Locale in Cardenio, Double Falsehood, Don Quixote and Wellington

Abstract

This essay deals with locale in Lewis Theobald's 1727 play Double Falsehood on the early eighteenth-century English stage, and in Gary Taylor's “creative reconstruction” of it as The History of Cardenio in a production I directed on a twenty-first century New Zealand stage. Lying behind both these is the presumptive lost Fletcher/Shakespeare collaborative play Cardenio performed on the Jacobean stage in 1613; and Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, the source of the story. My concerns will lie with the court, the village, the city, the mountains and, eventually, New Zealand; and more particularly with the way in which performance may highlight or solve problems inherent in the text.