Download Not Doing Anything to Shakespeare

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Conclusion:
So What Is the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?
Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous and Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood
Henriquez: “This forgery
confounds me!”
Duke: “Read it, Roderick.”
Lewis Theobald, Double Falsehood,
5.2. 177 (Arden p. 295)1
Prithee, be gone, and bid the bell
knoll for me.
I have had one foot in the grave
some time.
Lewis Theobald, Double Falsehood,
3.3.68-69 (Arden, 249)2
What Shakespeare Didn’t Write, Or What Will Wills
Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011) is not the worst thing you can do to
Shakespeare. Nor, for that matter, is Lewis Thebald’s Double Falsehood. Emmerich
is best known for his disaster films—Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow,
2012—and Anonymous is not only a disaster film, it is a disaster as a film. It is
confused and incoherent. We go back four years earlier, then forty years, then …
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where are ? Oh, OK . . . . I guess. Correctly spelled, the film’s title is actually
Anonymess. Yet the film’s messiness has nothing to do with cinematic incompetence.
The film had a huge budget. The messiness has to do with the title of the film, with
what happens when you deal with authorship controversies as conspiracy thrillers
and detective mysteries based on an anonymous writer. Anonymous is in many
respects a failure when it comes to the authorship question. The fails to give any
forensic evidence that Oxford wrote Shakespeare. It is not historically accurate.
Marlowe is still alive when Hamlet is performed, for example. Moreover, the least
plausible elements of the play, which make up most of it, have nothing to do with the
authorship Oxford turns out to be the bastard son of Elizabeth, and they in turn have
a bastard son, the Earl of Southampton. (Shakespeare murders Marlowe, by the
way.)
A value judgment is even more difficult pass on Double Falsehood because no one
any say what the play really is: an adaptation of a lost play by Shakespeare and
Fletcher named The History of Cardenio aka Cardenio a Cardenna that was never
performed? A forgery by Lewis Theobald? A multi-authored palimpsest of a lost
manuscript, a revised Restoration version (for which there is no evidence), and
Theobald’s edition as the Arden editor believes? According to Hammon, Double
Falsehood is not a forgery, but a composite text: “Freehafter postulates that
between the original and Theobald’s version was an intermediate version prepared
in the Restoration. With Theobald’s own further alterations, what we now have is a
palimpsest or pentimento—nothing that is straightforwardly ShakespeareFletcher.” Of course, Hammon’s metaphor of the palimpsest has no textual referent.
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And were Hammon to follow out the logic of his metaphor, he would arrive that the
text he has edited is indecipherable, unreadable.
While Anonymous is a really badly made film and the Arden third series edition of
Double Falsehood may have rendered the text unreadable, we think both the film
and the edition attention because of the way it shows how bibliographical codes of
authorship attribution, codes that inform the Shakespeare authorship controversy,
are based on shared genres of murder mysteries, conspiracy thrillers, and detective
fiction. These codes and the legal model of textual forensics and character criticism
to which they are attached continue to operate in Shakespeare editions of
Shakespeare and early modern dramatists, the Oxford Middleton edition being the
most noteworthy. Anonymous as and Hammon’s Double Falsehood are for us about
what happens when these codes cease to operate: anonymity as a default for
authorship turns character into an author who can’t sign and Hammon’s Double
Falsehood (the consensus view about it not being a forgery Hammon claims to
represent as an edition, turns character into “characteristic” criticism about what
happens when the title of a lost play replaces the author, we return to our earlier
discussion of textual faux-rensics in order to show that the normal routine of
resorting authors and texts (Middleton wrote The Revenger’s Tragedy, not Cyril
Tourneur) concerned with so-called documentary evidence are enabled by a
structure of pre-sorting, (everything is already fact, including what is obviously
inaccurate historically, within the diegesis of the film or of the editor).
We bring Anonymous and the Arden edition of Double Falsehood to bear on
Oxfordian / Stratfordian authorship debate, particularly on attempts like James
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Shapiro to stop proposing that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote
Shakespeare’s plays. To show that Oxfordians are delusional (and they are
delusional, of course) is to miss the ways in which the Shakespeare canon is no
longer determined by the kind of authorship and forensic evidence to which
Stratfordians cling as fast as do Oxfordians. Whereas Oxfordians and Stratfordians
want to determine who wrote Shakespeare, both Anonymous and the Arden Double
Falsehood are concerned with what an author did not write. What is most evident is
what is most radically missing: the signature in Anonymous and the play Cardenio in
Double Falsehood. Whereas anti-Stratfordians have always proposed there have a
single author of Shakespeare’s plays (Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford, and so on), Hammon
more ecumenically allows that all authors who have ever been said to have had a
hand in Cardenio may be included.3 Only Shakespeare’s “presence” (160) in Double
Falsehood matters, detectable through “characteristic” that effectively make the play
Eucharistic. Shakespeare’s body and blood are in there somewhere. The
conjectural emendation of editing practice adopted by Theobald and restricted to
local cruxes has now morphed and expanded into what Hammon calls “conjectural
reconstructions of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio (2010, 48).4 By positing a
lost Cardenio, Hammon and his allies permit themselves to do what they want,
namely, nothing at all to Shakespeare.
4
From Folio to Olio: The Missing Cipher
Like Anonymous, Double Falsehood does not operate through the biobibliographical
codes through which authors and titles of texts are connected. Or to put it both
more paradoxically and more accurately, both the Emmerich film and Cardenios
operates by departing from them. Brean Hammon, the editor of the Arden Third
Series Double Falsehood (2010), and Roger Chartier in his book on Cardenio, both
mention a number of novels, murder mystery and science-fiction thrillers that
concern Cardenio: Jaspser Fforde, Lost in a Good Book (2002), sci-fi, 131; J. L. Carrell,
The Shakespeare Secret (2007), 133; Jean Rae Baxter, Looking for Cardenio (2008);
David Nokes, The Nightingale Papers (2005), 132;
To be sure, these works get little more than a mention and a plot summary as
they are relevant to Cardenio. Hammon stops his increasingly wild speculations by
drawing a line between his edition of Double Falsehood and genre fiction about
Cardenio: “It is time to time to stop, or I will be in the terrain of The Shakespeare
Secret (2007), J.I. Carrell’s murder mystery thriller-of which more later.” (2010, 8).
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And neither Gregory Doran’s book Shakespeare's Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio and
Gary Taylor and David Between Cervantes and Shakespeare are the most recent
additions include any work on the mass market fiction and literature concerned
with Cardenio. Nevertheless, the purpose of the Arden edition and current
scholarship is not to recover Shakespeare’s original by purging Double Falsehood of
alterations made by Theobald (assuming the text is not a forgery) and but to
constitute “Cardenio” as a crypt, a sort of coffin that is housed in different texts.
Consider the Arden Double Falsehood for a moment.
By giving ground on questions of evidence, Anonymous and reconstructions and
editions of Cardenio can engage in groundless, playful speculation. But to be
legitimate, scholarly (Stratfordian) speculations about Cardenio require a kind of
double book keeping: some kinds of play are legitimate and others aren’t, and the
distinction between them is based on the non-existence of the referent, the lost play
or the lost manuscript.
Instead of integratioionists versus disintegrationists (1930s) who argue over which
single author wrote what text or what part of which text, conjencutral emdners
versus uneditors, we now have reconstructionists versus attributionists, and
attributionists include both Oxfordians and Shakespeareans (and Baconias,
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Marlovians, and so on). There is nothing polemical about reconstructionists,
however, as there was about conjectural emendation as restration, rescue form
corruption or disintegrationism. Cardenio summary included in the Norton (2007),
but not Double Falsehood. Other lost plays EK. Chambers names are not included in
the Norton.
By disappearing Shakespeare and replacing his name with the title of a play, be it
Cardenio or Double Falsehood, Shakespeareans have managed to create something
like an Oxford wrote Shakespeare cottage industry of their own, the difference being
that Oxfordians still remain focused on who wrote the plays while Emmerich,
Hammon and others who think Double Falsehood contains a ghost of Cardenio are
concerned by what Shakespeare didn’t write.
Like anonymity in Anonymous, the “lost play” aka Cardenio aka Double Falsehood
serves in work as a sort of open coffin to which may be added more treasure. Critics
are feel to reconstruct it, revise it, as they now believe Theobald probably / no
doubt did.
THE HISTORY OF CARDENIO
By
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher
Adapted for the eighteenth century stage as
DOUBLEFALSEHOOD
OR
THE DISTRESSED LOVERS
By
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Lewis Theobald
For Hammon, the point is not to decide on authentic or what is forged or to sort out
who did wrote what, as is the case in editions of Pericles, for example, but to create a
template that graphically connects title and authors that just as graphically divides
them the adapter (and editor). In addition to the Arden edition of Cardenio, Gary
Taylor’s reconstruction, Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio project, and other
reconstructions repeating what Theobald did on the title page of his edition:
attribute an author to the original play and then name yourself as adapter. There is
no graphic unconscious, only a graphic conscious for editors and reconstructors
alike.
This biobiliographically normalized template then licenses speculation that
necessarily borders not only on fiction involving Cardenio but crosses over into on
the kind of Oxfordian speculations about authorship presented as givens of
Anonymous, givens rather than facts presented as proof. Whereas Theobald claimed
he had published a “newly discovered” play by Shakespeare, the Arden editor and
others who share his view inadvertently advertise their reconstructions of a newly
lost (again) play and fabricate plays they suppose existed.
Not Doing Anything to Shakespeare
Part of the looniness of the Arden Double Falsehood is that the editor forges a
consensus that is really nothing more than an alliance. Scholars who propose
different sources are discounted and scholars who continue to argue that DF is a
forgery are not even given minority report status. But that is mere rhetorical
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loneness that is symptomatic of the way that editor cannot propose that the edition
is speculative and that his characteristic based conjectural reconstruction / editing
is an experiment. The really looney thing is that the Shakespeare canon is turned
into a totally stable given to which nothing may be added. Doubel Falseheoood is
trated as being entirely external to it veen though it supposedly contains a laer of
play at least partly written by Shakespeare. Hammon samples the canon as a
database (and he turns the already “attributed” collected works in the same thing)
to which DF can then be comparaed and contrasted. It never occurs to Hammon
that if Shakespeare wrote Cardenio, he could have, probably would have added to
the database he uses as his Shakespearebase. So the algorithms and other math
done by “expert analysts” are based on an entirely bogus notions of canonical fixity
and literary production. They do not add up. Or they add up to zero, which is
presumably what Hammon and his editors want: null.
How would one read the missing supposedly “intermediate version”? Hammon
twice concedes that he does not have what he regards as decisive evidence that
Double Falsehood is not a forgery, namely, a manuscript. “Finding a manuscript of
the lost Cardenio would be the only way of proving beyond all doubt that Theobald
did not forget it. I cannot claim to have achieved that, but I hope that this edition
reinforces the accumulating consensus that the lost play has a continuing presence
in its eighteenth-century great-grandchild. . . . Only discovery of Theobald’s
manuscripts or reliable external evidence that they existed can clear his name
altogether of the stigma of forgery. I cannot claim to have found the manuscripts,
but to the documentary story it is possible to add a widow’s mite.” 8; 122. Just as
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manuscripts twice fail Hammon, so too does the documentary, or external evidence
that would separate what Hammon calls the “original” play from Theobald’s forgery
/ alteration. Hammon regularly refers to “Cardenio / Double Falsehood”, and even
this conflated / confused title disappears as Hammon frequently drops Cardenio in
favor of “the lost play.” The play (of whatever title is an “enigma,” a “conundrum.”
The “vestigial element” (putative) amounts to a missing prequel some scholars feel
there is a need for. (Their felt need is on the order of a scene in Macbeth with Lady
Macbeth nursing her baby.)
Curiously all of the Hammon adds to establish resemblances between Double
Falsehood and Shakespeare have nothing to do with Cardenio, of course, but to other
plays. He points to similarities between plays, in terms of plot, like Two Noble
Kinsmen and Two Gentlemen of Verona, or to plays like Cymbeline and Hamlet. But he
does not consider that Two Noble Kinsmen, based on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,
recycles A Midsummer Night’s Dream and that it has a framing prologue making
reference to Chaucer: “Chaucer (of all admir'd) the Story gives, “ (15). So why not
assume that like Ancient Gower in Pericles, Cardenio had a framing prologue as well
with Cervantes presenting it?
