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Most critics looking to find evidence of Shakespeare, Fletcher, or Shelton (the 1612 translator of Cervantes's Don Quixote) in Lewis Theobald's Double Falshood have found it; this "evidence" has been treated as proof that Double Falshood contains traces of a lost play, Cardenio, said to have been based on Don Quixote and written by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Yet there is only weak information linking Shakespeare to "Cardenio," while Theobald's putative texts, all of which are called Double Falshood (he never uses the name "Cardenio"), have no unambiguous pre- or post-Theobald history and seem to have varied in number (from one to four), age (from early modern to Restoration), and handwriting (from Shakespeare's to Downes's), depending on when and where they were described. In the light of the decision by Arden Shakespeare to publish "The History of Cardenio By William Shakespeare and John Fletcher Adapted for the eighteenth century stage as Double Falsehood or The Distressed Lovers by Lewis Theobald," or Double Falsehood, as it called on the cover (on which no author is named), this essay will use new (and old) evidence to re-examine who wrote Double Falshood, and who wrote Cardenio.1
I. Shakespeare's Cardenio
Was there ever a play called The History of Cardenio written by "William Shakespeare and John Fletcher"? The two pieces of secure information on the subject both come from the same royal treasury accounts for the year 1613. They are for a King's Men play with an unclear title; no author is mentioned. The first records the following:
Item paid to . . . John Heminges . . . dated att Whitehall xxo die maii 1613 for presentinge sixe severall playes viz one playe called a badd beginininge [sic] makes a good endinge, One other called ye Capteyne, One other the Alcumist. / One other Cardenno. / One other The Hotspurr: / And one other called Benidicte and Betteris.2
Here, "Cardenno" occurs at the point in the list where titles of plays give way to titles of heroes, "The Hotspurr" appearing to refer to Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV and "Benidicte and Betteris" to Much Ado about Nothing. Descriptive play titles are, of course, regularly replaced by character names over time: the Shakespeare play called All Is True in performance was...