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C h a p t e r 4 Cardenio Lost and Found A drama cannot be national and take during its formative period any elements which are not born out of the spirit of the people themselves. —Rudolf Schevill With the 400th anniversary of Don Quijote in 2005 and of the 1612 Shelton translation in 2012, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost Cardenio, based on the unhinged lover-turned-wild-man in the first part of Cervantes’s novel, has moved center stage, in a series of academic, dramatic, and popular reconstructions. In this chapter and the next, I explore how the field of early modern English has negotiated Cardenio’s absent presence, and the role its disappearance has played in how we read Anglo-Spanish relations in early modern drama. I turn in this chapter to the textual history of the early Cardenio and to the theoretical assumptions underlying the search for the lost text; Chapter 5 explores how contemporary scholars, playwrights, and directors have attempted to supply its loss with a burgeoning collection of Cardenios for our time. While the critical and creative interventions I chart in these chapters all trade in Shakespeare’s cultural capital, their very multiplicity challenges notions of Shakespearean singularity. The Cervantine sources of Cardenio, moreover, allow us to rethink the national parameters of a literary history in which Shakespeare takes center stage and recognize instead the transnational context out of which national canons are wrought. “None but himself can be his parallel” Cardenio may or may not be entirely lost to us, and this ambiguity in part explains the enduring critical and popular fascination with the play. As is by 80 Chapter 4 now well established, we know of the play’s existence from two seventeenthcentury references. In 1612–13, Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, was paid for two performances of Cardenno or Cardenna at court.1 On September 9, 1653, publisher and bookseller Humphrey Moseley entered The History of Cardenio on the Stationer’s Register, as a play written “by Mr. Fletcher. & Shakespeare” (with the telling extra end-stop before the second name), although there is no extant trace of subsequent publication. Yet that is not the end of the story. In 1727, Shakespearean editor and adapter Lewis Theobald produced Double Falshood, or The Distrest Lovers, a play based on the erotic misadventures of the interpolated narratives in Don Quijote. When the play was published in 1728, the title page helpfully explained: “Written Originally by W. Shakespeare; And now Revised and Adapted to the Stage by Mr. Theobald , the Author of Shakespeare Restor’d.”2 While foregrounding his authority as a Shakespearean editor, Theobald claimed that this text was his version of a Shakespeare play “built upon a Novel in Don Quixot,” and based on several manuscripts in his possession.3 While we cannot know what the plot of the missing Cardenio might have been, the appeal of the Cervantes source material is evident. In part I of Don Quijote, Cervantes narrates the unfortunate loves of Cardenio, Luscinda , Fernando, and Dorotea, mismatched couples struggling to transcend class differences and avoid the tragic consequences of erotic competition. Don Quijote barely participates in the action. His role is primarily to serve as an audience for the complex reconstructed narration of the lovers’ adventures , which he, and the reader, must piece together from papers found in an abandoned suitcase, the story intermittently told by the mad Cardenio in rare moments of lucidity, the partial account of her own seduction by a ruined maid dressed as a shepherd, and the almost magical coincidences that bring all parties to the same inn. Reordered, the plot reads as follows. The noble Fernando, Cardenio’s so-called friend, plans to steals Cardenio ’s beloved Luscinda after being moved by his glowing description of her, and sends Cardenio to the court on a fool’s errand. Luscinda manages to send him a message warning that she is to be forced to marry Fernando, and Cardenio rushes back. Hidden behind a curtain, Cardenio is unable to stop the wedding, at which Luscinda whispers her assent before falling into a dead faint. Cardenio goes mad at the perceived double betrayal by his friend and his beloved, and seeks refuge in the mountains, where he is fed by kindly shepherds despite his occasional violent attacks on them. Fernando’s new adventure leads him, in turn, to abandon Dorotea, the rich farmer’s [18.223.119.17] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 18...

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