Abstract
This chapter maintains that “the Cardenio problem” raises interesting questions about the handling of scanty, contradictory, and often inadequate evidence. Shakespeare apparently collaborated with Fletcher on the original 1613 play (lost). An adaptation (by Davenant?) from circa 1667 is also lost. Theobald’s later adaptation, entitled Double Falsehood (1728), apparently combines generic features and language from both the Jacobean period and the 1720s. Quantitative stylistics suggest the presence of three authorial hands. While I conclude that Double Falsehood is an adaptation—longstanding charges of forgery ignore facts and historical circumstances—the play contains little or no unadulterated Shakespeare.
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Notes
- 1.
See Frazier and Jeffrey Kahan, 1:157–242.
- 2.
Stern, “Modern Author” and “Fletcher and Theobald.” Since then, two devastating rebuttals have been published. See Gary Taylor’s meticulous point-by-point refutation, “Sleight of Mind: Cognitive Illusions and Shakespearian Desire,” in Bourus & Taylor, 125–69; and Brean Hammond’s “Double Falsehood: The Forgery Hypothesis, the ‘Charles Dickson’ Enigma and a ‘Stern’ Rejoinder,” Shakespeare Survey 67 (2014): 165–79.
- 3.
There is a possibility that the play remained in the company’s repertory or was revived. A reference to a 1630 play based on Don Quixote could allude to a recent performance of Cardenio. See, for example, Gerald Baker, “Quixote on the English Stage: A New Glimpse of The History of Cardenio?” in Bourus & Taylor, 47–59.
- 4.
Preserved as Bodleian Library MS Rawl. A.239, fol. 47r-v; facsimile in DF, 10. Scholars have almost unanimously agreed that the two names refer to a single play, which seems overwhelmingly likely.
- 5.
Facsimile in DF, 79. The list is printed by W. W. Greg in A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London: The Bibliographical Society at the University Press, Oxford, 1939–1959), 1:60–61.
- 6.
Hammond states that the Stationers’ Register entry is “Confirmation that the lost Cardenio play was a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher,” but in fact Moseley is the sole source (other than Theobald) of the claim that Shakespeare was author or coauthor of the play (“Introduction,” 78).
- 7.
Stephan Kukowski, “The Hand of John Fletcher in Double Falsehood,” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991): 81–89.
- 8.
On Humphrey Moseley’s importance in the history of play publication, see Paulina Kewes, “‘Give me the Sociable Pocket-Books…’: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections,” Publishing History 38 (1995): 5–21; and David Scott Kastan, “Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 105–24.
- 9.
Fletcher’s collaborations are of course difficult to evaluate with precision. I would put the total of solo plays at eighteen, but as Gordon McMullan notes in his ODNB entry on Fletcher, he “continued to write plays without a collaborator…but he seems always to have preferred working with collaborators.” Roughly two-thirds of his plays are definitely collaborative.
- 10.
John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesie in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Samuel Holt Monk and A.E. Wallace Mauer, vol. 17: Prose 1668–1691 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 56.
- 11.
John Dryden, preface to An Evening’s Love in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and George Robert Guffey, vol. 10: Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 210.
- 12.
William Van Lennep, et al., eds, The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, together with Casts, Box-receipts and Contemporary Comment. Part I: 1660–1700 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), cxliii.
- 13.
For legal testimony in the 1660s about the King’s Company’s actors and regarding the company as a direct continuation of the pre-1642 company, see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “New Light on English Acting Companies in 1646, 1648, and 1660,” The Review of English Studies, n.s. 42 (1991): 487–509.
- 14.
The grant is in the National Archives, LC 5 / 137, pp. 343–44. For scholarly analysis of this bit of theatre history, see John Freehafer, “The Formation of the London Patent Companies in 1660,” Theatre Notebook 20 (1965): 6–30; Gunnar Sorelius, “The Rights of the Restoration Theatrical Companies in the Older Drama,” Studia Neophilologica 37 (1965): 174–89; and Robert D. Hume, “Securing a Repertory: Plays on the London Stage 1660–1665,” in Poetry and Drama 1570–1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, ed. Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond (London: Methuen, 1981), 156–72.
