 |
| Poster for the RSC's 2011 production of 'Cardenio: Shakespeare's Lost Play Reimagined' |
There’s a satirical news story going around the internet at the moment that the lost play Cardenio has
been found, printed, in the personal
collection of a recently deceased English Lord. The ‘holy grail’ of literature,
[The History of] Cardenio is a play written in 1612-13 by William Shakespeare and
John Fletcher, and dramatises an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The story has
appeared numerous times over the past fortnight, yet the reportage doesn’t
change. At least seventeen days too late to be an April Fool’s hoax, I wouldn't doubt if the story is in fact an elaborate kind of meta-hoax designed to
celebrate Shakespeare’s four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday.
Finding Cardenio is akin to discovering Father Christmas doesn’t exist, or
that the grass isn’t in fact greener on the other side of the hill. I love the
idea of Shakespeare collaborating on a play adapted from Don Quixote; I’d love to know what Shakespeare thought of
Cervantes’ story – I’d like to think he was rather quite taken with it, if a
little apprehensive, but delighted with its erroneous knight, his portly squire
and their wide travails across the length and breadth of Spain .
Part of my
fascination with the story of Cardenio,
as written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, comes from not knowing the play, from
not having the Jacobean play-text to hand; comes from not being certain of its
contents, composition or plot, apart from its entries in the Stationer’s
register, court records for the Christmas period of 1612-13, and the accounts
kept by John Heminges for the King’s Men. While we do have a seventeenth
century adaptation of the play, published as Double Falsehood, or the Distrest Lovers, the fact we don’t have
the original is all the more reason to dream, to conjecture, to rhapsody and to
imagine. Sometimes it’s best not to have all the answers; sometimes it’s better
to not know everything; sometimes the world is a richer place for muses of fire
that transcend the heavens of invention…
