Abstract
Many scholars believe Lewis Theobald's 1727 play Double Falsehood to be an adaptation of Fletcher and Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio. Double Falsehood diverges in some striking ways from the “Cardenio” source material found in Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. One such example is that the seduction of the heroine in the source is transformed into a rape in the play. Is this rape, then, the addition and invention of Lewis Theobald? If so, why in Double Falsehood does the Epilogue attest that the rape exists from an “ancient play”? Is the rape closer to a Jacobean rape plot than to eighteenth-century modes? If so, how does it function in the dramaturgy?
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