Cardenio (?) Staged

The Christian Science Monitor reports on a new staging of "Cardenio":

Playwright Charles L. Mee remembers the phone call. A Harvard scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, had been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and wanted to use the funds to explore how a dramatist crafts a play. Professor Greenblatt had chosen to observe Mr. Mee at work, noting that Mee's cut-and-paste methods of "resituating and appropriating" materials reminded him of William Shakespeare's manner of writing.

"I'm the biggest thief," says Mee, who was honored this past year with the staging of an entire season of his plays at New York's Signature Theatre. He recalls telling Greenblatt that the project wouldn't be fun unless the pair wrote a play together – and then asking Greenblatt if he knew of any lost plays by Shakespeare.

"His answer?" says Mee, " 'Oh yes: 'Cardenio.' "

And so it goes...  Click the CSM link above to read the article.  The new staging will open May 10 at the American Repertory Theatre, in Cambridge, Mass.

But, is it really Cardenio?  Let's review the facts as given in John Freehafer's 1969 PMLA article "Cardenio, By Shakespeare and Fletcher" (JSTOR stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261138):

"During 1612-13 Shakespeare's company twice acted a play called Cardenno or Cardenna at the court of James I. In 1653 Humphrey Moseley, who had acquired manuscripts of many unpublished plays of that company, entered in the Stationers' Register a play called "The History of Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher. & Shakespeare." In 1728 Lewis Theobald published Double Falshood, a play based on the story of Cardenio in Don Quixote, as "Written Originally by W. SHAKESPEARE; And now Revised and Adapted to the Stage By Mr. THEOBALD," from three manuscripts which he owned. Taken together, these facts indicate that Double Falshood may be an adaptation of an otherwise lost play by Shakespeare and one of his most eminent contemporaries."

That's pretty much all we have to go on.  The most fantastic "fact" contained in this paragraph is that Theobald claimed to have THREE, no less, copies of the original.  This when no one else seems to have been able to lay their hands on a single copy.  Here is Theobald's explanation from the Preface to the 1728 edition:

"It has been alledg’d as incredible, that such a Curiosity 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 Copies) that this Play was given by our Author, as a Present of Value, to a Natural Daughter of his, for whose Sake he wrote it, in the Time of his Retirement from the Stage. Two other Copies I have, (one of which I was glad to purchase at a very good Rate,) which may not, perhaps, be quite so Old as the Former; but One of Them is much more perfect, and has fewer Flaws and Interruptions in the Sense."

In the George II testimonial, Holles Newcastle says that Mr. Theobald "with great Labour and Pains, Revised, and Adapted the same to the Stage" and Theobald himself says he came to the actors "as an Editor, not an Author," and that "...a Theatre cannot always subsist on old Stock, but that the Town requires Novelty at their Hands. On the other Hand, they must be so far Judges of their own Art and Profession, as to know that all the Compositions, which are offer’d them, would never go down with Audiences of so nice and delicate a Taste, as in this Age frequent the Theatres."  Now just how much editing and adapting Theobald did he does not say, nor can we guess.

The real problem is the subsequent wherefore.  Theobald says, in the same Preface, "I therefore think it not amiss here to promise, that, tho’ private Property should so far stand in my Way, as to prevent me from putting out an Edition of Shakespeare, yet, some Way or other, if I live, the Publick shall receive from my Hand his whole Works corrected, with my best Care and Ability. This may furnish an Occasion for speaking more at large concerning the present Play:"  And that is just the problem.  When Shakespeare did come to put out his edition of Shakespeare in 1733, for the owners of that "Private Property," Tonsons, he did not include Cardenio in his edition.  It is difficult to see why not, since ownership of the copyright cannot have been the issue.  If he really believed he possessed original Shakespearean material, why did he never produce it in a collected edition?  I know arguments have been made in favor of Theobald, but this seems to me a powerful objection.

Here are links to the text of Double Falsehood for the curious:

• Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers, a careful reading and transcription of the work by John W. Kennedy.
• The original edition is also available at Google Book Search.
• An Internet Archive edition of Miscellaneous Plays and Farces, (1761-1775) contains a copy of the Third Edition of Theobald's Double Falshood (dated 1767, the last play in the book).

Whatever our conclusions about Cardenio, I think we can rest assured that 1.5 million dollars has been well spent... At any rate, it was good for an economy here or there. 

Comments

[Lis Riba]

I saw it. I've blogged my review. It's basically a piece of fanfic with delusions of grandeur.

Re:Theobald, have you seen (or are you interested in) Kukowski's essay on how "large parts of [Double Falsehood] are distinctively Fletcherian"?

After a bunch of textual evidence, he concludes that "[t]his does more than suggest Fletcher's presence in the play: it makes it clear that the play cannot be a forgery (unless, that is, Theobald had inadvertently forged the wrong writer); if the play is not a forgery, then the case for it being a relic of Cardenio is very strong. ... Had The Two Noble Kinismen never been published in the form we have now; had instead Theobald revised and adapted Davenant's The Rivals and claimed -- in good faith -- that it was by Shakespeare, we would no doubt have had the same debate about that play as we have had about Double Falsehood. We would have a play in scenes some reminiscent of Fletcher, but with no evidence of Shakespeare's hand."