- 15.
The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–1673, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 229.
- 16.
Much larger numbers of amateur, closet drama, and religious plays survive. Wagonheim records 780 play manuscripts of all sorts from the Middle Ages to 1700, more than 500 of them attributed. See Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim, ed., Annals of English Drama, 975–1700. 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1989), 358–75.
- 17.
For a complete list with dates, see Greg, Bibliography, 1:1–76.
- 18.
Quoted in ibid., 3:1353.
- 19.
Alfred Harbage, “Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest,” Modern Language Review 35 (1940): 287–319. The famous account of the Warburton list is W. W. Greg, “The Bakings of Betsy,” The Library, 3rd ser., 7, no. 2 (1911): 225–59. In my opinion, Greg’s hypothesis that it was a “want list” rather than a catalogue of extant manuscripts has been decisively rebutted by John Freehafer in “John Warburton’s Lost Plays,” Studies in Bibliography 23 (1970): 154–64. On the Hill plays, see Joseph Quincy Adams, “Hill’s List of Early Plays in Manuscript,” The Library, 4th ser., 20, no. 1 (1939): 71–99.
- 20.
See “Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest,” 296–97. Part of Harbage’s trust in Theobald stemmed from his belief that “Theobald was willing to exhibit the old manuscript upon which Double Falsehood was based” (297). He thanks his colleague John Cadwalader for this information, which Cadwalader published in “Theobald’s Alleged Shakespeare Manuscript,” Modern Language Notes 55, no. 2 (1940): 108–9. Like several other scholars, I read Theobald’s letter to the Countess of Oxford as an offer to let her read not Cardenio but rather Double Falsehood “in manuscript” about two weeks before it was published.
- 21.
Harbage did, of course, know that Don Quixote was the underlying source for the story. Gary Taylor offers a plausible alternative hypothesis in “The Embassy, The City, The Court, The Text: Cardenio Performed in 1613” in Carnegie & Taylor, 306. He suggests reasons that Theobald would have wanted to distance Double Falsehood from “Thomas D’Urfey’s scandalously popular Comical History of Don Quixote” (3 parts, 1694–1695). The logic is good, though I point out that those plays were losing their appeal by the early 1720s. At the time of the premiere of Double Falsehood, none had received a performance since June 1724.
- 22.
Harbage throws out the comment that “The lady is otherwise unknown, but possibly Mary Davenant is indicated,” a suggestion enthusiastically picked up by Freehafer and apparently accepted by Stern. See “Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest,” 297; Freehafer, “Cardenio,” 502; and Stern, “Modern Author,” 590–91. The identification strikes me as approximately lunatic. Davenant sometimes claimed to be Shakespeare’s natural son: is he supposed to have married his sister or half-sister? Whatever Theobald was told or misunderstood, the natural daughter could be no more than a false hare. Or not. For a serious, soberly argued case for taking Shakespeare’s illegitimate “third daughter” as a genuine possibility, see Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare’s Illegitimate Daughter,” Memoria di Shakespeare: A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 2 (2015): 177–94.
- 23.
The relationship of this manuscript to the performance script of 1613 is obviously indeterminable. If the 1653 manuscript was obtained from surviving members of the King’s Company, then it is very likely close to what had been performed. But if it was an earlier draft that wended its way to Moseley through other channels, then it might be either very similar to or quite different from the performance script.
- 24.
Chartier correctly deduces the necessity of what I am calling B as an intermediary stage between the Moseley manuscript and the Downes version, though he is probably wrong in thinking that the Downes manuscript was what Theobald worked from, it being less “perfect” than one of the others (116).
- 25.
If Theobald did possess four manuscripts (which I doubt), then this would become D1. D2 would be a second draft revision preliminary to E, the more complete and less flawed later manuscript to which Theobald refers.
- 26.
“Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest,” 297–304, 310–18.
- 27.
Lewis Theobald, ed., The Works of Shakespeare (London, 1733), 1:xxxvii.
- 28.
