One of my most exciting and enthralling Christmas presents was a copy of The Arden Shakespeare’s Double Falsehood, a play from 1727 by Lewis Theobald purportedly based on three or more copies of Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s play Cardenio (or The History of Cardenio), performed at court in 1613 and otherwise lost. Cardenio’s title indicates it was based on a story-within-a-story from Don Quixote by Cervantes, first published in an English translation in 1612 and more recently published in an excellent comic strip adaptation by Rob Davis.
The
introduction (which takes up more of the book than the actual play) goes into
as much detail as possible about the provenance of the play and – as you might
expect – concludes that treating Double Falsehood as part of the Shakespeare
canon is a worthwhile exercise, even if very, very little of it is recognisably
Shakespeare, as it was written in collaboration, and has been rewritten by one
or more hands.
The
fundamental issue, at least as I see it, is whether Theobald could have known
about Cardenio by any other means. The only reason we know about today is because
of a 1613 record of payments to the actor John Heminges and the Stationer’s
Register from 1653. Could Theobald have known about either of these things? If
so, or if he heard about the play by some other route, then it’s possible that
Double Falsehood could be a not-particularly-elaborate fake. But it seems to me
to be unlikely that the memory of a short-lived play would endure for over a
century. It also seems unbelievably unlikely that if Theobald were to consider
‘faking’ a Shakespeare play, he would - by coincidence - base it upon the same
story from Don Quixote that Shakespeare actually did use as the basis of a
play.
The mystery,
though, is why Cardenio wasn’t collected in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s
works. It could, at a stretch, be down to quality. Or availability. But my
guess – and it can only be a guess – is that it wasn’t included for the same
reason that The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles weren’t included, because they
were collaborative works, and that the compilers only wanted to include solo
Shakespeare works, either out of a sense of authorial integrity, or because the
rights weren’t available (John Fletcher still being alive at the time). Maybe
the compilers thought The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio would be better suited
to a collection of John Fletcher’s works (such a collection appeared in 1647,
but initially didn’t include The Two Noble Kinsmen).
The Double
Falsehood play itself does share several qualities with The Two Noble Kinsmen,
as they both offer the simplistic, almost fairy-story type of storytelling with
no real subplots and with basic stereotypical characterisation and have
contrived dramatic situations overcome without recourse to logic or ingenuity.
They both also seem to have chunks of the story missing, set-ups with no
pay-offs and pay-offs without set-ups. In Double Falsehood, the well-worn plot
device of disguise is handled particularly clumsily; there’s an almost funny
scene where some shepherds laugh at Julio chatting up a girl that they think is
a boy, but that’s about it. The scene where Julio reveals his true identity is
quite wilfully perverse in the way it avoids dramatic potential.
Double
Falsehood also shares some similarities with A Winter’s Tale and Pericles in
having a change of location and a passage of time for the pastoral fourth act.
Oddly, it also has a few things in common with The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays,
with its storyline about a chap betraying a friend by sending him away to court
so he can seduce his girlfriend (Verona has a chap following his friend to
court and then attempting to seduce his friend’s girlfriend). Most
problematically, to my twenty-first century politically-correct sensibilities,
they also both handle rape (or attempted rape) plots rather dubiously; in
Verona the assaulter expresses remorse and is spontaneously forgiven by everyone (including
his victim) while Double Falsehood goes one step further by having Violante
(the victim) remain in love with her attacker (Henriquez) and has, as its
resolution, Henriquez falling in love with Violante anew. It’s not as if the
play treats the moral and emotional consequences of sexual assault particularly
lightly – it doesn’t – it just ‘solves’ the problems raised incredibly glibly
(and, even in its own terms, implausibly). But that is, I imagine, just down to the fact that attitudes now are
so different from back then, when rape and domestic abuse were considered ripe
subjects for theatrical comedies, whereas now the notion induces a reflexive
cringe (though our soap operas are no less salacious and exploitative and even
more superficial in their treatment of emotion, so we can claim no moral high
ground).
Anyway, it
was a fascinating read, even if it’s the Shakespeare equivalent of, oh, The
Beatles’ I’ll Be On My Way, and I look forward to my other presents, Sir Thomas
More and Edward III.