Only four lines are thought to be “unadulterated Shakespeare” see note 53-56, p.
209 of Arden and intro “Quoted in Carrell, Secret, 185. In those a contemporary
thriller writer hears genuine Shakespeare, and I am no the one to gainsay it.” 134
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We can focus on this novel since it is so central to Hammon in his introduction. We
can also justify attention ot these works because they are placed on a continuum
with Greenblatt and Mee , Talyor, etc in the Arden intro (same section) and by
Chartier. Mentioed summarized, invoked, but not read. The novel triangulates our
trianglualtion of Anonymous , Cardenio, and Oxfordianism (except it is
Bacoonianism in Carrell’s case).
Entre Cervantes y Shakespeare : sendas del Renacimiento = Between Shakespeare and
Cervantes : Trails Along the Renaissance
eds. Zenón Luis-Martínez, Luis Gómez Canseco.
Author: Entre Cervantes y Shakespeare: Sendas del Renacimiento (2004: Huelva,
Spain) Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006.
Robin Chapman, Shakespeare's Don Quixote: A Novel in Dialogue Book Now
Publishing, 2011
Interesting that the title is creates yet another aka for Cardenio and actually
misattributes authorship since only Cervantes can rightly be linked with a
possessive to Don Quixote. The conjunction of Shakespeare and Don Quixote, both
part of a title separated from the author (like film director Baz Luhman is from
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet) is obviously meant to be thought-provoking.
SHAKESPEARE'S DON QUIXOTE recreates what might have been: a lost play presented at
Whitehall Palace in 1613. That year Shakespeare's company provided 14 plays for a royal
wedding. One was called Cardenio. The original script has never been found but an 18th century
version, retitled Double Falsehood, may contain echoes of their work together. Cardenio's story
occurs in Don Quixote, Cervantes's universal best-seller, wherein the vexed teenager protagonist
encounters the would-be knight errant and his sceptical squire. If Shakespeare's attention was
drawn to the story's dramatic potential it seems likely it would have featured Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza, since by that time Cervantes's double act was appearing on stage and in
carnivals worldwide. Acting upon this hypothesis Robin Chapman's novel plays out today in a
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theatre of the mind. Among the audience the reader will find the attentive spirits of Shakespeare,
Fletcher and Cervantes who soon become involved with each other and in the performance.
Frazier, Harriet C. 2009. A babble of ancestral voices: Shakespeare, Cervantes and
Theobald, Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland & Co.,
Roger Chartier, Cardenio Between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost
Play
(Polity Press, 2012)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cardenio-Between-Cervantes-ShakespeareStory/dp/0745661858/ref=lh_ni_t
The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play
[Hardcover]
David Carnegie (Editor), Gary Taylor (Editor)
Oxford UP, Sept / November 2012
Shakespeare's Don Quixote: A Novel in Dialogue [Paperback]
Robin Chapman (Author)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeares-Don-Quixote-NovelDialogue/dp/0950671517/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338125056&sr
=1-1-spell
Double Falsehood Fever (see n53 on “fever” in Arden, p. 214AND THE FOLLOWING
SCENE CONTAINS TWO LINES THT OTHERS THIKN ARE THE FORGER’S
SIGNATURE. N8-17, p. 212 Arden
HAMMON (AND OTHERS) THNK THAT FORGERY HAD TO BEGIN WITH
THOBALD,THAT IF HE FORGED IT HE HAD no mANUSCRIPTS AND THAT IF HE
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ADAPATED IT THE MANUSCRIPTS WERE GENUINEE. BUT OF COURSE THEOBALD
COULD HAVE BOUGHT FORGED MANUSCRIPTS.
Editing by free association in Arden, n20 p. 219
Don Quixote itself has a frame narrative—it’s a found text framed as a translation
from Arabic, an archive (literally).
A la Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quioxote, we have Lewis Theobald, not
author of Cardenio.
Erdman, David V., and Ephim G. Fogel, eds. Evidence for Authorship: Essays on
Problems of Attribution. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1966.
[on this, the last page of the introduction, Hammon does a sort of reverse Oxfordian
argument—instead of trying to limit authorship to one writer, Hammon allows all of
the authors he mentioned on p. 1 to be possible co-authors]
“there is no reason, though, why [Cardenio being by Beaumont and Fletcher] should
rule Shakespeare out. As we have seen, Gildon reports the play as the work of all
tree authors. Neither, perhaps, is there a clear case of testing Beaumont’s authorship
that that, say, of Massinger. 160
[All Hammon seems to care about is that Shakespeare is one of those authors]
[Greenblatt and Mee add a frame narrative so that DF is a ply within the play, Arden,
130]
“may have been” 112
13
I need but loo upon his Lines,
And know the Master there’ stare quoted in Arden 109. [look as instaneous
recognition rather than reading.]
Michael wood quoted p. 105: Theobald’s Double Falsehood [sic] of 1728 was indeed,
as he claimed, based on a genuine text of the lost play.”
Hammon cites on McMullan, Henry VIII, 1960 and the inadequacy of the fingerprint
metaphor for attributing authorship based on style [it’s good] but then acts as if it
did not apply to DF.]
“indeed, Shakespeare might have been one of them.” 77
Pun on “Olio” cited by Hammon, 74
“a definite consensus has emerged among those who have studied the evidence
thoroughly, to the effect that Theobald’s adaptation is need what remains of an
otherwise lost Shakespeare-Fletcher collaboration called Cardenio.” 94
“There is no evidence that any manuscripts were conveyed to Watts—would that
there were!” 89
“An search for consistency . . . is doomed to failure.” 138
“It would be rash to make many judgments about Cardenio on the evidence of
Double Falsehood, given the adaptation the script almost certainly went at
Theobald’s hands and had probably already suffered before (see p. 50)” 43
“Let us turn now form these conjectural reconstructions of Shakespeare and
Fltcher’s Cardenio to the text we actually have in Double Falsehood. 48
A lost source play in the source play:
Griffiths traces the outline of a silhouette of a lost friendship between Henriquez and
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Julio he believes must have been in the source play. (Many students of the play have
felt the absence of some developed relationship between the pairings of men and
women who are central to the action. All the reconstructions considered above
build-up this vestigial element of the surviving play.) Arden, 158-59.
Cardenio enigma 156
Is one additional strand of evidence for the authenticity of his exemplars and
against the hypothesis that the entire project is a forgery. 138
“Quoted in Carrell, Secret, 185. In those a contemporary thriller writer hears
genuine Shakespeare, and I am no the one to gainsay it.” 134
Would any speaker’s work dislodge the consensual view expressed I this edition
that the play s a radical adaptation of a Shakespeare-Fetcher collaboration probably
already subjected to a layer of adaptive revision tin the restoration period? 159 [on
the very page Hammon mentions a “vestigial element” of a lost source play, he drops
it from the consensual view.” That view includes not a layer that does not exist, that
is merely postulated and then becomes “probably”; how can probability be
determined on the basis of pure speculation?]
Genuinely derives / possibly derives 105
“The metaphor of Double Falsehood containing the ghost’ of Cardenio is developed .
.” 104
His method is designed to use linguistic features impervious to scribal or
compositorial inference” 99 [ as if there were no unconscious n the author, no
revision, no graphic unconscious in the “original” mss.]
“Arguably there is something confused about reconstructing a lsot original ina form
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in which one knows it could never existed: a little like producing an identkit portrait
of someone who does not like like the criminal.” (129) [on Taylor’s criticism, faulted
for being sexually explicit, not permissible on early modern or Restoration stage.]
In addition to there being a debate over whether DF is a forgery, there’s a debate
over whether Pope ever accused Theobald of forging it. Pope says he did not.
Arden, 319; and there’s also a debate over whether Theobald three or four
manuscripts. . 23, p. 169 of Arden third
Appendix six of Arden third Series consists of facsimile four “extracts” of relevant
passages from Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote. 336-419.
Note 30-3, p. 169 refers the reader back to the authorship debate (see pp. 22-23).
Conjectural emendation (Theoblad) has morphed into conjectural reconstruction.
Roger Chartier’s book on Cardenio,
And Theobald’s case—the accusations he was a forger--suggests that you can’t add
treasure without digging your own grave.
And that appears to be the point. Unlike anti-Statfordians obsessed with
Shakespeare’s crypt,
In addition to the Arden edition of Cardenio, Gary Taylor’s reconstruction,
Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio project, and Roger Chartier’s book on Cardenio,
Similar books have been written about Cardenio. Murder mystery by J. L. Carrell’s
Gregory Doran,
These books are books restitution, recovery, and restoration projects that operate
through normal bibliographical codes and textual forensics. High tech computer
scene when John Hurt demonstrates the “real” truth of the Last Supper and, along
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with John Hurt, explains the cover up. In Da Vinci Code 2, the archive is where the
truth is.
All assassination plots fail (of Essex, of de Vere); all authors fail too.
On the blu-ray, as it loads, William Shakespeare’s name appears and then self-erases
form right to left. But Oxford’s name is nowhere.
Arden 3 Double Falsehood. The intro does various kinds of fails as it tries to sort of
Double Falsehood and its provenance. Is it a forgery? Is it based on Cardenio? Who
wrote Cardenio? Beaumont and Fletcher? Shakespeare and Fletcher? Did co-writing
actually mean co-writing the script or that one person might have an idea and the
other write it up? Is Middleton’s Second Maiden’s Tragedy really Cardenio?
“we have seen espoused in the history of the Cardenio / Double Falsehood
conundrum.” 91 The editor, Brean Hammon
“The Problem of Authorship, or What Did Theobald Know and When Did He Know
It?” Title of a subsection, 76
The editor, who is very bright and writes very well, ends up talking about the stage
history of Cardenio, even though he is editing Double Falsehood, because Gary
Taylor, Greenblatt and Mee, and so are using Double Falsehood as part of their
reconstructed Cardenios. The forensics model Hammon uses actually in the reverse
way it is supposed—precisely because the original text cannot be recovered and the
double of it cannot be authenticated. And the Arden cover drops the second of
Theobald’s titles: Double Falshood; Or, the Distresst Lovers, 134. But both titles are
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printed, modernized, same font size, on the title page.
Then on p 161 after the introduction, there’s a new title page:
THE HISTORY OF CARDENIO
By
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher
Adapted for the eighteenth century stage as
DOUBLEFALSEHOOD
OR
THE DISTRESSED LOVERS
By
Lewis Theobald
Theobald’s preface is worth reading:
“I came to them at this juncture as an editor, not an author” 170
Marchitello notes that there was a production of Cardenio /
Double Falsehood in Los Angeles in August 2002 . . ; though actually this was the
Hamilton ascribed Second Maiden’s Tragedy—by now capable, in its Spensierian
shape changing, of confusing scholars and the public alike.” 124
“Finding Cardenio has become something of a Holy Grail. If finding the play proves
impossible, the next best thing might be to write it oneself.” 124
In this section of the intro, Hammon talks about Taylor, Greenblatt and Mee, Doran,
as well as the novels, detective fiction. So writing “it” yourself blurs scholarship just
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as much as “the misleading packaging of Middleton’s play as Cardenio” 124 Hammon
effectively scapegoats.
Greenblatt’s and Mee’s Cardenio (2008) is in fact, like Middleton’s The Second
Maiden’s Tragedy, based o the Tale of Curious Imperitent’ (the story in Don Quixote.
. . )” 130
Scholars who examined the play in the period close to Theobald’s own life time were
unconvinced by it.” 94
The tide turned decisively in favor of the view that Double Falsehood harbors an
authentic Jacobean layer only after the publication of . . in 1969.” 95
Note the mixed metaphor of harboring a layer.
Footnote 1 on p. 123: “Hamilton’s perversely ingenious arguments (which includes
the claim that the manuscript of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy is in Shakespeare’s
hand) have convinced no scholars to date. . . They have, however, occasionally been
accepted by students and fringe theater directors, with the inconvenient and
misleading result that there have been a few recent revivals The Second Maiden’s
Tragedy under the title Cardenio. The one real link between this play and Cardenio
is that its subplot is a version of the ‘The Tale of the Curious Impertinent,’ told at the
inn in the interstices of the Cardenio plot in Don Quixote.”