The only surviving set of play manuscripts submitted to a pre-1800 London management of which I am aware is the Patmore MSS in the British Library, offered to the Sheridan management of Drury Lane between 1776 and 1809. Most were never produced, but Sheridan (among others) scribbled some of them up with an eye to performance. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Neglected English Play Manuscripts in the British Library (c. 1770–1809),” The Library, 7th ser., 9, nos. 1–2 (March and June 2008): 37–61, 158–96.
- 29.
On Spanish romance, see Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 240–42. Initiated by the success of Sir Samuel Tuke’s The Adventures of Five Hours, the form flourished between 1663 and 1668.
- 30.
Brean Hammond, “After Arden,” in Carnegie & Taylor, 73–74.
- 31.
See Robert D. Hume, “Theatre Performance Records in London, 1660–1705,” The Review of English Studies, n.s. 67, no. 280 (2016): 468–95.
- 32.
See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Dating Play Premières from Publication Data, 1660-1700,” Harvard Library Bulletin 22, no. 4 (1974): 374–405.
- 33.
See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Lost English Plays, 1660-1700,” Harvard Library Bulletin 25, no. 1 (1977): 5–33.
- 34.
The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942), 112–13.
- 35.
Authorial identity for a source play was sometimes communicated in the prologue or epilogue, as was done in the prologue for the Dryden-Davenant revision of Shakespeare’s Tempest (1667; pub. 1670): “So, from old Shakespear’s honour’d dust, this day / Springs up and buds a new reviving Play.” See The Works of John Dryden, 10:6.
- 36.
Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, vol. 1: 1660–1678, ed. George deF. Lord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 352–56. On Betterton’s dramatic carpentry, see Judith Milhous, “Thomas Betterton’s Playwriting,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 77 (1974): 375–92.
- 37.
On which, see Robert D. Hume, “Feniza or The Ingeniouse Mayde: A ‘Lost’ Carolean Comedy Found—and a Source for Shadwell’s The Amorous Bigotte,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 18 (2013): 68–103.
- 38.
“Fletcher and Theobald,” 126. Stern says that Betterton comments on Shakespeare in “the notes he prepared in his own memoir (written up by Curll).” I presume that “his own memoir” is an allusion to The History of the English Stage (London, 1741), said falsely on the title page to be “By Mr. Thomas Betterton.” This book is in fact merely a plagiaristic plundering of Downes’s Roscius Anglicanus and Gildon’s 1710 Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton concocted by Curll or some hack in his employment.
- 39.
‘Brief Lives,’ chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 1:204.
- 40.
N. Rowe, ed., The Works of Mr. William Shakespear (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), 1:xxxiv.
- 41.
See Robert D. Hume, “Before the Bard: ‘Shakespeare’ in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” ELH 64, no. 1 (1997): 41–75.
- 42.
Charles Gildon, The Post-Man Robb’d of his Mail: or, the Packet broke open. Being A Collection of Miscellaneous Letters…By the best Wits of the present Age (London, 1719), 267–68.
- 43.
See “Fletcher and Theobald,” 127; and Taylor, “History,” 50.
- 44.
See Bruce Podewell, “New Light on John Downes,” Notes and Queries 223 (1978): 24.
- 45.
On the dizzying shifts and complexities of theatrical management at Drury Lane and the Queen’s Theatre Haymarket between 1709 and 1712, see Vice Chamberlain Coke’s Theatrical Papers, 1706–1715, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 116–88.
- 46.
Gildon, The Post-Man, 259–63.
- 47.
Ibid., 261.
- 48.
Gildon knew this. Gerard Langbaine says “Fatal Dowry, a Tragedy often acted at the private House in Black-friars, by His Majesties Servants, printed 4° Lond. 1632.” An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), 355. Gildon retained the substance of the entry in his updated revision of Langbaine, The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (London, 1699), 95.
- 49.
