Finding Cardenio Howard Marchitello In his 1885 memoir Behind the Footlights, W. C. Day offers an account of a spectacularly ill-fated production of Double Falshood he had staged nearly forty years earlier, a play he had found in a 1728 book labeled by a bookseller "[t]he last production of the immortal Shakespeare, 2s. 6d. only" and bearing on its title page the following remarkable declaration: "Written originally by W. Shakespeare; and now revised and adapted to the Stage by Mr. Theobald, the author of Shakespeare Restor'd."1 In what we quickly come to recognize as mock amazement, Day declares, "Here was an El Dorado; an original play of the 'Divine William'—his last production, too—lost to the stage for 120 years, and last, though not by any means least, its authenticity guaranteed by the autograph of a monarch!" (B, 61–62).2 Day scoffs not only at Lewis Theobald's claim to a lost Shakespearean original for his play but also at the (attempted) legitimation of that claim in the form of a royal patent, issued in the name of King George II, granting Theobald exclusive rights to the play for a term of fourteen years.3 Day's dismissive irony is not sufficiently serious, however, to prevent him from following what he clearly understood to be Theobald's lead in both forgery and opportunistic self-promotion, determining immediately that "[s]uch an opportunity for the manufacture of a little 'sugar' was not to be heedlessly thrown aside" (B, 62). Day and an associate lease the Theatre Royal Olympic for one night's performance (with "the option of indefinite continuance should the public trout accept the fly") and promote the event through "a flaming playbill [that] let the cat out of the bag in the following interesting terms: SHAKESPEARE'S LAST PLAY" (B, 62).4 The evening of the performance arrives and the players bring the doubly-lost play to the stage. But almost immediately the prospects of success sour: upon the first entrance of Duke Angelo, his son Roderick, and a few courtiers, one of the latter is recognized by a member of the audience who calls to him, "Hallo, Jim!" and this call is acknowledged by the player who "deliberately singled out his friend and returned the salutation with, 'All right, old boy,' and a familiar nod of the head" (B, 65). Though recalling the event from some forty [End Page 957] years on, Day "can vividly remember, even at this lapse of years, the effect this sally produced, and recall the sudden sinking of my hopes as the conviction flashed across me that the game was up, and Double Falshood an irretrievably gone coon" (B, 65).5 The succeeding several paragraphs recount many similar moments in which the players—and, Day is quite clear, the play, too—fail to "silence the jokers and master the discontents" (B, 65), culminating in the moment at which "Miss Fanny Hamilton ([playing the part of] Violante)," "a lady to whom Nature had been no niggard in the matter of flesh and muscle, as she scaled about fourteen stone," appeared disguised as a shepherd boy "attired in light green-coloured pants." On her exclamation, "How his eyes shake fire, and measure every piece of youth about me," the audience, Day reports, "was . . . thrown entirely out of balance, and all hope of attention and enlisting further interest in the story at an end" (B, 66). After the final curtain, Day and his partner are counting receipts in their dressing room when they hear laughter, "slight applause," and the cry of "Manager," followed immediately by the cry of "Author." This was an idea, Day offers, that "so tickled the audience that the majority refused to leave without a response being made" (B, 66). The suitably theatrical—and comical—response comes from Day's (unnamed) partner, who "hurried to the green-room, where on a rickety shelf over the fireplace figured a life-size plaster bust of the Immortal Bard. Hastily reaching it down, covered with dust an inch thick which he did not wait to remove, he strode majestically on the stage and held it out to the audience. Such...