He says the same thing later in the body of the text. Hammon’s argument is
structurally identical to Hamilton’s. One play harbors another in it. And he does not
account for the one real link between SMT and Theobald’s DF.
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questions raised by the state of the text, by documentary evidence bearing on the
issue of authorship and by recent scholarship. The commentary represents a full
attempt to assess the range and scale of Shakespearean and FLetcherian allusion, as
well as to gloss lexical and other difficulties.” 148
By this point, the editor defaults to the notion that the play really is an adaptation of
Cardenio and excises Theobald from authorship.
Although he presents all the evidence for the play being a forgery but still goes on as
if the forgery case were settled in Theobald’s favor.
perhaps the orphan of a previous play n60-63 221
Yet ne'er one Spring of Laurel graced these Ribbalds,
From sanguine Seew[ell] down to piddling T[ibbald]s.
Who thinks he reads when he but scans and spells,
A Word-catcher, that lives on syllables,
Pope, Satire, 129-30, cited by Hammon, 310
“If one of the original manuscripts on which Double Falsehood was based really was
in safekeeping in Covent Garden, its fate would have been sealed on the sad night of
19 September 1808, the theater building burned down. (122-23) No unaltered
copy of this Cardenio play is now known to survive, but something like Cardenio
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gained a Frankenstein’s monster’s existence when in 1994 Charles Hamilton argued
that the lost play and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, a manuscript play that the
commentators consider to be by Thomas Middleton, are one and the same.” 123
History of Cardenio is listed . . . but is not endorsed by a tick, 82
Erasing Authors / Un(en)titled:
Anonymous, Cardenio, Cover Stories, Protextion Rackets, and Canon Deformation
No revival
“’Pope . . thought, for a Line in a posthumous play of our Author’s which I brought
upon the stage’ (Shakespeare, 4. 187-8). Arden ed, 318
See the Anonymous DVD at the bottom right page for Doran's Cardenio book.
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I'm thinking that Cardenio is the academic version of the Shakespeare
authorship question. Shapiro wants to shut one kind of authorship
controversy while oblivious of another just like it or even worse
since it's Shakespeare (maybe plus Theobald, plus Cervantes, plus
Fetcher Plus Greenblatt and Mee plus Gary Taylor. It's like those
build a bears. Build a Shakespeare play called Cardenio.
One of the articles I sent you actually talks about getting the
Theobald out of the play before reconstructing it. Seems like an
obviously impossible task, esp given that Theobald may have written
DF. :)
Shakespeare as w/underwriter / undertaker.
Murder mystery by J. L. Carrell’s The Shakespeare Secret (2007), 133
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Jean Rae Baxter Looking for Cardenio (20008)
David Nokes The Nightingale Papers (2005), 132
Jpaser Fforde, Lost in a Good Book (2002), sci-fi, 131
Gregory Doran Shakespeare's Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio [Paperback]
The title and subtitle of Doran’s book actually do replace Shakespeare’s name with
another. There was a TV show with Michael Wood called In Search of Shakespeare
(2003). One of the sequences of that show, directed by Doran, involved a song from
Cardenio. See Arden, 332 and “Wood speculates that this is the second song heard
originally in The History of Cardenio but dropped by Theobald except in allusion.”
333 As I recall, Woods also gets into the authorship question.
Looking for Richard is also a quest film.
“Detective work on the lost play can approach it from at least two angles, one
conjecturing backwards form its extant derivative and one forwards from before it
was composed, since we possess not only Theobald’s adaptation but the original
play’s main source.” 35
[Here the play has taken on two frequently used titles—“the lsot play” and “the
original play” ; Hammon keeps naively resinscbing naïve noitons of the original and
the manscuript as direct, transparent proof, as if the provenance of a newly
discovered mss would not be questioned, as William Ireland’s forged mss was.
There is a very selective memory at work here. I think it’s interesting that Eric
23
Rasmussen’s book on the theft of the first folios (haven’t looked at it—no doubt it is
insane) is also on the same amazon capture I included above.
“responsibility for htat inspiration may lie as much with Fletcher as it did with
Shakespeare” 35 [Isn’t that an obvious statement?]
“Others, now and then, have something of an earlier date lies behind Double
Falsehood but that it not simply a lost play by Shakespeare. It is a play by James
Shirley, or by Philip Massinger, or by Fletcher. At very best, it is a collaborative play
by Shakespeare and Fletcher.” 1
This sentence seems like the closest to the history of the Shakespeare authorship
controversy. So does the history of consensus about Cardenio being by Shakespeare.
After lots of candidates, the anti-Stratfordians have settled on Oxford. There are no
more Baconians, and aonly a few Marlovians.
Maybe Emmerich will make Card-onymous as a sequel. Who wrote this play that's
lost? All we have is the title. Maybe the author. It fits the same conspiracy model
except that Taylor's "authentish" reconstruction (that's his witticism) has replaced
any notion of authentic. Orgel could write _Authentish Shakespeare_.
OXofrd conspiracy types are still working within the small old bibliographical and
cipher codes. The Cardenio types have reinvented the game. Sort of ultrafetishistic--
24
you get to have authentic and authentish at the same time. And you get to be a
creative writer, a playwright, you get to DO Shakespeare while doing nothing to him.
Maybe that's why you can play around with Cardenio but not Sir Thomas More or
Pericles, etc. Because Shakespeare isn't there, just the title of the play, as Chartier
puts it. I'm surprised Stallybrass isn't involved.
In any case, Cardenio is the exception that keeps the rules and norms of
biobibliographical criticism in place. There now has to be an excess, a surplus of
(not) Shakespeare inside the canon in order for various other kinds of normal
repackaging to seem scholarly (like Taylor's Middleton).
And the Arden Double Falsehood is a kind of exception within the exception. What
Hammon calls “documentary evidence” is a given, a kind of replacement for editorial
stability. The “evidence” functions as the “text” ordinarily does for editors. So
scholars like Chartier can also do “scholarly” things with Cardenio, and with authors.
Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare. The Arden intro is full of dead ends
(“maybe . . .”) that are like the withheld writing scenes in Anonymous. Hammond
says he is purposely being cautious. So I guess that’s the point: do nothing g to
Shakespeare, go nowhere, get stuck, turn your wheels, turn over in your grave . . .
(The coffin is central to Taylor, btw).
Intro pp. 3-8
25
“Moving further into the realm of speculation” 8
It is more likely that he was not a forger. 7
This edition complicates the story by suggesting Theobald could have known, and
probably did know, that there was a Cardenio play. . “ 7
This introduction posits some relationship between the lost play presented in 1613
and the play printed in 1728.” 3
Enigma, 3; “deepening the enigma” 20
Theobald claimed to possess no fewer than three manuscript copies in differing
states of legibility and preservation, of an original play by Shakespeare.” 3
[Hamman sounds like an Oxfordian—could becomes did—vague assertions of
“some relation” stand in for any actual evidence of a connection. “posits’ replaces
something like “decided on the basis of existing documentary evidence.” He also
ignores other forgeries of the 18th ct like William Ireland’s.
The fact that Theobald did not include it in his second edition of Shakespeare and in
the second preface to the second edition of DF thought that maybe Fletcher
26
collaborated, suggests that he was either less certain what he had, if he had anything
at all, was by Shakespeare.
Hammon also arbitrarily assumes that Theobald was not aware of the record of the
play of 1613. Malone announced it after Theobald died, Hammon notes. See p. 6 But
Chartier notes how popular Don Quixote was (doesn’t mention knight of the Burning
Pestle), so there’s no reason to think it is an amazing coincidence that Theobald
decided to forge a play based on DQ without knowing that a play in 1613 was also
based on it.
The main thing that emerges form pp. 3-8 (and the rest of the intro is that you can’t
demolish “destroy” 6 the forgery theory without also weakening radically the based
on Sh theory.
There may be a very direct ‘fossil’ of the lost play to be found . . “ 9
Not much doubt exists amongst modern scholars, then, that a play based on the
Cardenio story in Don Quixote existed and was performed.” 9
Anonymous botches revelation moments. Writing moments are about the
withholding of revelation. The film you didn’t see because it’s not there. A bunch of
teasers (the writing scenes) that the film that never got made. Two theater montage
scenes.
27
Impossible translation of secrecy—you can’t ever have the secret. Derrida and gift
of death.
Anon defaces authors and monarchs.
Title of film versus title of book: Anonymous: William Shakespeare Revealed
(Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook)
Roland Emmerich (Author)
Conspiracy films tend to build up the ego. You know. The character knows.
Abjection of authorship—no one is a success, really. Shakespeare is a fraud; Jonson
gets shut out from the Globe; the playwrights—dekker, Marlowe—are always
spectators.
For its strangeness, it is still bibliographically driven.
Shakespeare recovery projects. The
Non compus mentus
The movie is a collage of images which don’t quite become a conspiracy—there’s no
obvious conspiracy—why does Elizabeth refuse to allow
If there was a real conspiracy film the title wouldn’t be anonymous. Anon disavows
an identification of anyone as the author. The title correctly describes with the film
presents but it doesn’t allow us to translate the bits into stable bibliographical
28
codes.
The film is bad, but it’s bad because it is about something interesting.
Shakespeare’s sister was anonymous (a woman).
Marcie North’s book—good historically but no theory—inattention to play, no
Derrida.
John Law, Mess and social research
Most of what we write a reduction of a larger mess.
Cover up to “protextion” racket –recovery a recovering or covering over or cover up.
Recovery builds in conspiracy. Protection seems like cover up. the injured author—
which is literally wounded in the though, wounded by having his son taken away,
Not something like that Middleton project, not something bibliography inclined—
how do you keep a book off its shelf?
Let's get one thing perfectly clear at the outset. This is a "Da Vinci Code" clone. Live
with it! It is better than Dan Brown's original--but, then, what isn't?
As has been noted elsewhere in these Amazon reviews, perhaps the most interesting
portion of this book is to be found in the Author's Note at the back of the volume. In
it, Dr. Carrell tells how she came upon Shakespeare's possible lost plays in E. K.
29
Chambers' magisterial four-volume study, "The Elizabethan Stage."
"I began to wonder," she writes, "what would it be like to find one of these plays.
Where might one unearth such a thing? What would the moment of discovery feel
like? And what would the finding do to the shape of one's life--apart from the
obvious bestowal of instant wealth and fame?" [Hardback edition, page 407]
"Interred with Their Bones" is Dr. Carrell's 405 page attempt to answer the
questions generated by her reading of Chambers.
The format of the answering takes the form of an academic quest generously laced
with copious amounts of homicide, general looniness and sight-seeing. The object of
the quest, the McGuffin, is a manuscript of a play that was produced before the
English royal court in 1613 under the name "Cardenno" or maybe "Cardenna" that
may or may not have been the same as a play registered in 1653 (but never
published) under the names of John Beaumont and William Shakespeare and called
"Cardenio."
The course to be followed by the protagonists is the one set out in that universal
guidebook for lunatic quests, "The Da Vinci Code." Faithful to its precepts, the
questors will find themselves beset by people who drop mysterious clues because,
for some unexplained reason, they refuse to express themselves in simple
declarative sentences. There are enough deaths to make one think that at least one
30
of the characters must be a second cousin to an unusually aggressive upas tree.
Naturally, commonsense is in short supply or there wouldn't be a book at all. (After
all, why should one waste breath talking to the cops merely because one's nearest
and dearest friends are dropping like flies: there are files to be rifled and planes to
catch!) And it need hardly be said that the whole is seasoned with regular lashings
of surprises, hair-breadth escapes, betrayals, revisions and then re-revisions of
relationships.
So far, so good. But what is a Brownian academic mystery without crackpot
theories? This book abounds in them, hardly a surprise considering the history of
Shakespearean scholarship. Included in the crackpot-iana, but by no means
exhausting the list, are theories about the skullduggeries of Jacobean aristos, the
origins of the play "Cardenno" or "Cardenna" or maybe "Cardenio," the identity of
the author(s) of what we call Shakespeare's works, the validity of Shakespeare's
sonnets as autobiographical material and the identities of the Dark Lady and the
Fair-haired boy who shared the name "Will" with the poet. Ee-haw!
The presentation of the book is competent enough. Dr. Carrell's prose is
professionally adequate, although memorable or witty passages--if any--are few and
very far between. The crackpot theories are well and fairly presented, some at
considerable length--but what's the value of a mad theory in an academic mystery
that isn't long-winded, eh? The theories, themselves, are mostly old-hat to anyone
who has ever dipped into the wilderness of mirrors that is the "Anti-Stratfordian"
31
controversy.
