Cardenio, Or, the Second Maiden's Tragedy

This is both text and background material for Cardenio, a play usually attributed to Shakespeare, co-authored by John Fletcher towards the end of Shakespeare's career. The background material is rich, interesting and necessary for placing the play, and its evolution, in context. This is the play Arden is releasing as "Double Falsehood" in 2010 as a play, #37, finally accepted into the Shakespeare canon. The character Cardenio, comes from Cervantes' magnum opus, "Don Quixote", where he is an interesting character in an interesting situation, which Cervantes does not take full advantage of. Shakespeare and Fletcher take the character, expand the plot and fill it with drama. A wonderful read.

The reader above wants to know if there has been a refuation of the case Hamiltom makes in this book. The fact that it's in Shakesperae's writing cannot be refuted, but the fact that it's a Shakespeare play can, for the simple reason that until the handwriting was revealed to be what it quite clearly is, no one suspected Shakespeare as the author, and nearly everyone had it pegged sa Middleton (or someone very like him), which it is. T. S. Eliot believed that as a writer Middleton was second only to Shakespeare, but that's partly because his style was so very different and very much his own. What we have here is a mansucript copied by a scribe who happens to have William Shakespeare's handwriting. This would mean to someone like Sherlock Holmes that the man from Stratford was a scribe who happened to be lucky enough to earn his living pretending to be a playwright in order to protect the identity of the true aurhtor. Thus without meaning to, Hamilton has offered some of the very best evidence there is that the modest William did not write the works attributed to him. This is clearly the reason Shakesperean scholars don't want to go near this book, which contains one of the most important discoveries ever made in the history of Elizabethan scholarship. Read it and revel in its dramatic values, and then try to see if you can find any way to marry the style of this work with that of any of the Shakesperae plays. This would be easier if you could use the play developed from it, called Double Falsehood, which actually sounds a good deal more like Shakespeare than this version. Next see what scholars had to say about this play before anyone thought it might be by Shakespeare. At the very least you'll have a lot of fun with this fascinating detective story, and maybe you'll do some of your own thinking about it instead of pretending that the truth about William Shakespeare is well established. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There's a great mystery here, and there always has been.

I recently asked a friend, a Shakespeare professor, what she thought about the argument advanced in this book, which I had read perhaps a year previously. I was surprised to hear her say she wasn't acquainted with it. Hamilton seems to demonstrate soundly that the text known to us as the "Second Maiden's Tragedy" could originally have been titled "Cardenio" (a known "lost" Shakespeare play) since its plot appears to be drawn from a character of that name in "Don Quixote" and the current title appears to have been a working title applied by the royal censor. More dramatically, Hamilton (a nationally prominent forensic handwriting authority) argues that the handwriting in the survivng original manuscript of this play and that of Shakespeare's will are by the same man. Given Hamilton's stature in that field alone, I'd have expected the book to have drawn more attention. I don't know if the arguments in the book have been subjected to sound refutation by someone more expert than me, but to this journeyman Shakespeare buff he makes a solid enough case to bear hearing out