David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (eds),The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play.

Abstract

THIS volume of essays arises from a conference held at Wellington, New Zealand, in 2009. At its heart is the possibility that Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood , performed in 1727, preserves within it elements of the lost Shakespearean play Cardenio. The Quest for Cardenio is, in some respects, a very pleasing volume, given coherence and unity by its subject-matter. It provides an ‘in the round’ view of the play(s), the controversy, and the performance history at all stages from the performance of ‘Cardenno’ at court in January 1613 to the 2012 performance in Indianapolis of ‘[Gary] Taylor’s The History of Cardenio ’ (285). The opening part of the volume deals in particular with problems of text and attribution. Particular highlights include Brean S. Hammond’s account of the media reaction to his 2010 edition of Double Falsehood ; Ivan Lupić’s helpful dissection of who knew what when in eighteenth-century scholarship; and Tiffany Stern’s bucket of cold water emphasizing how tenuous the connections to Shakespeare might be. Elsewhere in this part of the book we see quantitative attributional methods, as well as various forms of more conventional literary-critical tools, applied to the play. But the keystone of this first part of the volume—indeed, of the volume as a whole—is Gary Taylor’s ‘A History of the History of Cardenio ’.