Oddly, though, there are occasionally jarring little quirks of carelessness that
seemed strange from a Ph.D. in literature with a bent for Shakespeare. For example,
the phrase, "All that glitters is not gold" or variations on it, appears several times in
the book. Not once does the supposed academic superstar heroine ever note that
Shakespeare actually wrote "All that glisters is not gold." Even worse, is an old letter
bearing the following dateline: "20 May 1881, The Savoy, London." I can't help but
think that the heroine might have been disposed toward doubt about the contents of
this missive had she realized that the Savoy Hotel in London opened its doors to the
public for the first time on August 6, 1889.
Then there is a little motif that I suspect was originally intended to lead somewhere
but simply peters out in the published version of the book: fires are started in two
different cities, each of which covers the theft of a Shakespearean First Folio. Fair
enough. But the folios are casually described at beautiful books. Anyone who has
ever taken a good, close look at a Folio or even a facsimile of one will immediately
realize that it is a perfectly dreadful-looking book, a distinctly inferior example of
the printing art of the early 17th Century, as is amply demonstrated by the
willingness of its owners to chuck it out when the much better looking Second Folio
was published some years later. In one of those fires, it is clear that a Gutenberg
Bible displayed beside the First Folio had been destroyed, a fact that elicits not the
slightest hint of regret from anybody in the book. In fact, a First Folio is a mere
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collectible. Its true (as opposed to monetary) value resides solely in its text,
something that has been relentlessly examined and reproduced for the better part of
four centuries. If all the First Folios were to be burnt, the world would not be
appreciably worse off. A Gutenberg Bible, on the other hand, was a magnificent
work of art on the day it was first printed and remains so to this day. The loss of one
out of the survivors of the original printing run of about two hundred would be an
artistic catastrophe.
Finally, there is Dr. Carrell's peculiar omission of the fact that a claim was made in
the late 20th Century that "Cardenio" had actually been found. It was identified as
an old play that had never actually been lost, a piece traditionally attributed to
Massinger under the title of "The Second Maiden's Tragedy." Admittedly, the claim
has not exactly taken the academic community by storm. On the other hand, it hasn't
generated a string of murders--yet.
This is a first novel about a lunatic academic quest. It is generally more intelligent
and respectable than "The Da Vinci Code," rather less over-hyped and breathless,
and just about as illogically plotted. For devotees of academic puzzlers, it's probably
worth four stars, but for the general mystery reader, three will do.
Perhaps we could juxtapose Cardenio and Anonymous. Why the missing
play has such fascination and why Anonymous blows the Oxford was
Shakespeare industry up. Oxford wasn't even Oxford! Kind of a weird
Nemo authorship logic in both cases. Author goes missing as other
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authors come in as true author (both Cervantes and Theobald); real
author is not the real person the author is supposed to be (even the
constant shifting from young to old actors playing the same character
plays out this doubleness, as does the Jacobi frame and the hidden
manuscript frame. A double double falsehood.
:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cardenio/index.html
Anonymous is an original film. There’s nothing else quite like it.
Unauthor -ability as a kind of attachment disorder of title to medium and of media to
author. The most basic paratextual information—title and author—are in play.
There is one case where Dekker, in the audience refers to his Shoemaker’s Holiday,
and Marlowe says it was a bomb. He also pronounces the end of Ben Jonson’s career
after he is arrested and the play closed (this scene recalls the scene in Shakespeare
in Love where the theater is closed but Elizabeth reopens it). Oxford wrote in his
father-in-law’s name, he says. So Jonson says that’s not official, but de Vere shuts
him up with “Of course, not. But you’re free.” So anonymity is a kind of get out of
jail free card.
There’s no real tomb in the play, no burial place, no archaeological dig (THAT might
have worked as an opening frame). There’s encryption without a crypt. The film’s a
cipher. There is no Shakespeare Code the title of a book).
34
Anonymous is about the “death of the authored,” as it were, of the text as dead and
gone, buried, stained. There's no possibility of resurrection in the film, just
insurrection. It's like the de Vere as anonymous (never “Shakespeare”) installs a
series of political effects that play out tragically.
All writing is effectively anonymous, and all heirs to Eliz are bastards.
So authorship is never legit; nor is politics in the narrow sense. Intrigue and
insurrection. That's all you get. Very Jacobean in a way.
Anonymous is really about Hamlet insofar as the film can be said to be really about
anything. Its about Hamlet as a play about ghostwriting. It’s about the ink stain as
revelation. “the inker’s hand.” Also blood on one’s hand. There’s a visible link
between ink and blood stains when the young de vere kills the thief who stole his
papers. The film has no interest in attaching text to author. It shows papers and
authors in proximity, but we never even get the title of a play, not the way that is
shut, not A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not even the sonnets. Shakespeare’s name
and his works are connected by Jacobi is his opening monologue, but not one title is
mentioned. Nothing in the film about published plays, just about manuscripts in “his
own handwriting.” The film implies that the manuscripts by Oxford still exist.
Polonius parallel—cited by Jonson first in conjunction with torture to locate plays of
de vere; then closet scene re-enacted by de vere when a thief in the house steals
only some of his papers—it’s not clear whey he has taken a few papers and not all of
35
them.
There’s no play within the play. Instead there are a series of frames that really don’t
frame anything—they have no meaningful structure. There’s the Jacobi frame; then
the Jonson burying the plays frame; then a dissolve involving AMND performed
twice for Elizabeth (old then young); then an abrupt return to Jonson; and then we
go back to de Vere as a 16 year staying at the Cecil’s via a flashback of the younger
Cecil . Who knows what year we are at now. There is never a date to begin with—
so when we get “earlier” we get dating without a date.
The film is a kind of new historicist time travel hallucinogenic trip. Back in time four
years earlier, with Essex and Southampton plotting the Essex rebellion, then forty,
then the present when Eliz sees AMND at Oxford’s outside, then flashback of hers
seeing it as a young woman acted by de Vere as a young teen as puck’s epilogue in
the present morphs into a child who turns out to be de Vere reciting the rest of the
epilogue; she talks to de Vere, its author, then, back to the present as we go to a
curtain call in the theater, then to the Cecil’s talking, planning to send Essex and
Southampton off to Ireland from whence they shall never return!, and then back to
younger Cecil’s childhood (flashback) the older de Vere as teen at who knows how
many years earlier.
The internal time travel is more excessive than the external time travel of Hamlet 2.
The text marking years drops out, other conventions like dissolves to indicate
36
flashback kick in even though the flashback sequences are not shot as flashbacks.
The character is not actually having flashback. There’s nothing subjective or
interior; they are just as “objective” as all of the other sequences.
So 27 minutes into the film, we have three actors playing de Vere, two playing
Elizabeth, the same actor playing old Cecil (old in make up), two playing the younger
Cecil. Even the casting young and old characters is inconsistent.
The postal relay system in the film is all blackmail. Shakespeare blackmails his way
into taking over Jonson’s cover for Anonymous. But Anonymous is a bit like Nemo.
He’s a character. The film has to have the Elizabeth subplot in order to get rid of any
Oedipal rivalry between authors. De Vere has no rival, though Jonson whines to
Shakespeare that Oxford is an amateur. (In this way, the film differs significantly
from Shakespeare in Love, in which Marlowe is a rival and Webster is a parodic
future imitator.) Elizabeth says she loves the verses of Anonymous (that’s the name
she gives him—but before we can imagine that she’s thinking of anyone in
particular, like Oxford, we get the outdoor performance of AMND, then the indoor
with de Vere as Puck, and only afterwards is the child identified as de Vere. By that
point, one will likely have forgotten that she even mentioned “anonymous.”). All the
Oedipal stuff, question of origins, blindness, mourning plays out in relation to Essex,
one of her bastards, and de Vere. Essex knows he’s a bastard—refuses to let Eliz
name a Scotman as his King. She doesn’t want a successor. De Vere has no children.
His wife does not appear until way into the film. He mentions having the
37
unfortunate honor of being married to Cecil’s daughter when Jonson first is taken to
seem him after getting out of jail. De Vere does not realize that he is a bastard.
Incest. He is Oedipus, not in relation to authorship.
One could say that the film has nothing scholarly about it and be right. One could
say that scholarship has a lot in common with the psychotic hallucinations of the
film and be right too.
Theater becomes the site of rivalry between courtiers. Cecil is against it. Some other
courtier (Ralegh?) is for it. Cecil orders the theater closed for sedition. De Vere
wants to take advantage of it as a political medium, although he has no agenda—he
has no successor in mind nor no process of succession in mind either.
De Vere says some New Hist clichés like “all plays are political.”
He overhears the rebellion plot but advises Southampton not to take part in it. De
vere wants to avoid civil war. Jonson says he came to London to write plays because
“he wanted to change the world.”
When asked if he’s ever been arrested, he says “I write plays. Of course I’ve been
arrested.”
Anonymous is a play—marquee as Jacobi arrives late comes in through the stage
door. Stage dud cues theater. Jacobi speaks to the audience. Two flashlights shine
on him.
38
Not a single manuscript has ever been found. Actors getting dressed, sound effects,
tape recorder playing, Jacobi puts up umbrella as –we see it, water fountain above
him.
Our Shakespeare is a cipher a ghost et me offer a different story, a darker story.
Jacobi loos to his right, cut to an actor we’ve seen rehearsing running through Tudor
set. Solider with their flares lit, chasing him “Jonson, I know you’re in here. He
Jonson puts leather pouch and other papers he’s been carrying in an iron strong box
as the guard gives order to burn the theater. Jonson took out firework of a box while
in hiding. They go off as he
Carrying nothing but a quill and some empty pages.
You are Benjamin Jonson.
Ask him about the plays
Answer is a parody of Polonius in Hamlet—historical pastoral.
We’re interested in the plays of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. As he is
Hit in the face, flashes to the stage ad Shakespeare comes out on stage
Five years earlier—daylight and Oxford and Southampton go to the theater. A play
is going on—it’s The Alchemist. Jonson is reading the text behind the stage.
Shakespeare is acting. People laugh at itself to a character who happens to look
exactly like someone in the audience who gets up and leaves. Shakespeare a dunk.
“This play has been declared seditious by Edward Lord . It’s a comedy there’s
nothing seditious about. Man arrested in audience and then Jonson arrested too.
“that’s power.”
39
Since when did words ever win a kingdom.
Cecil corresponding with James VI—Essex plots with Southampton to support Essex
going on the throne. Oxford overhears the plot. The son of the Queen. That is
rumor. Everyone thinks he is her son.
What Essex contemplates will surely lead to civil war.” Oxford wants to do it
properly.
Cecil’s son is a hunchback. Southampton does not bow as does everyone else when
Elizabeth comes to court. Some man escorts her.
South presents her with a theater –dwarf announces his gift is a play. Cecil is
Comedy by whom?
By anonymous your majesty
Anonymous. I sooo admire his verse.
AMND is played outside—scene with Bottom singing as ass. Titania wakes—what
angel wakes me . .? If we
Forty years earlier as we go to puck and young Elizabeth. Puck is a child—all of the
actors are children; performance is inside. Cecil’s house. De Vere is Puck and also
the author. Elizabeth asks him to compose something on on truth.
He is not only a poet but wants to serve—We may have found your replacement,
Lord Cecil.
Then back to the present with “Benjamin Jonson” being called by a guard while
Jonson is in a prison cell. You’ve been released. You’ve got powerful friends now
don’t you.” He is puzzled. R On a boating rowing to De Vere’s house—looks like A
40
Man for All Seasons.
The Tudor rose. My father in law—Lord William Cecil. Married to his only daughter.
Politics, my play has nothing to with politics—all art is political, otherwise it would
just be ornamentation. In the garden labyrinth, Oxford gives him a script—or has a
servant give him. Under your name, Jonson. “In my world, one does not write
plays, Jonson. People
One performed at court, others never seen by a living soul.
I mean all of them.
I mean to make you the most popular and most monetarily successful. Servants
gives him a purse of money.
What about this play. And fairies and asses. Cecil recognizes that MND from his
son’s description. But the pay we saw n stage was not MND.
“Except one of Elizabeth’s bastards.”
