A lovely edition of a play with a checkered past. Hammond's Arden edition is as solid as any of the wonderful Ardens, discussing in depth the history of the play. Hammond is clearly on the pro-Shakespeare side, and the argument convinces me too. Not an amazing play by any standards (although the various background information explains a lot of why this may be), but a fascinating entry into the complicated 400 year legacy of William Shakespeare. ( )

A belated addition to the "year of Shakespeare", due to the debated authorship (a debate I find I have little actual interest in). I found the play actually quite interesting, and liked many of the characters, especially Julio, Leonora, and Camillo. A bit of the rehash of the ol' tropes, and some weird holes and pacing things, but I think it could make a great production, and there were some good lines and scenes. For some reason the whole forgiveness/reconciliation thing with Henriquez didn't ruin the rest of the play as much for me as the similar scene in Two Gentlemen of Verona did-- not sure why.

The scene with Violante and the Master may actually the scariest moment in Shakespeare (if this is Shakespeare) that I remember, because of how little I suspected it -- the convention is that nobody recognizes the girl in boy's clothing, but the Master identifies her as a girl and a potential object of lust, and turns out to have been essentially in disguise himself as a harmless unnamed extra, when instead he was a terrifying creep.

Need a prequel about whatever the hell actually happened with Don Fernand and his wife.

Thanks for the book, Neal! ( )

First performed in 1727, Cardenio or Double Falsehood was based on a play originally written by William Shakespeare. This significant new edition traces the elements of his work to be found in the text we have today, opening up fascinating questions and ideas for all students of Shakespeare.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1418060.html

The play was produced in 1727 by Lewis Theobald, who claimed to have somehow come by a lost manuscript of Shakespeare's late play Cardenio, based on an episode from Don Quixote. It's a little odd that there is no character called Cardenio in Double Falshood, the name of the character having been changed to Julio - by Shakespeare, or by Theobald? The manuscript itself has been long lost, believed destroyed in a fire in 1808. So a reasonable doubt has been hanging around the play since 1727.

Myself, though not an expert, I'm reasonably convinced that most of the first half is by Shakespeare - no particularly memorable quotes, but there's a feeling of the old master keeping his hand in. But I also suspect that Theobald edited it down - the play is much shorter, and the plot less convoluted, than we normally get with Shakespeare. A lot of the second half is clearly Theobald rather than Shakespeare or Fletcher, and the switch to eighteenth-century rather than seventeenth-century idiom is occasionally jarring.

To today's reader, the most disturbing aspect of the play is the rape of Violante by Henriquez, which takes place off stage between Act One and Act Two. Act Two then follows both Henriquez, full of guilty bluster, and Violante, injured and looking for escape, and it's in this very uncomfortable pair of scenes that one actually feels Shakespeare at work to convey the characters and feelings of two people, one of who has done something brutal and awful to the other. The rape is Shakespeare's invention; in the original Cervantes story, Dorothea is quite clear that she was seduced (and indeed married) by Fernando, who has deceived and abandoned her, but is not accused of assault. Today's readers will be squicked by the ending of Double Falshood, in which Henriquez is made to marry his victim Violante; they will be even more squicked by the eighteenth-century epilogue wondering what Violante was making such a fuss about.

I do wonder if this very uncomfortable theme was part of the reason that the play was lost. The First Folio includes several Shakespeare plays for which there is no contemporary record of performance, whereas it is known that Cardenio had several stage runs in 1614 and after; if Heminge and Condell had wanted to include it, they surely could have tracked it down. On the other hand a couple of the other late plays are also missing, so it may simply be that Heminge and Condell had better access to the earlier archives (or indeed that our records of missing plays are better for the later period). ( )