobald’s Double Falsehood with help from theatre colleagues and academic communities in Spain, to reassert some of the tone of the Cervantes’s original; and testing the text with Spanish-American actors from New York’s LAByrinth Theatre Company at an RSC residency in Michigan University, and in two workshops in Stratford. His purpose is not to pastiche an ‘authentic’ version of what the play might have been in 1613, but to re-explore the story in theatre terms for the twenty-first century. The production reopened the Swan Theatre in April 2011.

This chapter discusses what was learned by the two directors of the first full production of Gary Taylor’s ‘creative reconstruction’ entitled The History of Cardenio. Performed at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Taylor’s play cut some material from Double Falsehoodthat was obviously by Theobald, and added new writing in the style of Fletcher and Shakespeare, including a subplot based on Don Quixote and Sancho. The two directors discuss their rehearsal process with Taylor, especially the importance of props such as a coffin and spurs; the options for staging a new scene showing the rape or seduction only reported in Double Falsehood; and the implications of an open and fluid stagecraft in the early modern style for questions such as locale and use of an upper level.

This chapter discusses the May 2009 performance of Gary Taylor’s adaptation of Double Falsehood as The History of Cardenio, directed by David Carnegie and Lori Leigh in Wellington, New Zealand. It is a critical review looking at how the production realized the requirements of the text, with primary focus on the performances of the actors playing the two central couples in the play, but also considering the staging, design, costuming, and audiences’ reception of the production.

This chapter traces how Taylor’s ‘creative reconstruction’ of The History of Cardenio has been tested and developed in performance, from the first publicly performed reading at New York’s Public Theatre in 1994 and others that followed, to the first full production in New Zealand in May 2009. That production, including the rehearsal process and the associated academic colloquium on which this book is based, provided Taylor with the most substantive ideas yet about where the script might best be strengthened, and has led to further revisions, including explorations of race and of bisexuality in Cervantes, Fletcher, and Shakespeare. Each of these versions, and all the directors and actors, have influenced Taylor’s quest to discover something of what the Shakespeare‐Fletcher play might have been like in performance — indeed, in a larger sense, how an idea becomes a script and a script becomes a performance.

This introduction describes the structure of the book and the arguments of each contributor. It also outlines the main questions around the lost play Cardenio: was it really by Shakespeare and Fletcher? Was Theobald’s Double Falsehood really based on Cardenio? If so, how much did Theobald adapt it, and how much is original? Or was it his own forgery passed off as Shakespeare, as Theobald’s enemies claimed? How closely did the original Cardenio follow its source material in Cervantes’s Don Quixote? What can we learn from close scrutiny of the available documents? Can computer-aided stylometric tests establish convincing proof of Shakespeare and Fletcher authorship lying behind Theobald’s eighteenth-century adaptation? Can close critical analysis reveal what Theobald probably cut? Can modern stage adaptations of Double Falsehood recreate something akin to the lost original? All these questions are central to one of the great current debates about Shakespeare and early modern drama.

This chapter re-examines and reinterprets key seventeenth-century documents concerning The History of Cardenio and its relationship to Cervantes, Fletcher, Shakespeare, Beaumont, the King’s Men, their composer Robert Johnson, the publisher Humphrey Moseley, and the scholar-writer Edmund Gayton. By this process it narrows the range of plausible candidates for the 1613 play, connects it to seventeenth-century English responses to Cervantes and Spain, and relates it to patterns in the transformation of prose narratives into drama. It also provides detailed new stylometric evidence for Fletcher’s authorship of a song by Johnson based on an episode in Don Quixote, and for the presence in Double Falsehood of writing by Theobald, Fletcher, and Shakespeare. It concludes that the ‘lost play’ is not entirely lost, but survives in fragments, which may be identified by careful historical and stylometric analysis.