You mean Essex. He despises us.”
Cecil with send them to Ireland—the Robert looks out the window and has a
flashback to his youth—Robert! Robert come here with some strange echoeing as
after some back and for the brief shots, we are in the past (who knows how many
years earlier).
41
The plays Oxford gives are not named, nor is the one play Jonson knows named,
though we are to infer that it is MND since that is the only play that has ever been
performed. But was it also the play? What is the play Jonson knows?
Cecil is anti-poetry. Essex is a Renaissance Man, a sort of Thomas More, an future
adviser or philosopher to the king is not philosopher king.
Robert discovers papers as Oxford in another room is overheard. Now he is older—
has a moustache—actually we don’t know who he is—he spills ink on the papers
that remains as he leaves the desk and the room.
Oxford goes to the same room, sees the ink spilled. There are lots of papers on the
desk. Why didn’t the thief take them? The thief is not Cecil. Much later, in a
different flashback, we learn that the man was Cecil’s agent.
The thief hides behind a curtain, his shoes show, he makes a noise—like Polonius.
So Oxford is a kind of Hamlet figure.
He stabs the thief, who then papers with the papers, now with blood on them.
Then cuts to the theater and actors taking a bow. Again, we don’t know what time
were in. The present? Esp, that is Shakespeare taking a bow.
Jonson surreptitiously drinks behind a leather case, apparently holding a text. He
says to Shakespeare he came to London to change the world. He quotes de Vere
saying he will make him the most popular. “He’s a complete and utter amateur.” He
leaves out de Vere’s statements about politics. He hires Jonson as a mercenary, a
42
relay. But Jonson wants to write himself.
Dekker Shoemaker’s Holiday—asks Marlowe in the audience.
Shakespeare says he will keep Jonson’s good name out of it. He says nothing abut his
own name He jests wants to get money.
I saw a problem this weekend—made me think f many things long past. [there were
weekends back then?]
Cecil then has a flashback from Elizabeth talking to Cecil and asking to if Edward
happy being married to Cecil
S daughter. yelling
“I cannot have my reputation soiled by this regrettable lack of control on your part.”
He has to marry Cecil’s daughter. Mozart requiem plays (similar to music in
Elizabeth)
Henry V by . . . no one. There’s no name on the title page, as if everyone expected
there would be. Marlowe is still alive. Oxford is there to watch the performance.
“two mighty monarchies”
Montage cross cutting to Essex riding horses in Ireland
“printing their proud hoofs in the receiving earth” holds out his foot. St. Crispian’s
speech; Oxford mouths the line. Henry touches the audience as if they were his
troops.
Jonson keeps looking over at Oxford in amazement.
Do you see? Do you see?
43
Death to the French Dekker: Down with the French, Down with the French.
Essex arrives as the audience takes a bow. And Shakespeare comes out.
Southampton.
“Playwright. Shakespeare grabs the play, puts finger in ink, comes out with a quill
and the text. Southampton does not get Oxford’s blessing to go to Ireland with Essex.
Oxford and Jonson exchange glances horrified.
You have no voice, that’s why I chose you.
You at least kept my name from it. And will continue you to do so. This is in the
sturdy, He has an archive of all of his plays Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and is drafting
Twelfth Night on his desk. It’s a
Then he sttels on Romeo and Juliet.
So his study is in effect a storage unit
Then he signs “William Shakespeare”
William Shake . . Spear!
Then he signs William Shake-speare.
His is a reworking of Shakespeare in Love. Two actresses for de Vere’s wife.
You’re writing again After you promised.
Why must you write.
The voices Ann the voices. I can’t stop them when they come
Only when I commit their voices to parchment is my mind freed. I would go mad
44
Are you possessed? Maybe I am.
Shakespeare does a parody of the balcony scene.
He wants the role of Romeo. Keep off the stage. Writers do not have time to act.
Shakespeare goes to the theater where the Capulet ball scene is in progress.
Do you se it scene a bit like play in the play with
I ne’er saw beauty til this night—goes to flashback of Elizabeth and Oxford dancing.
We very much liked your play tonight Henry V. Butt it’s not clear where she saw it.
Or why it was performed for her before it was performed on stage. She compares de
Vere to HV. He flirts with Elizabeth.
De Vere has ben to Italy—commedia del arte. Italian ladies take are not taken. Then
they sleep together. She is the taker, not the one who waits to be taken.
I cannot decide. Are you Prince Hal or Romeo? No, you’re Puck.
When she tells him to get out he recites O mistress mine he has a hard on and keeps
this is not hereafter as she goes down on what’s to come . .
Youth’s the stuff will not endure.
The maids love the romantic tragedies. That’s why
Then Twelfth Night poster with William Shakespeare on it.
Then Julius Caesar again with William Shakespeare properly spelled, a bit larger at
the bottom.
JC ends at the assassination
Macbeth—now Shakespeare’s name is at the center of the poster.
45
Then William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Shakespeare below it.
Polonius , performing first in globe then at court. Elizabeth nods. Cross cutting
between the two performances. Closet scene and Polonius, who looks like older
Cecil, is slain. Audience member IDs Cecil with Polonius.
To be or not to be. Rains and thunders. And lightning (as if Macbeth).
Dekker and Marlowe are still watching. Oxford
Seems like the end of the play. Standing ovation. Oxford nods to Jonson, then a
standing ovation, then Shakespeare comes on stage. Becomes a mosh pit. Over head
of him being carried by the crowd.
Marlowe reports, with a copy of the text, saying that Cecil was killed on stage—“not
literally”
You must compensate for your malformations.
Cecil gives letter from King James to younger Cecil. Ells him to write James and what
to tell him.
Essex will not return alive. This is how kings are made. So it was with Elizabeth. So
shall it ever be.
Like Essex, Edward must be removed. Then cuts back abruptly to Eliz pregnant (as
we have done before –and Edward? He must never know.)
46
You’re neither the first nor the last of her lovers.
Elizabeth wants to marry Essex after she gets married.
Make e a grandson, an heir
Jonson writing in a tavern. He has crumpled papers everywhere. Hard to write
after a play like Hamlet.
Marlowe tells Jonson he has informed on Shakespeare. You know he’s illiterate. He
can read. But the man never did learn to form his letters.
Careful, Kit. You’re beginning to sound like one of your plays.
You reported on me last year for Everyman
Cut to Southampton killing the assassin of Essex.
Cut to corpse of Marlowe.
Cut to fencing training with Oxford, guy is French. Boilieau. Cuts Oxford’’s thigh.
Oxford kills him. His Italian servant Francesco gets their afterwards.
Shakespeare is the one who killed Marlowe.
To bear baiting.
Shakespeare wears disguise and follows the servant. Just pull in there—like the taxi
joke in Shakespeare in Love. Shakespeare caught and brought to oxford.
I need more money. I’m addressing the writer of Hamlet and Juliet and Romeo, am I
not?
Shakespeare asks 400 pounds and he gets it. But de Vere never admits directly to
47
being the author. The purse he gets from Shakespeare is the same size Jonson got.
But that amount was never named.
Cut to two people in bed having sex under covers. No idea who they are. Turns out
to be young de vere and his wife. He is mad t Elizabeth=, she is consoling, two shots
of him writing, one very brief shot of hos writing a sonnet “Autumn big, with rich
entretes
Bearing the [???] then “
Lines are crossed out, phrases and so on. His fingers seen in close up ar al inky. SO
Eliz becomes the Dark Lady. Sort of. But she is vever mentioned. You have to stop
the DVD to read the poem de Vere is writing. This another moment of textual
withholding that aborts a conspiracy reading of Shakespeare while seeming to allow
for it.
The mob’s reaction to HV and hten to RIII is not controllable by the actors. Neither
actors nor auth have control. This woman, not his wife, apparently, tells him that the
queen had his child. Then his wife returns with a little girl. She sees the pregnant
woman leaving.
Cecil tells Eiz de Vere has gotten the lady pregnant. “Arrest them. Arrest them both.
“Bessie” is her name.
“Your whore gave birth last week.” Oxford is released but banished from court. Cecil
has to repeat his demand that Oxford go back to his wife
the name f my child-no the other one—Elizabeth’s. “There is no record that leads
back to you and the Queen. The foster parents never dead and they are dead.”
48
The Earl of Southampton is his son.
“Down n with the hunchback!” shouts from crowd at Robert Cecil. So he is kind of
Richard III.
Shakespeare doesn’t have to prove he can’t write because “We haven’t got ink” hen
Jonson tries to expose him.
De ere offers to mediate Essex and Elizabeth. I will send her not a letter but a book.
You will come with her loyal subjects Words, words, will prevail with Elizabeth, not
swords.
How do suggest I raise this mob?
Then he weies Richard III.
You had a poem published today. What you mean like a book?
Then cut to printing of Venus and Adonis. Then Shakespeare holding a copy and
reading it.
Ladies give a copy to Elizabeth. Has title but not author in the over,
Have you rad the book? He writes about m, how I took, how I adored him?
Who is my son? The Earl of Southampton.
Refuses James VI as her heir.
Mark Rylance is Burbage.
Only one performance of RIII. Performer it free to the public. Some anonymous
nobleman’s been paper.
49
No Jonson plays at the Glove, ever.
RIII will open the lobe, almost finished being built.
In revenge, Jonson goes to inform to the same guy Marlowe did; in William
Shakespeare’s version he is played as a hunchback.
Robert asked “Shall I close the theater?” No.
Now is the winter of discontent. . . “He’s Cecil he is” someone shouts from the
audience.
Again, cross cutting to Cecil
getting armed, de Vere crossing the Thames as RIII continues his monologue on
stage.
Then Clear the bridge.”
Edward promised a mob and we’ll have a mob.
Then cross cutting between Essex, de Vere, Elizabeth getting ready, primping before
the mirror.
The play ignites an insurrection.
They just yelll “Essex” over and over again as they hold their playbills up, as if Essex
were the real author of the play.
The mob are fired on at nearly point blank range; de vere waits; Essex goes to
Elizabeth and is surrounded; lightning and “it’s a trap!” Fire.
Essex gets Elizabeth away before de Vere can talk to him.
Essex yields.
50
Lots of Oxford looking through window shots, One after Jonso leaves Oxford; same
kind of shot after Shakespeare leaves, looks back as he holds up his purse with 400
lbs; One after Essex yields.
Elizabeth had several bastard children, not just . . .
Grandson of Henry VIII—had to be reared a nobleman. John de Vere agreed to
accept the task.
You caused this. Your head should be cut off, not his.
Oxford wears more and more eyeshadow.
Does he know?
He will never learn of it from me.
Elizabeth would never have slept with her own son. Perhaps she didn’t know.
It’s Oedipus without the recognition scene.
She gives up Southampton but says to de Vere
None of your poems of your plays will ever carry your name None.
Cecil gets Elizabeth to sign the Act of Succession—[points her finger at the word
James and throws out the paper. Cut to helicopter shot of her funeral. Cut to James
VI becoming James I. He and Cecil nod smiles.
51
Essex and Southampton exchange eye contact from behind a window before Essex is
executed in the tower of London.
Jonson comes in like actor playing Mercutio in Shkespeare in Love.
Oxford is writing in bed, surrounded by papers and quills. Shot of his text, but you
can’t read it. He covers it over with leather case.
He tells Jonson his autobiography; Robert Cecil ad told him hs father’s plans to make
de Vere king.
I strained to hear two hands. Your I never did
Promse me you will keep our secret.
All my writings, all my plays. All my sonnets. Keep them sae. Wait a few years and
hten publish them.
You may have vetryed me, but you will never vetray my works.
What are those? Wife asks Jonson.
Whilst your husband put ink to paper.
Voice-over to the Earl of Southamton, looks back at the hall (theme music sounds
like soundtack of Hero). We he finishes, de vere is dead and his wife covers up his
face with a winding sheet.
Then cut back to Jonson being tortured. Now we understand –sort of—why Cecil
52
wants the manuscripts.
But earlier, when we saw Jonson rleased by de Vere, it seemd like he was released
from the very scene of torture that we now return to. How he got into jail to be
rleased is not otherwise explained. So the opening and lcosing frame does double
time.
They were destroyed burned. Every word went up in flames when you torched the
theater.
To him I was nothing, a messenger.
He tells the truth. What is the referent of the truth?