On the “Hill” version, see J. Frank Kermode, “A Note on the History of Massinger’s ‘The Fatal Dowry’ in the Eighteenth Century,” Notes and Queries 192 (1947): 186–87. Kermode was unaware of Gildon’s letter to Cibber printed in The Post-Man Robb’d of his Mail. In this case, however, Hill (and hence Davenant before him) did retain “an unexpectedly high proportion of Massinger’s own language.”
- 50.
In Jacob Hooke’s Pinacotheca Bettertonæana (London, 1710), Betterton’s books are identified as of 24 August 1710. The catalogue merely lists “Eleven Bundles of Plays and Parts of Plays, each containing 24 MSS” and “Seven Masques and MS. Plays” (22). Obviously one or more of Theobald’s MSS could have come from this source, either directly to him or through an intermediary owner. The sale catalogue itself is located in the British Library: S.C. 246 (9).
- 51.
Gildon, The Post-man Robb’d of his Mail, 267.
- 52.
The first edition was advertised in the London Evening Post of 19–21 December 1727: “To-morrow (the 22d of this Instant December) will be publish’d.” The second edition was advertised in the Daily Post on 18 March 1728.
- 53.
I need to raise a question about the author’s benefits. Kahan states that “Theobald negotiated for three theatrical benefits from the first ten performances,” adding that “These benefits netted Theobald £128.12s” (Shakespeare Imitations, 1:170). “Negotiated” is nonsense: both theatres automatically gave the author of a new play the profits of the third, sixth, and ninth nights (deducting the “constant charge” from the gross receipts) assuming it played that long. Where Kahan got the sum of money he reports I have no idea. His footnote (37 on page 179) states, “Totals from theatrical benefits listed in Index to The London Stage, 1660–1800” (i.e., the Index edited by Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., published in 1979), but neither that volume nor Part 2 contains any such information. Neither does the performance calendar documentation in Part 2 of The London Stage itself. To the best of my knowledge, no account books or lists of receipts survive for Drury Lane prior to the season of 1741–1742, so any attempt at estimating Theobald’s profit are highly speculative. That said, I note that at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (for which Rich’s Register and Harvard Theatre Collection fMS Thr 22 give us daily receipt figures), only five new plays enjoyed nine-night runs at Lincoln’s Inn Fields between 1714 and 1732. Only four of the playwrights actually received three benefits: clearly Double Falsehood was exceptionally successful. For the relevant figures, see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Playwrights’ Remuneration in Eighteenth-Century London,” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s., 10, nos. 2–3 (1999): 3–90. The average net to the playwright from three benefits was £325, the totals ranging from a low of £128 for Madden’s Themistocles to a high of £494 for Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Given that Double Falsehood ran a tenth night and was used for actors’ benefits, I suspect that Theobald’s take might have run to £250 or £300. I should also note that Kahan reports Theobald’s getting £100 from a benefit at Covent Garden on 15 May 1741 (171). That was the gross, but deduction of house charges would have left Theobald with no more than £50.
- 54.
Theobald received a fourth benefit the following season when Double Falsehood was performed at Drury Lane on 21 April 1729. Scholars seem mostly to have ignored this event, but it is extraordinary. I conjecture that Theobald had done a bit of script doctoring or other service for the company and was rewarded with a benefit. At a guess, he was sufficiently connected to think he could flog expensive tickets and earn more than whatever flat fee the managers might have offered him. See his servile letter to the Countess of Oxford of 10 December 1727, enclosing twelve box tickets for his benefits for Double Falsehood and begging her to “disperse them” for him as a patroness, even though he is “unknown” to her. Historical Manuscript Commission, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, vol. 6 (London: HMSO, 1901), 20. Printed by Cadwalader.
- 55.
I find nothing suspicious about this. George Lillo did not sign a contract on The London Merchant until November 1735, though Gray had published it back in the summer of 1731 with three more editions before 1735 (British Library Add. MS 38,728, fol. 129). Arthur Murphy at least twice waited many months to sign a formal agreement for plays already in print. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Profits from Play Publication: The Evidence of Murphy v. Vaillant,” Studies in Bibliography 51 (1998): 213–29.
- 56.
Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 79.
- 57.
Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), 215.
- 58.
Gildon, The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets, 60.
