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This chapter discusses the marginal notes Edmond Malone made in his copy of the second issue of the 1728 edition of Double Falsehood. Malone’s observations are placed in the context of other eighteenth-century attempts to understand the relationship between Theobald’s play and (The History of) Cardenio, especially those of Isaac Reed and George Steevens, hitherto neglected by scholars. New information on the fate of the surviving external evidence relating to Double Falsehood and Cardenio is presented and interpreted within the larger framework of eighteenth-century attribution studies. The insights gained from this act of historical recovery are then brought to bear on the current discussion of Shakespeare’s collaborative plays.

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 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 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 considers the reaction to the publication, in March 2010, of the Arden edition of Double Falsehood. It takes into account discussion in the press and in the ‘blogosphere’, as well as academic reviews that have so far appeared, and considers what controversies have been generated, what new knowledge has been gained, and what are the principal unanswered questions in the wake of this publication. The chapter offers some speculative answers to some of those questions.

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 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 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 rejects the allegation, current since 1728, that Double Falsehood is Theobald’s original composition, masquerading as Shakespeare. Connection with the plays written by Shakespeare and Fletcher between c.1602 and c.1614, especially their two collaborations, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, is demonstrated by close examination of the 100 line-end polysyllables in the verse scenes of Double Falsehood (a quantifiable feature of versification preserved by Theobald at rates of 60% and 40% respectively in his adaptations of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1715) and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (as The Fatal Secret, 1735)). Theobald’s ‘falsehood’ was to make a loud and very public claim for Shakespeare as sole author of a play, putatively the ‘lost’ Cardenio, that he had good reason to believe — but (too) strenuously denied — also contained the work of Fletcher

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 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.