Tat the mss were destroyed? Tat ocford was undeianle perfection.
Anothermontage with singing—as James arrives at court to a masque and Jonson
returns to the burnt out theater (Catholic luyrics? They’re in Latin). The box reflects
light on Jonson, like a computer screen.
We see Henry V and again the chorus reciting the prologue. James says he loves
theater
Jacobi waders into this scene that cuts to him waking back before the audience.
And so though our story’s finished, our poets not. For his momument is everliving,
not of stone but of verse. Words are made of breath and breath of life.
53
No reference ot the ublication of the plays. End credits roll over people leaving the
theater. Ben Jon is elevated as eulogist of Oxford, task taken over by Jacobi, who
mentions Ben Jonson, His story s as important as Oxford’s. Shakespeare’s
retrirement story told as well.
Actual double—Joely and Vanesa RIchardosson
Rivalry between Marlowe and Shakespeare—but then Marlowe immediately killed,
later we learn by Shakespeare; it’s not rivalry over literature but over who gets
money from Oxford—so the multiple plots also fill in information in breaks.
Three plots developed in three short sequences in quick succession.
The film has to divide writing form acting (Shakespeare can only act, not write;
Jonson does not act, nor do any of the other playwrights who go to the globe. Oxford
attends as a spectator as if the writer had nothing to do with cast rehearsals. Henry
V in performance comes as a complete surprise to him.
I think we can go with the textual fauxrensics / CSI thing as played
out in Anonymous, etc.
Anonymous Emmerich notes November 11, 2011
54
My immediate response is that it's a bad film--almost as bad or worse than 10,000
B.C. or 2012. I should Stratfordians would be thrilled by it because it is. TOTALLY.
INSANE! Elizabeth is a total slut who has had many chiildren,m including Edward
de Vere! And he had incest with her and they bore the Earl of Southampton! RII is
Cecil and inspires a total mob revolution. (RII goes out the window.) So it was often
hilarious.
For us, the best parts of course have to do with writing. When de Vere first gives
Jonson (not Will) a play, it is a printed copy, unbound. Later, the manuscripts are all
fair copies. de Vere never writes a draft. Jonson cannot write verse—iambic
pentameter. Marlowe's mighty line does not exist. Oh, and Shakespeare murders
Marlowe.
Back to writing. We never see a signature anywhere. Shakespeare is illiterate
(which means he can read but not write). he cannot even write an "I" (get it?)
de Vere never signs. Elizabeth will not sign an Act of Succession.
On his deathbed, de Vere tells Jonson (who has not aged at all) to publish the plays
after de Vere is dead (but he does not say to publish htem under his name.
Jonson recovers them all from a fire at the Globe. Raider of the Found Ark. But
there is no image of the colelcted works, or even of a bound play. The only bound
55
book is Venus and Adonis, and that book has no author. (Somehow the Rape of
Lucrece has not yet been published). King Lear is hte last play de Vere writes, and
we cannot really see the mss because he folds up and hten inserts , on a small piece
of paper, the title "King Lear."
The reason he writes is that he hears voices. They go away when he puts ink to
parchment (even though he is writingon paper). His wife asks "are you possessed?"
and he replies "I dont know."
There is no de Vere code. He is made into a poet who could have been King (only he
sucked at politics). That comes out absurdly at the end.
The end is totally deflating. Jacobi comes back and says that the plays are a
monument that will last as long as words are made of air, and air of life--or
something that ridiculous. (Maybe they were thinking of Milton's dedicatory Sonnet
to the Fourth Folio.).
The last shot shows hte audience of hte play (in the film) leaving and hte credits roll.
Emmerich's name comes up first, as I recall.
56
Anyway, I was thinking about how the play has as much to do with Shakespeare and
Elizabeth as Shakespeare in love does. And that all kinds of Stratforidan accounts
share the same fantasies about writing and a desire to exorcise spectrality from
writing.
Shakespeare the author depends on filling an area of anonymity (not just the lost
years, either).
One other thought related to writing.
Ben Jonson is the posthumous editor of the collected works. Yet we never see him
editing. After the Jacobi addressing a live theater audience frame, the film begins
with a sequence that turns out to be another frame--Jonson running to the \Globe
and hiding what turn out to be all of Oxford's mss. Late in the film, we see Jonson
carry them off from Oxford's deathbed and , when the frame returns, recover them.
But Jonson cannot write iambic pentameter. We see hi write one page that is full of
strike throughs and revisions that he crumples and throws away. he is one step
away from Shakespeare in terms of illiteracy.
Anyway, my point is that just as the plays are always already written, even in the
case of the MND, by Oxford, so they are already already edited. Or there writing is
anterior but not yet (delivered, printed, produced on stage) and their editing is yet
to come but already arrived.
57
The thing about Jonson is that he would seem to be unnecessary to the plot. The
film could have gone directly to Shakespeare. But when he is about to be tortured,
he actually quotes a famous line (maybe more than one) of Shakespeare's (I can't
recall which one). There's a logic in which revelation operates through another
secret--in this case that Jonson edited the plays. Similarly, Oxford learns that he is
Elizabeth's son (as is Essex), but he tells he that Southampton will never learn from
him (Oxford) that Southampton is his brother/son. (I was thinking of Chinatown-my brother, my son, my brother my son). Shakespeare kills Marlowe to keep his
secret safe. Jonson is the only one who knows that.
So the hilarity and insanity of the play is driven by a spectral logic or logic of
spectrality, secrecy, and, in the film's lexicon, bastardization (as if authorship were
incestuous--Jonson is already Shakespeare, who later turns out to be Oxford, who
gives his manuscripts to Jonson, who doesn't edit them or direct them or publish
them [nor are theere priated quarto editions, though there is a scene at a
bookseller's stall where Shakespeare buys a copy of Venus and Adonis]). )--that by
the end seems to liberate the plays for many author. The plays are what matter, not
the author. If I were an Oxfordian, I would think Emmerich had set back the cause
10,000 years. BC.
Forgot to mention one of the film's highlights: Elizabeth I goes down on the nude
Southampton as he composes a sonnet.
58
Haven't word doc'd them yet.
One other thought related to writing.
Ben Jonson is the posthumous editor of the collected works. Yet we never see him
editing. After the Jacobi addressing a live theater audience frame, the film begins
with a sequence that turns out to be another frame--Jonson running to the Globe
and hiding what turn out to be all of Oxford's mss. Late in the film, we see Jonson
carry them off from Oxford's deathbed and , when the frame returns, recover them.
But Jonson cannot write iambic pentameter. We see him write one page that is full
of strike throughs and revisions that he crumples and throws away. he is one step
away from Shakespeare in terms of illiteracy.
Anyway, my point is that just as the plays are always already written, even in the
case of the MND, by Oxford, so they are already already edited. Or there writing is
anterior but not yet (delivered, printed, produced on stage) and their editing is yet
to come but already arrived.
The thing about Jonson is that he would seem to be unnecessary to the plot. The
film could have gone directly to Shakespeare. But when he is about to be tortured,
he actually quotes a famous line (maybe more than one) of Shakespeare's (I can't
recall which one). There's a logic in which revelation operates through another
secret--in this case that Jonson edited the plays. Similarly, Oxford learns that he is
59
Elizabeth's son (as is Essex), but he tells he that Southampton will never learn from
him (Oxford) that Southampton is his brother/son. (I was thinking of Chinatown-my brother, my son, my brother my son). Shakespeare kills Marlowe to keep his
secret safe. Jonson is the only one who knows that.
So the hilarity and insanity of the play is driven by a spectral logic or logic of
spectrality, secrecy, and, in the film's lexicon, bastardization (as if authorship were
incestuous--Jonson is already Shakespeare, who later turns out to be Oxford, who
gives his manuscripts to Jonson, who doesn't edit them or direct them or publish
them [nor are theere priated quarto editions, though there is a scene at a
bookseller's stall where Shakespeare buys a copy of Venus and Adonis]). )--that by
the end seems to liberate the plays for many author. The plays are what matter, not
the author. If I were an Oxfordian, I would think Emmerich had set back the cause
10,000 years. BC.
http://www.npg.org.uk/business/publications/imagined-lives-mystery-portraits15401640.php
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/20/project-to-use-facial-recognitionsoftware-to-identify-subjects-of-worlds-famous-artworks/
We could connect this exhibition and this use of technology to
Shakespeare portraits. I remember now I took a lot of notes on
60
Shakespeare's tomb, Pope, etc. And there's Jim Shaprio's books. Ah
.. it's . . . all starting to come back to me now. The SHakespeare
cipher, the Bacon machine, and so on.
And we connect the exhibition to Renaissance films like Greenaway's
Nightwatching (the documentary about it is totally CSI). It also
centers on a sex crime ring--an orphanage uses as a brothel for hetero
pedophiles.
One funny thing about Anonymous is the way it tries to connect
politics to the theater. But it totally fucks up things like the
Essex Rebellion and the deposition scene from RII or ELizabeth
attending a performance of AMND.
Sort of Beyond Facial Recognition
Arde 3:
The first three
appendices are really fascinating--all about Theobald and Pope. Pope
was thought to have said and indeed appears to have written that the
play was a forgery. But in a ether, he said he never did. (SE
Appendix One).
The edition really seems to be an unbowed experiment. What happens if
we imagine that Shakespeare and Fletcher did write Double Falsehood
and if we imagine that it is an accurate transcript of a manuscript
61
Theobald had?
Note 151 on p. 243 compares a swooning in DF to Hermione swooning in
the Winter's Tale. One wonders (or I wonder) what value that kind of
note can have or even what it means. A canonical play is being
compared to what, exactly?
I don't know if I can actually read the mass market novels on
Cardenio. They are truly bad.
P
First-time director Osric Taylor finally manages to get his dream film financed,
Shakespeare's HAMLET--set against the epic backdrop of the American Civil War. He
heads to a small town in Louisiana to start filming when production funding
suddenly dries up. Osric agrees to take up southern matron Hester Beauchamp's
offer to finance his movie as long as he throws some zombies in the film to attract a
wider audience. When Hester suddenly dies mid-shoot, and with the local sheriff
and ambitious news reporter Shine Reynolds hot on his trail, Osric is thrust into
precarious and hilarious situations in a desperate effort to keep ZOMBIE HAMLET
alive.
I think we can go with the textual fauxrensics / CSI thing as played
62
out in Anonymous, etc.
http://www.npg.org.uk/business/publications/imagined-lives-mystery-portraits15401640.php
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/20/project-to-use-facial-recognitionsoftware-to-identify-subjects-of-worlds-famous-artworks/
We could connect this exhibition and this use of technology to
Shakespeare portraits. I remember now I took a lot of notes on
Shakespeare's tomb, Pope, etc. And there's Jim Shapiro’s books. Ah
.. it's . . . all starting to come back to me now. The SHakespeare
cipher, the Bacon machine, and so on.
And we connect the exhibition to Renaissance films like Greenaway's
Nightwatching (the documentary about it is totally CSI). It also
centers on a sex crime ring--an orphanage uses as a brothel for hetero
pedophiles.
One funny thing about Anonymous is the way it tries to connect
politics to the theater. But it totally fucks up things like the
Essex Rebellion and the deposition scene from RII or ELizabeth
attending a performance of AMND.
Sort of Beyond Facial Recognition
63
I don't know if i can actually read the mass market novels on
Cardenio. They are truly bad.
Perhaps we could juxtapose Cardenio and Anonymous. Why the missing
play has such fascination and why Anonymous blows the Oxford really was
Shakespeare industry up. Oxford wasn't even Oxford! Kind of a weird
Nemo authorship logic in both cases. Author goes missing as other
authors come in as true author (both Cevantes and Theobald); real
author is not the real person the author is supposed to be (even the
constant shifting from young to old actors playing the same character
plays out this doubleness, as does the Jacobi frame and the hidden
manuscript frame. A double double falsehood.
Btw, check this out:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cardenio/index.html
Double Falsehood: Third Series (Arden Shakespeare)
William Shakespeare, Brean Hammond
Cardenio entre Cervantes et Shakespeare (French Edition) [Paperback]
Roger Chartier (Author)
Below you can see a translation of the text to be found on the France Culture, French
radio website, copied from the book's blurb. This blurb prompted me to buy Roger
Chartier's book, "Cardenio, between Cervantès and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost
64
Play". The book was published a few months ago.
