Cardenio – The Lost Play

Cardenio – The Lost Play

We know that 'Cardenio' as a play existed. We know that it was written as a collaboration between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. We know that it was probably written about 1612 and it appeared in the performance list in 1613.

When the plague hit London badly in 1608, the King’s Men had to tour the provinces for almost 6 months. On top this, the Burbage family had started to suffer huge loses in London particularly with their theatres including the Blackfriars Theatre. Late in 1608, the ownership of the Blackfriars Theatre was re-organised into a new partnership arrangement between the Burbage family and the King’s Men. The new ownership arrangement for the Blackfriars Theatre included the financial partners of Richard Burbage, Cuthbert Burbage (non-acting partner), Thomas Evans (theatre manager agent), John Heminges, Henry Condell, William Sly, and William Shakespeare. When Sly died early in 1609, his shares were split among the other partners. When the all of the theatres re-opened in May of 1609, this saw substantial money coming into the King’s Men from both the Globe and Blackfriars. This meant that by 1612, Shakespeare had substantial shares in two theatres along with receiving the income coming in from his many land holdings in Stratford upon Avon. It is likely at this point that Shakespeare, started arranging for a smooth transition into retirement. The problem was that a substantial part of the success of the King’s Men lay with Shakespeare himself and the company having a house playwright who could write good and sometimes great plays quickly and prolifically. Enter John Fletcher.

Shakespeare probably hadn’t got on well with John Fletcher initially. Firstly, Fletcher was a Cambridge man and Shakespeare had had an acrimonious relationship with some ‘University Wits’ like Marlowe, Greene and Nashe. Secondly, Fletcher’s work with Beaumont on plays using companies of boys around 1605 had also not enamoured him to Shakespeare. When Fletcher started to collaborate with Ben Jonson, Shakespeare probably started to take Fletcher more seriously and when in late 1611, Richard Burbage suggested John Fletcher be contracted as a second playwright to the King's Men, Shakespeare’s only probable only condition was that John Fletcher not be made a partner in the King’s Men.

Sometime around the beginning of 1612, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher started to collaborate on a play which was to become known as ‘Cardenio’. No copy of this play exists but it is known to have been performed a number of times including in August of 1613 by the King’s Men at Blackfriars Theatre and is listed in the Stationer’s Register in 1653 as being attributed to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. They probably based the play around the character of Cardenio in Miguel Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’ which portrays Cardenio as a young male who lives in Morena and is being driven slowly to madness.

The style of the piece was probably ultimately a comedy (in the Shakespearean sense). The story of the play probably involved showing the wealthy Cardenio who lives in Andalucia. He is in love with Lucinda, a girl he grew up with and who comes from another rich family of nobility. Lucinda’s father is not eager for them to marry and Cardenio’s father also is not keen on the marriage. The Duke summons Cardenio to court and Cardenio asks Lucinda to wait until he returns so that they can marry.

This section of the play may have involved Cardenio going away to a war or wars for the Duke and probably this accounts for why the play is sometimes referred to by the title of 'The History of Cardenio'. When he returns to court after fighting in wars for the Duke, Cardenio befriends the Duke’s son, Fernando, who reveals that he is in love with a girl not of nobility. Cardenio tries to help Fernando and perhaps arranged some meeting between Fernando and his love. Cardenio is well received at the court and the Duke's son and him become good companions but Cardenio does not know how to advise Fernando on what to do about his love.

The piece then probably involved, Cardenio and Fernando wooing their respective girls. This involved writing love poetry in secret maybe like in 'Love's Labour's Lost'. Some of Cardenio’s poetry is found by the Duke and Cardenio is embarrassed and requests that the Duke release him from service. Cardenio returns to his father. He proposes to Lucinda but he thinks she has been disloyal. Cardenio becomes mad with jealousy and a number of 'Othello' style speeches were probably inserted at this point. Then, at the altar, Cardenio takes on a jealous madness which drives him to falsely accuse Lucinda at the wedding of infidelity. At this point the play was probably a bit like 'Much Ado About Nothing'. Fernando and his love probably find the person who damaged Lucinda's reputation and the play probably ended with a double marriage of Cardenio and Lucinda and Fernando and his love. The play was a love story with elements as passionate as ‘Romeo and Juliet but with points of as tragic as ‘Othello’ but with characterizations similar to 'Much Ado About Nothing'. The play was well received and apparently many performances were done. But the story does not stop there. 

In 1727, Lewis Theobald (English writer, editor and literary critic) announced that he had obtained three Restoration manuscripts one of which he claimed was Shakespeare and Fletcher's 'Cardenio'. He rewrote and 'improved' the text and attempted to publish them as 'Double Falsehood or the Distrest Lovers'. For some reason the publishing was stopped (some claim through disputes with the owner of the rights to Shakespeare). Theobald would not publically display the manuscripts so by 1732, it was widely assumed that Theobald had faked and manufactured the manuscripts himself. 

250 years later, a number of people had become interested in the manuscripts again. During the 1990's, interest in Theobald's work was looked at in a whole new light. English historian and broadcaster Michael Wood created a program which was aired in 2003 which reinvigorated interest in the 'Double Falsehood' manuscript. In 2008, Professor Brean Hammond started working on a version of 'Double Falsehood which appeared in the Arden Shakespeare series in 2010. In 2011, the Royal Shakespeare Comapny presented a version of 'Double Falsehood' under the title, 'Cardenio - Shakespeare's 'lost play' reimagined'. In 2012, Terri Bourus directed Gary Taylor's "unadaptation" of Theobald's adaptation of 'Cardenio'. Taylor came to believe as he worked on this project that Theobald had used Shakespeare and Fletcher's original manuscript. Then in 2013, Academic Ryan L. Boyd, at the University of Texas, Austin Campus, assisted by James W. Pennebaker, subjected 'Double Falsehood' to stylometric tests using psychological theory and text analysis software. They surprisingly found that on every measure bar one, Shakespeare was the most likely author of the text. The indicators were particularily strong for the first half of the play. The results of the study were published in the journal 'Psychological Science' in 2014.