Double Falsehood

Double Falsehood, tragicomedy in five acts presented by Lewis Theobald at Drury Lane Theatre in 1727. According to Theobald, it was based on a lost play by William Shakespeare (and, scholars now believe, John Fletcher) called Cardenio. The play was probably first performed (as Cardenio) in 1613, but it was not published as part of the Shakespeare canon until 2010. The principal source of the plot was a digressive episode in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Part I, 1605), which was translated into English by Richard Shelton in 1612.

Ever since Theobald’s production of Double Falsehood, scholars and critics have wondered if the work deserves a place in the canon of Shakespeare’s works. Theobald, himself a playwright and Shakespeare editor, claimed to have owned three original texts of Cardenio. Since a play called Cardenio was in fact performed by Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, in 1613, the near coincidence of date suggests that Shakespeare could have been the author or part-author of Cardenio. Shakespeare, as the company’s leading playwright, seemingly collaborated in 1613 in the writing of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen with Fletcher, who was fast becoming Shakespeare’s successor.

The poet Alexander Pope was dismissive of Theobald’s claim, but then Pope had no use for Theobald generally; he pilloried Theobald in a version of The Dunciad (1728). Still, Pope’s judgment on Double Falsehood carried the day, and the matter remained in contention for nearly three centuries. It remains contentious still.

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The whole subject has been thoroughly reviewed by Brean Hammond, a professor of English literature at the University of Nottingham, in his edition of Double Falsehood for The Arden Shakespeare (2010). In that volume Hammond expresses his conviction that Shakespeare was co-dramatist with Fletcher. At the same time, Hammond allows Double Falsehood to be a flawed play. Eighteenth-century versions of Shakespeare on stage tended to be freely adapted to the tastes of the age. No doubt Theobald felt little compunction in departing widely from Cardenio, if he was indeed working from that play. The alternative possibility—that Theobald perpetrated a hoax—is also plausible; Shakespeare’s reputation invited such flights of imagination. Double Falsehood is a short play. Theobald, if he was indeed working from a text of Cardenio, presumably excised sizable portions that he deemed not suited to his audience’s tastes and rearranged what was left, adding and subtracting characters more or less at will. Thus, even if Theobald’s claim is true, the shape and exact content of the Shakespearean original is not clear. The plot of Double Falsehood—centring on two young women, one of whom is highborn and the other of lowly origins, together with two men who are contrastingly honourable and villainous—is the stuff out of which many a tragicomic play might have been written in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Other plays and poems have been attributed to Shakespeare over the years. He is so supreme that appreciators of the Bard are anxious not to miss anything he may have written. Yet the efforts at filling out the Shakespeare canon have not succeeded in providing dramatic texts that one can really care deeply about. Double Falsehood is no exception. It provides an interesting, speculative chapter in theatre history, but to read it is to learn more about the early 18th century than about Shakespeare.