Cardenio
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Cardenio is a lost play, known to have been performed by the King's Men, a London theatre company, in 1613. It was attributed to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher in 1653.
The content of the play is not known, and only one song survives [[Citing sources citation needed]]. However, it is likely based on incidents in Don Quixote, of which the 1612 translation by Thomas Shelton would have been available to the authors. Fletcher based several of his later plays on the work of Miguel Cervantes.
Lewis Theobald and Double Falshood
In 1727, Lewis Theobald claimed to have obtained three Restoration-era manuscripts of an unnamed play by Shakespeare, which he edited, "improved", and released under the name Double Falshood. (In Theobald's time, Shakespeare was always adapted to the tastes of contemporary theatergoers, so there is nothing particularly odd about that, however much we may regret it; and Theobald was also unable to publish the original script, because of Jacob Tonson's exclusive copyright on Shakespeare's plays.) The Double Falshood story has the plot of the "Cardenio" episode in Don Quixote, and present scholarly opinion is that Theobald did indeed use the lost Cardenio as his original, but believed the work to be by John Fletcher, as the co-authoriship attribution had not been discovered at the time[[Citing sources citation needed]]. The fate of Theobald's three manuscripts is unknown; they may well have passed to John Warburton, who had worked with Theobald, and if they did, they probably perished at the hands of his infamous cook.Charles Hamilton and The Second Maiden's Tragedy
In 1990, Charles Hamilton, a handwriting expert, after seeing a 1611 manuscript known as The Second Maiden's Tragedy, usually attributed to Thomas Middleton, identified it as a text of the missing Cardenio in which the characters' names had been changed. This attribution is not generally accepted by experts on Shakespeare [link].Several theatre companies have capitalized on Hamilton's attribution by performing The Second Maiden's Tragedy under the name of Shakespeare's Cardenio, often ignoring its disputed status. For instance, a production at Oxford's Burton Taylor Theatre in March, 2004, claimed to have been the first performance of the play in England since its recovery (even though there have been several earlier productions of the play under the title The Second Maiden's Tragedy) [[Citing sources citation needed]].
Arguably the most prominent American staging of The Second Maiden's Tragedy as Cardenio to date — the acclaimed [link] 2002 Los Angeles production starring film and television actors Megan Henning and Travis Schuldt — was advertised as "Shakespeare's" play, although the programme note by director James Kerwin acknowledged — and discussed in detail — the play's controversial history.
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