Unfinished plays. The lost play of ‘Cardenio.’
While there is every indication that in 1611 Shakespeare abandoned dramatic composition, there seems
little doubt that he left with the manager of his company unfinished drafts of more than one play which others were summoned at a later date to complete. His place at the head of the active dramatists was at once filled by John Fletcher, and Fletcher, with some aid possibly from his friend Philip Massinger, undertook the working up of Shakespeare’s unfinished sketches. On September 9, 1653, the publisher Humphrey Moseley obtained a license for the publication of a play which he described as ‘History of Cardenio, by Fletcher and Shakespeare.’ This was probably identical with the lost play, ‘Cardenno,’ or ‘Cardenna,’ which was twice acted at Court by Shakespeare’s company in 1613—in May during the Princess Elizabeth’s marriage festivities, and on June 8 before the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador. [258a] Moseley, whose description may have been fraudulent, [258b] failed to publish the piece, and nothing is otherwise known of it with certainty; but it was no doubt a dramatic version of the adventures of the lovelorn Cardenio which are related in the first part of ‘Don Quixote’ (ch. xxiii.-xxxvii.) Cervantes’s amorous story, which first appeared in English in Thomas Shelton’s translation in 1612, offers much incident in Fletcher’s vein. When Lewis Theobald,
the Shakespearean critic, brought out his ‘Double Falshood, or the Distrest Lovers,’ in 1727, he mysteriously represented that the play was based on an unfinished and unpublished draft of a play by Shakespeare. The story of Theobald’s piece is the story of Cardenio, although the characters are renamed. There is nothing in the play as published by Theobald to suggest Shakespeare’s hand, [259a] but Theobald doubtless took advantage of a tradition that Shakespeare and Fletcher had combined to dramatise the Cervantic theme.