The Cardenio Mystery

The most tantalizing of Shakespeare's "lost" plays, certainly a collaboration with Fletcher if Shakespeare had a hand in it at all, is Cardenio.  A play of this title was played twice at court by the King's Men in 1613 (see Neilsen and Thorndike, The Facts About Shakespeare, p. 160).  Further, in 1653 a play also of this name was entered in the Stationers' Register by publisher Humphrey Moseley as "The History of Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher & Shakespeare."  No published copies, if indeed it was ever published, remain.

In 1727 the famous (or infamous) Shakespeare editor Lewis Theobald prepared a play he named Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers.  He claimed that the play was originally by Shakespeare which he possessed in manuscript (three copies, no less).  The plot of Double Falsehood is based on the Cardenio and Lucinda story in the 1612 English translation of Don Quixote.  The play was produced in 1728 and was popular.  Theobald's Preface attempts an explanation of how such a valuable artifact could have lain fallow for so long:

It has been alledg'd as incredible, that such a Curiousity should be stifled and lost to the World for above a Century.  To This my Answer is short; that tho' it never till now made its Appearance on the Stage, yet one of the Manuscript Copies, which I have, is of above Sixty Years Standing, in the Handwriting of Mr. Downes, the famous Old Prompter; and, as I am credibly inform'd, was early in the Possession of the celebrated Mr. Betterton, and by Him design'd to have been usher'd into the world.  What Accident prevented This Purpose of his, I do not pretend to know: Or thro' what hands it had successively pass'd before that Period of Time.  There is a Tradition (which I have from the Noble Person who supply'd me with One of my Copis) that it was given by our Author, as a Present of Value to a Natural Daughter of his, for whose Sake he it, in the Time of his Retirement from the Stage.  Two Other Copies I have...which may not, perhaps, be quite so Old as the Former; but One of Them is mjuch more ;perfect, and had fewer Flaws and Interruptions in the Sense..." (quoted in Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare As Collaborator, p.149-150).

Subsequent critics have placed little faith in Theobald's explanations, strengthened by the fact that Theobald did not include the play in his edition of Shakespeare's works.  The manuscripts of which he spoke (he seems to say there were three, but his labored vagueness could indicate four) have never materialized.  It is supposed one or more of them was "treasured up "...in the Covent Garden Theatre Museum. The Covent Garden Theatre, an ancestor building of the present Royal Opera House, had a library or museum where it kept valuable literary properties and in 1770 it seems to be worth treasuring this up in that museum. Regrettable however, in the year 1808 that particular Covent Garden Theatre building burnt down” (transcript of podcast "Shakespeare's Lost Play" from Nottingham University--the podcast is in mp4 format with supporting video).

Views on Shakespeare's collaborations have varied.  Earlier critics have assumed Shakespeare abandoned playwriting in 1611, and left drafts with his company that were fleshed out by their new chief playwright John Fletcher.  Here is Sidney Lee's description:

While there is every indication that in 1611 Shakespeare abandoned dramatic composition, there seems little doubt that he left with the manager of his company unfinished drafts of more than one play which others were summoned at a later date to complete. His place at the head of the active dramatists was at once filled by John Fletcher, and Fletcher, with some aid possibly from his friend Philip Unfinished plays. Massinger, undertook the working up of Shakespeare's unfinished sketches. On September 9, 1653, the publisher Humphrey Moseley obtained a license for the publication of a play which he described as ' History of Cardenio, by Fletcher and Shakespeare.' This was probably identical with the lost play, ' Cardenno,' or ' Cardenna,' which was twice acted at Court by Shakespeare's company in 1613, in May during the Princess Elizabeth's marriage festivities, and on June 8 before the Duke of Savoy's ambassador. Moseley, whose description may have been fraudulent, failed to publish the piece, and nothing is otherwise known of it with certainty ; but it was no doubt a dramatic version of the adventures of the lovelorn Cardenio which are related in the first part of Don Quixote' (ch. xxiii.-xxxvii.) Cervantes's amorous story, which first appeared in English in Thomas Shelton's translation in 1612, offers much incident in Fletcher's vein. When Lewis Theobald, the Shakespearean critic, brought out his ' Double Falsehood, or the Distrest Lovers,' in 1727, he mysteriously represented that the play was based on an unfinished and unpublished draft of a play by Shakespeare. The story of Theobald's piece is the story of Cardenio, although the characters are renamed. There is nothing in the play as published by Theobald to suggest Shakespeare's hand. Dyce thought he detected in it traces of Shirley's workmanship, but it was possibly Theobald's unaided invention. Theobald doubtless took advantage of a tradition that Shakespeare and Fletcher had combined to dramatise the Cervantic theme  (Sidney Lee, Shakespeare's Life and Work , pp. 135-136).

Critical judgment in mid-twentieth century, represented by Kenneth Muir in Shakespeare As Collaborator (1960) was that "...it seems more likely that Theobald possessed at least one manuscript than that he himself was the sole author of the play" (152), but there is no real evidence that Shakespeare had a hand in it.  Theobald was unaware of the Moseley registration, because he attributed the play solely to Shakespeare (to hype his own adaptation, no doubt).  Muir concludes: "...one can understand the desire to relieve Shakespeare of all responsibility for a play which, at least in its present form, can add nothing to his reputation" (160).

The mystery took a turn in 1994 when "Charles Hamilton claimed...that another play, The Second Maiden's Tragedy, was the lost Cardenio.  This is thought by most to be by Thomas Middleton, and the fact that it is entered separately in Stationers' Register at the same time as Cardenio argues against the identification" (from The Shakespeare Apocrypha).  (Chris Cleary publishes an HTML version of The Second Maiden's Tragedy at his excellent Thomas Middleton web site).  Hamilton's claims are made in Cardenio, Or, the Second Maiden's Tragedy.  His arguments have not gained critical acceptance and are often thought strange, at best.

So the mystery remains.  There was certainly a play in 1613 titled Cardenio and was acted twice at court, but was it by Fletcher and Shakespeare?  Did Shakespeare have a hand in it at all?  The evidence, since little can be derived from Theobald's adaptation, rests on the registration by Humphrey Moseley, but no one knows why he made such an attribution, or if it could possibly have been true.  Did Theobald possess even a single manuscript of Cardenio, or was it all a fabrication in the interest of promoting his own play?  Muir concludes it most likely he possessed some sort of manuscript, and sees evidence of Fletcher's style (Muir was not the first to see Fletcher's hand in the Theobald play, of course.  He was preceded by Gamaliel Bradford, E. H. C. Oliphant, and Stephan Kukowski, to name but a few).  There seems no reason to suppose Shakespeare's involvement, however, except that he did collaborate with Fletcher on Two Noble Kinsmen and to a lesser extent on Henry VIII.  It remains a gauge of scholarly conservatism as to whether the play is included among Shakespeare's lost plays (albeit collaborative) or simply remains an unresolved, but probably unrelated, literary curiosity.