- 59.
A True and Exact Catalogue Of all the Plays That were ever yet Printed in the English Tongue (London, 1713), 44, and A Compleat Catalogue of All the Plays That were ever yet Printed in the English Language (London, 1726), 91.
- 60.
Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register: or, the Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (London: E. Curll, 1719), 108. He very likely got his information from Langbaine or Gildon’s revision. The entry is retained verbatim in the 1723 edition.
- 61.
See Corbett; Langbaine’s Account appears as item 507 (13).
- 62.
Quoted in my discussion of Gildon’s report of Cibber’s refusal to produce an unpublished “Shakespeare” play in “(9)” above.
- 63.
For evidence of Tanner’s use of the Stationers’ Register, see Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554–1640 A.D. (London, 1875–1894), 1:2.
- 64.
See Gary Taylor and Steven Wagschal, “Reading Cervantes, or Sheldon, or Phillips? The Source(s) of Cardenio and Double Falsehood,” in Bourus & Taylor, 17.
- 65.
Ivan Lupić, “Malone’s Double Falsehood,” in Carnegie & Taylor, 101.
- 66.
Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); and Paulina Kewes, ‘“[A] Play, which I presume to call original’: Appropriation, Creative Genius, and Eighteenth-Century Playwriting,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 34, no. 1 (2001): 17–47.
- 67.
For a basic survey of adaptive habits, see Antony Hammond, “‘Rather a Heap of Rubbish Than a Structure’: The Principles of Restoration Dramatic Adaptation Revisited,” The Stage in the 18th Century, ed. J. D. Browning (New York: Garland, 1981), 133–48.
- 68.
Dryden, The Works, 17: 56–57.
- 69.
Gary Taylor and John V. Nance, “Four Characters in Search of a Subplot: Quixote, Sancho, and Cardenio,” in Carnegie & Taylor, 192–216.
- 70.
Robert Jordan and Harold Love, eds., The Works of Thomas Southerne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2:180.
- 71.
For a more extensive treatment of drama and theatre at this time, see Robert D. Hume, “The London Theatre From The Beggar’s Opera to the Licensing Act,” in Robert D. Hume, The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama 1660–1800 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983).
- 72.
“Four Characters in Search of a Subplot,” 193.
- 73.
Edmund G. C. King, “Cardenio and the Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Canon,” in Carnegie & Taylor, 81–94.
- 74.
Ibid., 92–93.
- 75.
Ibid., 93.
- 76.
Harbage, “Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest,” 287–319.
- 77.
David Erskine Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, 2 vols. (London, 1764), 1, s.v. Provok’d Husband.
- 78.
Bonamy Dobrée and Geoffrey Webb, eds, The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, 4 vols. (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1927–1928), 3:179.
- 79.
As a loose parallel, one might point to playwrights whose scripts had been gutted by the Master of the Revels insisting on publishing it “just as I first writ it” with “all that was expunged…Printed in the Italick Letter” as Thomas Shadwell explains in his note “To the Reader” prefacing The Lancashire Witches (pub. 1683). Another example is Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III (1700), whose first act was cut in its entirety for performance purposes.
- 80.
For discussion of buying-power equivalency, see Robert D. Hume, “The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740,” Huntington Library Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2006): 487–533, and Hume, “The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power—and Some Problems in Cultural Economics,” Huntington Library Quarterly 77, no. 4 (2014): 373–416. MeasuringWorth.com calculates the Retail Price Index value today as £179 and the Average Income figure above £3000. The latter figure is testimony to just how few people could afford an expensive edition in the early eighteenth century.
- 81.
Price from David Foxon, ed., A Register of Books 1728–1732, Extracted from The Monthly Chronicle (London: Gregg-Archive, 1964), November 1728, page 261, item 4.
- 82.
See Don-John Dugas and Robert D. Hume, “The Dissemination of Shakespeare’s Plays Circa 1714,” Studies in Bibliography 56 (2003/2004): 261–79.
- 83.