"How to read a text that does not exist, or get an idea of a play whose real author we
don’t know and the manuscript of which has been lost? That is the riddle posed by
Cardenio--a play performed in England for the first time in 1612 or 1613, and
attributed, forty years later, to Shakespeare (and Fletcher). The play is based on a
story contained in Don Quixote, a work which began to circulate in the major
European countries very soon after publication, to be both translated and adapted
for the theater. In England, the novel of Cervantes was known and quoted even
before 1612, the year in which it was translated (into English) and inspired
Cardenio.
This riddle has a number of facets. It was a time when, thanks chiefly to the
invention of printing, differing discourses proliferated and fear of their excesses led
to their rarefaction. All pieces of writing were not meant to survive. Plays, which
were considered the lowest of the low in the literary hierarchy, very often were not
even printed – and the genre adapted well to the ephemeral existence of its works.
But, if an author became famous, the subsequent search through the archives
inspired the invention of textual relics, restoration of remains damaged by time, and
even, at times, to fill in the gaps, forgery.
This is what happened to Cardenio in the eighteenth century. Uncovering the history
of this play thus leads to questions about the past status of works now considered
65
part of the literary canon. In this book, the reader rediscovers the malleability of
texts, as they are transformed by their translations and adaptations, their migration
from one genre to another, and the successive meanings constructed by their
audiences. For many readers, Don Quixote was for a long time a collection of stories,
suitable to be published separately or to be adapted for the stage, at the expense of
the consistency of the eponymous hero's adventures. Shakespeare was a playwright
who, like many of his colleagues, often wrote in collaboration, recycled stories
borrowed from other writers and at times could not find a publisher for his texts.
Roger Chartier illuminates the riddle of a play without a text, but not without an
author."<a
href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/236994919">more...</a>
The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play
[Hardcover]
David Carnegie (Author), Gary Taylor (Author)
Also the library, wonder cabinet scene in Oxford’s house.
The Dunciad and Shakespeare
The DUNCIAD, sic. MS. It may well be disputed whether this be a right reading:
Ought it not to be spelled Dunceiad, as the Etymology evidently demands? Dunce
66
with an e, therefore Dunceiad with an e. That accurate and punctual Man of Letters,
the Restorer of Shakespeare, constantly observes the preservation of this very
Letter e, in spelling the name of his beloved Author, and not like his common
careless Editors, with the omission of one, nay sometimes of two ee’s, [as Shakspear]
which is utterly unpardonable. ‘Nor is the neglect of Single Letters so trivial to some
it may appear; the alteration whereof in a learned language is an Atchievement [sic]
that brings honour to the Critic who advances it; and Dr. Bentley will be
remembered to posterity for his performances of this sort as long as the world shall
have any esteem for the remains of Menander and Philemon.’ Theobald. <Cf. A i1 n.>
This is surely a slip in the learned author of the foregoing note; there having been
produced by an accurate Antiquary an Autograph of Shakspeare [sic] himself,
whereby it appears that he spelled his own name without the first e. And upon this
authority it was, that those most Critical Curators of his Monument in Westminster
Abbey erased the former wrong reading, and restored the true spelling on a new
piece of old AEgyptian Granite. Not only for this do they deserve our thanks, but for
exhibiting on the same Monument for the Specimen of an Edition of an author in
Marble; where (as may be seen on comparing the Tomb with the Book) in the space
of five lines, two words and a whole Verse are changed, and it is to be hoped that
will there stand, and outlast whatever hath been hitherto done in Paper; as for the
future, our Learned Sister University (the other eye of England) is taking care to
perpetuate a Total new Shakespear [sic], at the Clarendon Press. BENTL.
It is to be noted that, that this great Critic also has omitted one circumstance;
which is, that the Inscription with the Name of Shakespeare was intended to be
67
placed on the Marble Scroll to which he points with this hand; instead of which it is
now placed behind his back, and that specimen of an Edition is put on the Scroll,
which Shakespeare hath great reason to point at. ANON.
Pope Alexander. The Dunciad. In The Poems of Alexander Pope: A Reduced Version of
the Twickenham Text Ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale UP, 1961), 720.
Title of the book on the title page is
The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with
Selected Annotations
A two-fold “edition” that keeps getting unfolded and refolded: of the author and of
the author’s works / name. Somehow the marble subjectile cannot encompass the
author and an edition of his works that has both the title and the author on the
“scroll” (itself a facsimile of the printed edition).
Marble versus paper as support (relative durability) for correct spelling of
Shakespeare’s name. Marble versus granite. Stone can be “erased” (like paper).
Marble scroll as support for errant version of the spelling of the name replaced by
the correctly spelled name, but that name in turn replaced by the title of the book,
the edition.
The status as an edition; the marble scroll as an edition.
68
Shakespeare points with his hand. He has an indexical relation to his own
subjectile—a scroll displaced from front to back) that returns his works as a double
work of art (the statue as a double edition, or edition within an edition—or
Shakespeare “incarnated / entombed” as author and as editor).
From W Abbey website:
William Shakespeare (l564-1616) was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford upon
Avon in Warwickshire (see www.shakespeare.org.uk) and it was not until 1740 that
a memorial statue to him was erected in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Shortly after Shakespeare's death there was much talk about removing his remains
from Stratford to the Abbey but the idea was soon abandoned.This idea gave rise to
the poet Ben Jonson's lines "My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer
or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie a little further on to make thee room".
The life-size white marble statue, shown in the dress of his period, was erected by
the Earl of Burlington, Dr Mead, Alexander Pope and Mr Martin. It was designed by
William Kent and executed by Peter Scheemakers. The inscription above the head of
the statue can be translated :
"William Shakespeare [erected] 124 years after [his] death by public esteem".
The carved heads of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry V and Richard III appear on the
pedestal. The figure leans his elbow on a pile of books (they have no titles) and his
left hand points to a scroll on which are painted a variant of Prospero's lines from
69
'The Tempest':
The Cloud capt Tow'rs,
The Gorgeous Palaces,
The Solemn Temples,
The Great
Globe itself,
Yea all which it Inherit,
Shall Dissolve;
And like the baseless Fabrick of a
Vision
Leave not a wreck behind.
Some of the black paint has rubbed off this inscription so some letters are now
incomplete. The inscription at the base of the memorial (giving his name, dates and
burial place) is a modern addition. There is no other wording on the memorial.
Photographs of the monument can be purchased from Westminster Abbey Library.
Further reading:
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004
"Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey" by James Wilkinson, 2007 (available from the
Westminster Abbey Shop).
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/william-shakespeare
How I found Cardenio, Shakespeare's lost play
As a Renaissance scholar, I've been piecing together fragments of a play believed to
be part-written by Shakespeare. Now the results are about to go on show
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Putting one and one together ... Pippa Nixon and Alex Hassell in the RSC's Cardenio –
a different reconstruction – earlier this year. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the
Guardian
In the spring of 1613, the office of the Treasurer of the King's Chamber recorded
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two separate payments to the King's Men – William Shakespeare's company – for
performances of a play called Cardenna or Cardenno. The two records presumably
refer to the same play, since it is unlikely that the King's Men had two different plays
whose titles differed by only a single letter. Court records almost always
abbreviated play titles, and the clerks who wrote these draft accounts were
primarily concerned with exactly how much money was paid to whom. Almost all
scholars agree that both payments refer to Cardenio.
Cardenio's story, based on a section from Cervantes's masterpiece Don Quixote, is a
tragicomedy set in the Spanish mountains, populated by goatherds and shepherds,
lovers, madmen and nunneries. Of playwrights known to have been writing for the
King's Men in the years 1611–14, only three wrote pastoral tragicomedies: Francis
Beaumont, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare.
In 1653 the leading English publisher of plays and poetry, Humphrey Moseley,
registered his copyright in a list of 42 plays. Somewhere mid-list is "The History of
Cardenio, by Mr Fletcher & Shakespeare". Shakespeare had yet to become English
literature's biggest cash cow, and Moseley never published that play (or many
others that he registered). Moseley's title-phrase, The History of Cardenio, appears
verbatim in the first English translation of Part One of Don Quixote, published in
1612. Since the phrase appears nowhere else in English, the play that Moseley
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registered must, logically speaking, have dramatised the Cardenio episodes from
Cervantes's novel. It's a plausible attribution to Fletcher and Shakespeare.
In December 1727 the Drury Lane theatre performed a play based on the Cardenio
episodes in Don Quixote, and based in particular on the 1612 translation. It was
called Double Falshood, or The Distrest Lovers, and the edition printed that month
declared it was "written originally by W Shakespeare; and now revised and adapted
to the stage by Mr Theobald". Lewis Theobald was a minor playwright, minor poet
and the world's first Shakespeare scholar.
Did Theobald possess a manuscript of The History of Cardenio? For the past 100
years, respected attribution specialists have concluded that he did, and that Double
Falsehood includes passages clearly written by Fletcher and others probably
written by Shakespeare. Next year, which will be the quatercentenary of the
publication of Thomas Shelton's 1612 translation of Don Quixote, Oxford University
Press will publish The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes and the
Lost Play, which includes new empirical evidence based on modern databases.
Double Falsehood contains writing by Fletcher and Shakespeare – and Theobald. So
what we have is parts of a play, written by two great playwrights, rearranged and
overlaid and mixed with material written by a not-so-great playwright more than a
century later.
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If you have read the 2010 Arden Shakespeare edition of Double Falsehood, or seen
any of the recent theatrical revivals and adaptations calling themselves Cardenio,
you have almost certainly been disappointed, and skeptical. Why? In part because
what you have seen has contained a lot of Lewis Theobald, and Theobald will never
satisfy anyone's expectations of Shakespeare or Cervantes. The first thing we need
to do is get rid of Theobald. That requires a lot of painstaking (read: boring) work
with databases, a bit like paleontologists slowly brushing away the stone that
surrounds dinosaur bones.
But what's left after we get rid of Theobald? Fragments. And a lot of questions. Why
did Theobald add a speech here? Why did he change a name there? Why does one
18th-century phrase appear in the middle of a Jacobean sentence? Why did
Theobald leave out material that was in the novel? Because Shakespeare and
Fletcher left it out or because he (or Drury Lane) didn't like it?
As a scholar I have been talking about Renaissance drama for 35 years. But since 1992
I've been doing more than talk: I've been working with a series of companies (seven
different directors, nine groups of actors), trying to figure out how to put the pieces of
Fletcher and Shakespeare's Humpty Dumpty back together again. This Sunday at
Shakespeare's Globe in London, 16 actors directed by Wilson Milam will read the latest
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version of this experiment. Is it as good as your favourite Shakespeare play? Of course
not. Is it better than Theobald? You tell me.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/nov/18/cardenioshakespeares-lost-play
The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play
[Hardcover] David Carnegie (Author), Gary Taylor
http://liberalarts.iupui.edu/cardenio/colloquium.php
The History of Cardenio: Spain and England, Then and Now
Registration: $50 for students, $70 for non-students
(Includes a ticket to the performance on Friday, April 27, and
refreshments and lunch on Saturday, April 28)
To register for the colloquium, please click here.
