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The Royal Shakespeare Company's published playtext of Cardenio: Shakespeare's "Lost Play" Re-imagined bears some cautionary qualifications that should alert even the most gullible of readers and placate even the most skeptical of critics. Tiffiny Stern, for example, contends that the co-writing of plays in Shakespeare's period "might not actually involve two hands being present in the finished article" (Hammond 160). Furthermore, the title page of the RSC playtext offers a series of caveats that cannot but render both reader and viewer cautious as they approach this "new work" :
Cardenio, Shakespeare's "Lost Play" Re-imagined After Double Falshood; or The Distrest Lovers by Lewis Theobald (1727) Apparently revised from a manuscript in the handwriting of John Downes and conceivably adapted by Sir William Davenant for Thomas Betterton from The History of Cardenio by Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare (1612) performed at Court in 1612/13 Which may have been based on an episode in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes which was translated into English by Thomas Shelton First published in 1612 And here adapted and directed by Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespeare Company With additional Spanish material supplied by Antonio Alamo via a literal translation by Duncan Wheeler and developed in rehearsal by the original cast.1
It can hardly be coincidental that Cardenio was the first new production in the Swan Theatre since the RSC s Transformation Project, which culminated in 2011 with the reopening of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The Swan had opened twenty-five years before with Shakespeare and Fletcher's collaborative The Two Noble Kinsmen, so it seemed "fitting," in the words of director Gregory Doran in the introduction to his performance adaptation, "that we return with another play they worked on together, although this time the list of writing credits has grown to the length of a Hollywood blockbuster, with Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fletcher, Shelton, Theobald, etc." (Cardenio 7).
A cursory comparison of the cast list of Cardenio with the list of roles in Double Falsehood reveals that, if Theobald altered the names from the source material of the original Cervantes story in Part 3, Chapters 9-10, 13 and Part 4, Chapters 1-2, 9 (Chapters XXIII-XXIV, XXVII-IX, XXXVI ?? Don Quixote, G), Doran reverted to the original names whenever possible: Duke Angelo became Duke Ricardo;...