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Performance of Hamlet at Blackfriars Playhouse, photo by Tommy Thompson

September 18, 2008

For a lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio is receiving some significant time on stage this year. Last May, the American Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts produced an updated re-imaging of Cardenio written by Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt and playwright Charles Mee. Now, the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) is offering a staged reading of The History of Cardenio, Professor Gary Taylor’s reconstruction of the Bard’s lost work. The one-time performance will be presented Sunday, October 5 at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia.

“We are pleased that Gary Taylor, the scholar who revolutionized the way we edit Shakespeare’s plays, has reconstructed Shakespeare’s lost play about Don Quixote,” said Ralph Alan Cohen, director of mission of the American Shakespeare Center.

Gary Taylor is professor of English at Florida State University and General Editor of the Oxford editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works and of the Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, published last year by Oxford University Press. Taylor is also the author of numerous books on literature and literary theory, including Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present.

Many scholars believe that Shakespeare and his collaborator John Fletcher wrote Cardenio around 1612, using an episode from Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote as a primary source. The play was performed at the court of King James I and possibly at the original Blackfriars Theatre in London. Cardenio was not included in the First Folio of 1623 and the text of play disappeared, leading to a three-century-long search that made Cardenio the stuff of literary myth.

In 1727, Lewis Theobald, an editor of Shakespeare’s works, announced he had obtained three manuscripts of Cardenio. He adapted the play into a work called Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers. Unfortunately, the manuscripts Theobald claimed to have disappeared, although the play Double Falsehood survived.

Taylor’s used Theobald ’s adaptation as the basis for his recreation of Cardenio. Through painstaking archival research and detailed linguistic analysis, he has tried to get as close to the original text as possible. “When I’m in the process of undoing the damage that Theobald did in adapting the play,” Taylor said, “I have to use the language of Shakespeare’s time to undo the language of the eighteenth century.”

“The lost play was written by two very successful playwrights who knew what they were doing,” said Taylor, “and it was performed at court not once but twice – so, this should be a wonderful piece of theatre.”

Taylor began work on his reconstruction of Cardenio several years ago. The American Shakespeare Center’s performance is part of an ongoing series of public readings of Taylor’s work including an informal reading in early 2006 in New York and public readings at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts in 2006 and Florida State University in 2007. Both the Williamsburg and FSU performances were directed by Joe Cacaci and produced by David Black. Most recently, Cardenio received a public reading in 2008 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.

Professor Gary Taylor, photo courtesy Florida State University

Taylor’s reconstruction of Cardenio will be read on stage at the Blackfriars by the ASC’s resident Equity acting troupe. The performance will be Taylor’s chance to test his text in a kind of laboratory setting, taking advantage of the Blackfriars stage and the experience of its actors and audiences with Renaissance staging practices. “A piece of reconstructing the play would be to try it out at a theatre like the Blackfriars and with actors who are used to working with Shakespeare in such conditions,” said Taylor.

“Each of these readings has differed from the others, as I have learned from the actors and audiences of each, improving the reconstruction line by line and scene by scene.”

“My principle is that anything that doesn’t work can’t have been what Shakespeare and Fletcher originally wrote. So in a sense my re-creation is not only my work, but the work of all the actors, directors, and audiences who have tested it for me.”

“They’re our focus group and our sample that tells us whether this is going to work for much larger international audiences.”

Following the ASC performance in October, Cardenio will be given a public reading on November 3 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

This is not the first time Taylor has reconstructed a work by Shakespeare. He previously prepared a conjectural reconstruction of Pericles for The Oxford Shakespeare, first published in 1986. The surviving copies of Pericles are generally accepted to represent a corrupted version of Shakespeare’s original play. Taylor advanced the theory that Shakespeare wrote Pericles in collaboration with George Wilkin and he drew on Wilkin’s prose narrative The Painful Adventures of Pericles (1608) to replace missing material and show what the original play might have looked like.

The performance of The History of Cardenio is the first in the ASC’s 2008/09 series of Bring ‘Em Back Alive staged readings intended to introduce contemporary audiences to Renaissance English plays that are rarely, if ever, performed in the modern era. Other readings in the series are all written by anonymous Renaissance playwrights: Look About You on November 9, The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey or Caesar’s Revenge on March 15 and Edward III (possibly by Shakespeare) on April 19. All of these staged readings will be presented at the Blackfriars Playhouse, open to the public and free of charge.

For those who are unable to see Cardenio in performance, Taylor will make a printed version of the play available to the public in the future. The ASC will make an announcement when Taylor’s edition of Cardenio becomes available.

The American Shakespeare Center will present The History of Cardenio, on Sunday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. The performance is open to the public and free of charge.

CORRECTION: The first version of this article incorrectly stated that the American Shakespeare Company production would be the first time the play has been seen by an audience. In fact, as Professor Taylor notes in his comment below, Cardenio has received several public readings in recent years. His corrections and comments have since been incorporated into this article.

Web Resources:
The American Shakespeare Center
Gary Taylor bio
The New York Times - New Life for an Old Play, but Is It Shakespeare’s?
Online text of The Double Falsehood