See Keith Maslen and John Lancaster, eds., The Bowyer Ledgers (London: The Bibliographical Society; New York: The Bibliographical Society of America, 1991), nos. 2100 (The London Prodigal, 10,000), 2101 (Pericles, 8000), 2103 (Antony and Cleopatra, 10,000), 2105 (Cymbeline, 10,000), and 2106 (Two Gentlemen of Verona, 10,000).
- 84.
For a detailed and deeply learned account of the Macklin letter uproar and its ramifications, see Arthur Freeman, “The Beginnings of Shakespearean (and Jonsonian) Forgery: Attribution and the Politics of Exposure, Parts I and II,” in The Library, 7th ser., 5, nos. 3 and 4 (2004): 265–93, 402–27.
- 85.
The standard account of this transition is Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
- 86.
This claim is both confused and irrelevant. So far as we know, the Moseley manuscript probably no longer existed, and what Theobald was claiming the rights to was his adaptation, which derived from manuscripts descended from Moseley’s.
- 87.
I point blank reject this second claim. Theobald’s “Royal Licence” was based on his having paid £8 1s for it. The justification as printed is presumably, merely what he supplied in his application, and it mentions both his “considerable Expence” in purchasing a manuscript copy and his “great Labour and Pains” in revising and adapting said play “to the Stage.” Grand as a Royal Licence may seem, it got Theobald the standard fourteen-year sole right to print and publish guaranteed under the 1710 Act. For analysis of such licenses and a list of all those granted, see Shef Rogers, “The Use of Royal Licenses for Printing In England, 1695–1760: A Bibliography,” in The Library, 7th ser., 1, no. 2 (2000): 133–92.
- 88.
For a list of all known eighteenth-century copyright purchases of plays, see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, The Publication of Plays in London, 1660–1800: Playwrights, Publishers and the Market (London: The British Library, 2015), Appendix I.
- 89.
For a facsimile, see Hammond’s introduction in DF, 18. On copyright in practice as opposed to theory, see William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 2; and James Raven, “Booksellers in Court: Approaches to the Legal History of Copyright in England Before 1842,” Law Library Journal 104, no. 1 (2012–2013): 115–34.
- 90.
See Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian textual criticism and representations of scholarly labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 94–95; Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 73–74; and Chartier, 120.
- 91.
Quoted in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 1:539–42.
- 92.
Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (London: Methuen, 1960), 152.
- 93.
Ibid., 154.
- 94.
Ibid., 159.
- 95.
Ibid., 160. Ten years later Muir modified his position, pointing out Shakespeare’s increasingly frequent use in his later plays of “internal rhyme, perfect or imperfect, either in the same or successive lines” (305) and noting that “there are several examples of the same device in Theobald’s Double Falsehood” (309). See Kenneth Muir, “A Trick of Style and Some Implications,” Shakespeare Studies 6 (1970): 305–10, and his brief introduction to a facsimile of the 1728 edition (London: Cornmarket, 1970).
- 96.
Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). For a sober and detailed defense of identifying and differentiating Middletonian additions to Shakespeare’s original play made prior to its publication in the 1623 folio, see Gary Taylor, “Empirical Middleton: Macbeth, Adaptation, and Microauthorship,” Shakespeare Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2014): 239–72.
- 97.
See Martin C. Battestin, ed., New Essays by Henry Fielding: His Contributions to the Craftsman (1734–1739) and Other Early Journalism, with a Stylometric Analysis by Michael G. Farringdon (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989). For a devastating demolition of the whole enterprise, see Thomas Lockwood, “Did Fielding Write for The Craftsman?” Review of English Studies, n.s. 59 (2008): 86–117.
- 98.
See Martin C. Battestin, “The Cusum Method: Escaping the Bog of Subjectivism,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8 (1996): 533–38; Jill M. Farringdon, Analysing for Authorship: A Guide to the Cusum Technique (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996); and Stephen Karian, “Authors of the Mind: Some Notes on the QSUM Attribution Theory,” Studies in Bibliography 57 (2005): 263–86. Karian concludes that “QSUM has no validity” (281) and that it “cannot be rescued” (285).
- 99.
