Cardenio

…Shakespearean play of 1613 called Cardenio, of which Theobald asserted that he possessed three copies. Those copies have disappeared, leaving scholars today to wonder if Double Falsehood can give some impression of that lost Shakespearean tragicomedy. Probably Shakespeare wrote Cardenio in collaboration with John Fletcher, his successor as chief playwright…

Of Shakespeare’s late works, Cardenio (now lost) was probably based on incidents involving the character Cardenio in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Since that great work had been translated into English in 1612 by Thomas Shelton, it was available to Shakespeare and John Fletcher when they evidently collaborated as…

…may have contributed, or the Cardenio that Shakespeare appears to have written with John Fletcher and that may have provided the basis for Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood in 1727. It did nonetheless include 36 plays, half of them appearing in print for the first time.

…well have written the now-lost Cardenio in 1613, of which Double Falsehood, 1727, purports to be a later adaptation.) The story, taken out of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, is essentially another romance, in which two young gallants compete for the hand of Emilia and in which deities preside over the choice.…

now believe, John Fletcher) called Cardenio. The play was probably first performed (as Cardenio) in 1613, but it was not published as part of the Shakespeare canon until 2010. The principal source of the plot was a digressive episode in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Part I, 1605), which was…