The Quest for "Cardenio": Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the lost play ed. by David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (review)

This volume is an account—and a symptom—of what one of the contributors calls "Cardenio fever," a malady of long standing that has had a notable recent outbreak following the appearance of Brean Hammond's edition of Lewis Theobald's play Double Falsehood in the Arden Shakespeare series (2010). A play called Cardenno or Cardenna was performed at the English court in 1613; Humphrey Moseley registered ownership of a manuscript play called The History of Cardenio "by Mr Fletcher. & Shakespeare" in 1653; Theobald declared repeatedly that his play, performed in 1727 and published in 1728, was based on a Shakespeare manuscript inherited from a Restoration theater; and the plot of Double Falsehood does indeed follow the narrative strand in Don Quixote that involves a character called Cardenio. This chain of connections is strong, but not so strong that there is not room for doubt whether in fact there are any traces of Fletcher or Shakespeare in Theobald's play