A spectacular demonstration is to be had from Henry Salerno’s Double Falshood and Shakespeare’s Cardenio: A Study of a ‘Lost’ Play ([Bloomington, IN]: Xlibris, 2000). Salerno supplies long lists of “Shakespearian” echoes in Acts IV and V of Theobald’s play. This is bizarre: every other critic I have encountered finds Shakespeare present (if at all) in the first half of the play and largely or entirely absent in the second half.
- 100.
The field remains hotly contested. See, for example, Brian Vickers’s review article, “Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2011): 106–42; and John Burrows’s angry rebuttal, “A Second Opinion on Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2012): 355–92. Vickers favors gathering collocations; Burrows is a proponent of statistical analysis of relative word frequency.
- 101.
A fourth such approach to Double Falsehood, one relying on “analysis of recurrent strings of characters,” has not so far yielded helpful results. See Giuliano Pascucci, “Double Falsehood / Cardenio: A Case of Authorship Attribution with Computer-Based Tools,” Memoria di Shakespeare 8 (2012): 351–72.
- 102.
I am indebted to Richard Proudfoot for pointing out to me that the names could be pronounced in ways that would largely obviate the difficulty—e.g., treating Leonora as a trisyllable (Leo-no-ra). Whether there is evidence from the early modern period of spellings or elisions to buttress the likelihood of this suggestion, I do not know.
- 103.
Proudfoot’s conclusions are generally congruent with those later arrived at by Boyd and Pennebaker using a distinctly different methodology. See Ryan L. Boyd and James W. Pennebaker, “Did Shakespeare Write Double Falsehood? Identifying Individuals by Creating Psychological Signatures With Text Analysis,” Psychological Science 26, no. 5 (2015): 570–82.
- 104.
Speculative reconstructions can be imagined (such as those by Gary Taylor, Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee, and Bernard Richards described and analyzed in Carnegie & Taylor), but there is no way to “validate” such speculations. The full text of the Taylor version is published in Bourus & Taylor. Most of this collection is devoted to investigations of Cervantean, Fletcherian, and Theobaldian contexts. An entertaining overview of the history of the various versions is offered by Gregory Doran’s Shakespeare’s Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio (London: Nick Hern Books, 2012). Doran reimagined the play and directed the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 2011.
- 105.
Macdonald P. Jackson, as quoted in Proudfoot, “Merely a Forgery,” 163. I must underline the distinction between believing in participation and imagining that we can identify particular contributions. Writing well before the current critical debate, Brian Vickers states flatly that “the arguments claiming that Theobald’s text preserves something of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s original seem to me unconvincing” (Shakespeare, Co-Author, 10). Vickers is an authority on Shakespeare as collaborator, but he seems off the mark here. Shakespeare’s presence in the text may be close to nil (and not specifically identifiable), but the evidence of Fletcher’s presence seems quite convincing. And recent investigation of possible collaborators has solidified the grounds for seeing Shakespeare as the likeliest collaborator. For a broader consideration of Shakespeare’s rationale and modus operandi for collaborative ventures, see Gary Taylor, “Why did Shakespeare Collaborate?” Shakespeare Survey 67 (2014): 1–17. On current scholarly views and controversies concerning Shakespearean collaborations, see Gary Taylor, “Collaboration 2016,” in Shakespeare in Our Time, ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 141–48.
- 106.
Bernard Richards, “Now I am in Arden,” Essays in Criticism 61, no. 1 (2011): 79–88.
- 107.
Robert Folkenflik, “‘Shakespearesque’: The Arden Double Falsehood,” Huntington Library Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2012): 143.
- 108.
For advice and assistance of various kinds I am much indebted to Robert Folkenflik, Kit Hume, Jean Marsden, Ashley Marshall, Sonia Massai, Judith Milhous, Deborah C. Payne, Richard Proudfoot, Diana Solomon, and Gary Taylor.
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Hume, R.D. (2016). Believers Versus Skeptics: An Assessment of the Cardenio/Double Falsehood Problem. In: Payne, D. (eds) Revisiting Shakespeare’s Lost Play. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46514-2_2
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