Monumental Shakespeare

Abstract

This chapter begins with Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood (1727), the play he claimed was his own adaptation of the lost Cardenio. Critics have noted recently that Cardenio is a lost early modern text based upon an episode from Cervantes’ Don Quixote that has been “rediscovered” time and again in new remediations ever since the seventeenth century. The history of these “resurrections” (as Roger Chartier has argued) is linked to both the canonization of authors such as Cervantes and Shakespeare, on the one hand, and on the other, the attendant process by which their works become “monuments.” In this chapter, I take up the question of Cardenio and our abiding interest in its history of appearance and disappearance that has, in effect, all the features of the haunting Chartier offers as a metaphor in his book. My concern, though, is not in haunting as a trope, but rather as an integral feature of the processes of creating the (literary) monument we now recognize Shakespeare’s Works to be. At the same time, I am interested in the connection between such hauntings and the drive toward monumentalization that stands as one of the primary versions that remediations of Shakespeare have long taken.