Friday April 27, 2012
10:00 - 11:30 John Fletcher: Shakespeare's Last Collaborator (I)
Campus Center 305
Chair: Ayanna Thompson
Respondent: Gary Taylor
Lacey Conley, "Professionalizing Fletcher: the Co-authors' Influence"
Chad Andrews, "'A Tempest in my Stomach': Management of Ecosystems in
Shakespeare's The Tempest and Fletcher and Massinger's The Sea Voyage"
***break for lunch***
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1:00 - 2:30 Authorship and Cervantine Adaptation
Campus Center 305
Chair & Respondent: Roger Chartier
John V. Nance, "The Pleasure of Shakespearean Prose in Theobald's
Double Falsehood"
Greg Baum, "(Ab)using Cardenio: Thomas D'Urfey's The Comical History
of Don Quixote"
Ben Miele, "Step-fathers: Cervantes, Theobald, and the Fictions of Authorship"
***afternoon break***
5:30 Keynote Lecture
Campus Center Theater
Gary Taylor, “Working Together: Theater, Collaboration, and Cardenio”
7:00 Performance: The History of Cardenio
Campus Center Theater
10:00 Post-performance talk-back
Campus Center Theater
Saturday April 28, 2012
9:00 - 10:15 Cervantes in England
Campus Center 305
Chair: Gary Taylor
Roger Chartier, "Cardenio before "Cardenno": From Cervantes' historia
to Guillén de Castro's comedia"
Eduardo Olid Guerrero, "Cervantes' The English Spanish Lady and the
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history of Elizabeth I in Spain"
Joyce Boro, "'Bum-fidled with a bastard' or Blessed with a Baby:
Fletcher's The Chances and Cervantes' novela De la señora Cornelia"
10:15 - 10:45 Coffee break
10:45 - 12:00 John Fletcher: Shakespeare's Last Collaborator (II)
Campus Center 305
Chair: Suzanne Gossett
Vimala Pasupathi, "Fletcher's Martial Ethos"
Huw Griffiths, "Shall I never see a lusty man again?": John Fletcher's
Men, 1617-1715"
Christopher Hicklin, "Fletcher's Double Falsehood"
12:00 - 1:00 Catered Lunch
1:00 - 2:15 Adaptation from Theobald to the RSC
Campus Center 305
Chair: Sarah Neville
Adam Hooks, "Genuine Shakespeare"
Christopher Marino, "Cardenio Found"
Carla Della Gatta, "Is Spanishness in the Script? Embodying Duende in
The Royal Shakespeare Company's 2011 Cardenio"
2:15 - 2:45 Coffee break
2:45 - 4:00 Theatre as Research: Performing Cardenio
Campus Center 305
Moderator: Terri Bourus
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Joe Cacaci
Regina Buccola
Lori Leigh
***break for dinner***
6:00 Concert: Spanish Guitar Music
Campus Center Theater
John Alvarado, Lecturer, Music and Arts Technology, IUPUI
7:00 Performance: The History of Cardenio
Campus Center Theater
10:00 Post-performance talk-back
Campus Center Theater
Confirmed Participant Biographies
Chad Andrews received his B.A. in English from Indiana University
Kokomo in 2008. He is currently in his first year as a graduate
student in English Literature at IUPUI.
Gregory Baum is a PhD candidate in the department of Comparative
Literature at the University of Chicago. His dissertation focuses on
early English encounters with Don Quijote, moving from the first
translation by Thomas Shelton in 1612 through the abridgments and
dramatic adaptations that come at the end of the 17th century.
Joyce Boro is an Associate Professor of English at Université de
Montréal. Her work focuses on the English reception of Spanish
romance. An editor of Lord Berners's Castell of Love (MRTS 2007) and
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Margaret Tyler's Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (MHRA
forthcoming 2012), she has published on translation, Fletcher, and
Grisel y Mirabella.
Terri Bourus is director and producer of the IUPUI/Hoosier Bard
production of The History of Cardenio and a General Editor of the New
Oxford Shakespeare. She is Associate Professor of English Drama in the
IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, and has performed professionally
as actor, singer, and dancer in New York, San Diego, and Chicago.
Regina Buccola is an Associate Professor of English at Roosevelt
University and the Scholar in Residence at Chicago Shakespeare
Theater. She is the editor of A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Critical
Guide and contributor to the Oxford Handbook to the Collected Works of
Thomas Middleton.
Joe Cacaci is a co-artistic director of the Berkshire Playwrights Lab,
as well as the founding director of East Coast Arts, where he produced
twenty world premiere plays over seven seasons. Joe co-produced David
Mamet's Obie-winning play, Edmond at the Provincetown Playhouse. He
has taught television writing in the graduate program of the Columbia
University Film School since 2007. He directed three readings of
earlier drafts of Taylor's Cardenio in 2006-7.
Roger Chartier is Professor at the Collège de France, Directeur
d'études at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris
and Annenberg Visiting Professor in History at the University of
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Pennsylvania. He works on the history of the book, publishing, and
reading in a perspective that associates cultural history and textual
criticism. His latest book translated into English is Inscription and
Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the
Eighteenth Century (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). In the Fall of
2011 he published in French a book entitled Cardenio entre Cervantes
and Shakespeare. Histoire d'une pièce perdue (Gallimard).
Lacey Conley is a PhD candidate at Loyola University Chicago and will
be completing her degree in March 2012. She received her BA in English
from George Mason University in 2005, and her MA in English from
University College Cork in 2006. Her research interests include early
modern drama, theater history, collaboration, textual criticism, and
editorial theory.
Carla Della Gatta is a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary PhD
in Theatre and Drama program at Northwestern University. Her research
focuses on the intersection of contemporary Shakespearean productions
and the performance of Latinidad. She studies bilingual Shakespearean
adaptations, the role of Shakespeare Festivals in cultural exchange,
and Spanish Golden Age theatre.
Suzanne Gossett is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago
and the President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has
worked on both Shakespeare and Fletcher throughout her distinguished
career, and she is currently a General Textual Editor of the Norton
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Shakespeare Third Edition (forthcoming).
Huw Griffiths is a senior lecturer in English at the University of
Sydney. His contribution to the forthcoming OUP Quest for Cardenio
volume traces Double Falsehood's hidden histories of male friendship.
Christopher Hicklin is a Fletcher scholar and Associate Editor of the
Early Modern London Theatres website, an international collaborative
project by the Records of Early English Drama at the University of
Toronto, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College
London, and the English Department of the University of Southampton.
Adam G. Hooks is an Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Iowa, where he is also an associate at the UI Center for the Book.
His recent publications on Shakespeare and the book trade appear in
Shakespeare Survey and the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare.
Lori Leigh has a PhD in Theatre from Victoria University of Wellington
in Early Modern Drama and Gender. Lori has worked on productions and
readings of plays both Off-Broadway and regionally, collaborating as a
performer, puppeteer, writer, director, and dramaturg. She has
recently published on rape and Double Falsehood in the journal
Shakespeare and has two chapters in the forthcoming OUP Quest for
Cardenio.
Christopher Marino is former Artistic Director of the Baltimore
Shakespeare Festival, and currently Assistant Professor of Acting at
Illinois State University. He is also a founding member of the Taffety
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Punk Theatre Company, which in 2006 performed his adaptation Cardenio
Found in Washington D.C. His recent credits include the Shakespeare
Theatre Company, Primary Stages, Soho Rep, Village Theatre Company,
Mill Mountain Theatre, Utah Shakespeare Festival and others.
Ben Miele is a third-year PhD Candidate in English at the University
of Iowa studying authorship, early modern drama, and the History of
the Book.
John V. Nance has taught at St. John's University in New York City and
is currently a PhD student in early modern literature at Florida State
University. His article "Gross Anatomies: Mapping Matter and Literary
Form" is included in the anthology The Age of Nashe (Ashgate,
forthcoming).
Sarah Neville is an Editing Research Associate at IUPUI and an
Assistant Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare. She is a General
Textual Editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions and has published
in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin and CNQ.
Eduardo Olid Guerrero is an Assistant Professor at Muhlenberg College.
His current scholarship explores the early modern relationships
between England and Spain.
Vimala Pasupathi is an Assistant Professor at Hofstra University. Her
work appears in Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance
Drama, Modern Philology, ELH, Early Theatre, Shakespeare, and Celtic
Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers (Forthcoming Ashgate 2012).
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Gary Taylor is editor and co-author of The History of Cardenio. A
Distinguished Research Professor of English at Florida State
University, he is the lead General Editor of the New Oxford
Shakespeare project, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2016.
He has also co-edited John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed, and was General
Editor of OUP's 2008 edition of The Collected Works of Thomas
Middleton. His The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher,
Cervantes and the Lost Play is forthcoming from Oxford University
Press.
Ayanna Thompson is Associate Dean of Faculty and Professor of English
at Arizona State University. She specializes in Renaissance drama and
focuses on issues of race and performance. She is the author of
Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford
University Press, 2011) and Performing Race and Torture on the Early
Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008).
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/?view=usa&sf
=toc&ci=9780199641819
Table of Contents
Setting the Stage
1. Introduction , David Carnegie
2. A History of The History of Cardenio , Gary Taylor
3. After Arden , Brean Hammond
External Evidence: What the Documents Say
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4. Cardenio and the Eighteenth-century Shakespeare Canon , Edmund G. C. King
5. Malone's Double Falsehood , Ivan Lupic
6. 'Whether one did Contrive, the other Write, / Or one Fram'd the
Plot, the Other did Indite': Fletcher and Theobald as Collaborative
Writers , Tiffany Stern
Internal Evidence: What Style and Structure Say
7. Looking for Shakespeare in Double Falsehood: Stylistic Evidence ,
MacDonald P. Jackson
8. Can Double Falsehood Be Merely a Forgery by Lewis Theobald? ,
Richard Proudfoot
9. Theobald's Pattern of Adaptation: The Duchess of Malfi and Richard
II , David Carnegie
10. Four Characters in Search of a Subplot: Quixote, Sancho, and
Cardenio , Gary Taylor and John V. Nance
Intertexts and Cross-currents
11. Don Quixote and Shakespeare's Collaborative Turn to Romance , Valerie Wayne
12. The Friend in Cardenio, Double Falsehood, and Don Quixote , Huw Griffiths
13. Transvestism, Transformation, and Text: Cross-dressing and Gender
Roles in Double Falsehood/The History of Cardenio , Lori Leigh
14. In This Good Time: Cardenio and the Temporal Character of
Shakespearean Drama , Matthew Wagner
Cardenio for Performance
15. A Select Chronology of Cardenio , David Carnegie
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16. The Embassy, The City, The Court, The Text: Cardenio Performed in
1613 , Gary Taylor
17. Cardenio without Shakespeare , Roger Chartier
18. Nostalgia for the Cervantes-Shakespeare link: Charles David Ley's
Historia de Cardenio , Angel-Luis Pujante
19. Cultural Mobility and Transitioning Authority: Greenblatt's
Cardenio Project , Carla Della Gatta
20. Re-imagining Cardenio , Bernard Richards
21. Will the Real Cardenio Please Stand Up: Review of Richards'
Cardenio in Cambridge , Richard Proudfoot
22. Theobald Restor'd: Double Falsehood at the Union Theatre,
Southwark , Peter Kirwan
23. Restoring Double Falsehood to the Perpendicular for the RSC , Gregory Doran
24. Exploring The History of Cardenio in Performance , David Carnegie
and Lori Leigh
25. Taylor's The History of Cardenio in Wellington , David Lawrence
26. 'May I be metamorphosed': Cardenio by Stages , Terri Bourus
176 This forgery presumably the story being concocted by Roderick and Violante,
rather than the letter that he has not yet read. Cf. 2.1.13 (see n.): this is another line
that be self-reflexive if Theobald had forged the play.”
1
Not “is “ and “forged” but conditional tense.
The referent of “this forgery” is not even clear in the play, of ambiguous enough that
the editor feels required to specify the referent even though the referent he chooses
is less obvious that the letter that immediately follows. Hammon is engaging in his
85
own conjectural annotating. (Editors do that all the time, of course.) The preceding
lines also make it seem that the letter is the forgery:
Roderick: that he has beenan agent ini your service
Appears fromthis. Here is a letter, brother
Produce'd, perforce, to give him credit with me),
The writing, yours; the matter, love; for so,
He says, he can explain it.
Camillo: Then, belike,
A young the-bawd.
“69 one . . . grave The idiom is not in Shakespeare but is found in Fletcher and
Massinger’s LFI . . and in the latter’s The Guardian . . . as well as in plays by . . . .” 249
3 On the first page of the introduction, Hammon observes: “Others, now and then,
2
have something of an earlier date lies behind Double Falsehood but that it not simply
a lost play by Shakespeare. It is a play by James Shirley, or by Philip Massinger, or
by Fletcher. At very best, it is a collaborative play by Shakespeare and Fletcher.”
(2010, 1). On the last page, responding to a critic who reserves the right to test
whether Cardenio was written by Beaumont and Fletcher: “there is no reason,
though, why [if Cardenio is by Beaumont and Fletcher] should rule Shakespeare out.
As we have seen, Gildon reports the play as the work of all tree authors. Neither,
perhaps, is there a clear case of testing Beaumont’s authorship that that, say, of
Massinger. 160
the textual practice of wholesale reconstruction. “Let us turn now from these
conjectural reconstructions of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio to the text we
actually have in Double Falsehood.” Of course the “the text we actually have” is for
Hammon itself a palimpsest.
4
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