This is not a badly timed April Fools jape. The lost manuscript of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The History of Cardenio has indeed been creatively reconstructed by Professor Gary Taylor (USA) and, 393 years after its existence was first noted, it has premiered at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)’s Studio 77, directed by Professor David Carnegie (NZ) as part of the Compleate Workes Project.

An honour, a privilege and fascinating fun to boot.

Miguel de Cervantes also deserves credit since Fletcher and Shakespeare purloined characters and plot elements from his Don Quixote De La Mancha, the first great modern novel (translated into English by Thomas Shelton in 1612).

It is believed that Lewis Theobold based his Double Falsehood (1728) on the Fletcher / Shakespeare Cardenio, and because Theobold’s text is all that survives, Taylor has set himself the task of reconstructing The History of Cardenio by working backwards from there, much like an art conservator removing the dross from a badly restored painting. (See Laurie Atkinson’s review – link below – for more on the various Cardenios .)

Don’t be put off by the title: this is no dry history. Polonius would have called it ‘tragical-comical-historical-pastoral." While the players assembled are not "the best actors in the world" they do an excellent job of bringing the reconstruction to life with great clarity and intelligence, for which Carnegie, his assistant director Lori Leigh and Taylor, who has been in attendance during rehearsals, deserve shared credit.

I feel moved to add that the opportunities provided by Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand’s University of Otago Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival and VUW’s Summer Shakespeare have played key roles in giving this production a rich pool of talent to draw on. And with students of the new Scenic Imagination paper (THEA 324) evoking a ‘candle-lit’ Jacobean private theatre feel and superb props and costumes (click on the play title above for full credits) the production values are excellent too.

The music, played by a live quartet (see credits) and corralled or composed by musical director Simon Dickson is a wonderful complement to the onstage action.

Billed as "a tale of interrupted love", Cardenio revisits the fraught areas of class-impeded love, domineering fathers who see their daughters as agents of economic advancement, the rotten cad versus the honest man, and women – attended by more earthy maids – attempting to survive and progress with honour against these odds.

The cad is son-of-a-Duke Don Ferdinando (Jonny Potts), who cynically seduces farmer’s daughter Violante (Elle Wooton) – "’Tis time to stamp my seal in thy soft wax" – before turning his lustful eyes on the mayor’s daughter Lucinda (Kate Clarkin), beloved by his ‘best mate’ Cardenio (Paul Waggott). "I breathe the instant air; I am all future," is the opportunist’s justification.

Violante takes to the hills disguised as a shepherd boy but when the Master of the Flocks (Thomas Pepperell) divines her gender, he sees her as "made for tupping" and attempts to rape her. Ferdinando might be bad but there are worse men out there …

The comedic sub-plot that offsets this drama is led by Senor Quesada’s metamorphosis into errant knight Don Quixot De La Mancha (Christopher De Sousa Smith), abetted and somewhat protected in his follies by his loyal ‘boy’ Sancho (Kelly Irvine), who is sustained through many trials by his dream of being appointed Governor of an Island (e.g. England, where they eat nothing but beef and are all mad).

Cardenio, denied the hand of Lucinda (because her father thinks Ferdinando is a better bet) also goes mad in the mountains and in this guise crosses the path of Quixot et al. Intriguingly the Legend of King Arthur becomes a reference point, and in his madness Cardenio – hitherto the good guy! – is moved to write Guinevere off as "a hot little bitch who would sniff any passing codpiece." Scratch any man to find a misogynist, it seems.  

(In a brief post-show chat, Taylor indicated such lines were more redolent of Fletcher’s style that Shakespeare’s.)

The device by which the resolution is achieved includes Violenta taking the role of a Medieval princess to feed Don Quixtot’s fantasies. The ingenious convolutions that follow, involving various people lying low in coffins and appearing to surprising effect, are in the realm of a ‘play within the play’ by which the consciences of the guilty are caught.

The group tormenting of Don Quixot that follows cannot be seen as upbeat and celebratory. Rather it reminds us of how awful we can be en-mob. And given the fate of the Knight in the original novel, it’s probably fair to go there. Besides, to prove it is but a play, ’tis he who emerges unfettered to pronounce the epilogue.

Resonances from the full Shakespeare canon are legion but then with everyone using everyone else’s stories as inspiration for their own works, that’s inevitable.

In summary, this world premiere production of this version of The History of Cardenio is an admirable achievement all round. The season is sold out; who knows when we shall see it again. Meanwhile Professor Taylor is in the market for feedback on his script. Any discussion on this site will be very welcome.

For my money it deserves to enter the canon and be taken seriously by aficionados of Jacobean theatre. Far from being an academic exercise, it is as replete as many Shakespeare classics with timeless and universal truths we always need to be reminded of. 
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Gary Taylor once wrote that Shakespeare has become a black hole: "Light, insight, intelligence, matter – all pour ceaselessly into him as critics are drawn into the densening vortex of his reputation; they add their own weight to his increasing mass."

In the past few years, along with two very doubtful portraits, that mass has increased with a number of staged versions of a play that Shakespeare might have had a hand in. Most of them had ‘Cardenio’ in the title whether they were based on a play either probably by Middleton or re-titled versions of one possibly by Shakespeare and Fletcher via Lewis Theobald’s 1727’s Double Falsehood.

Theobald claimed he adapted his play from three original manuscripts (now lost) of The History of Cardenio, but recent stylometric attributional analysis indicates that he may well have been speaking the truth.

So Gary Taylor has made a reconstruction of the Fletcher/Shakespeare play using his encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare (he was co-editor of the 1988 Oxford Shakespeare) tracing the Shakespearian/Fletcher DNA in Theobald’s script and adding the sub-plot from Cervantes’s Don Quixote where the name Cardenio originated.

The play as performed by students under David Carnegie’s sturdy direction on a thrust stage certainly feels like a play Shakespeare could have been part author of. All the themes, characters and plot devices are there: youth v. age, fathers v. children, brother v. brother, court v. country, cheeky servants, disguises, cross-dressing, the healing power of music, and redemption and forgiveness.

The language of the play has moments of power but few seemed to me to have that Shakespearean ring, though some may well have a Fletcherian one. The bawdy jokes come off the best ("feed your codpiece" and "put my seal in thy soft wax"), and the staging of a game of bowls is unexpected as is the use of a coffin in the final scenes.

However, what came across most strongly to me were the many reminders of Shakespeare’s earlier work: a joke that was used in Hamlet; a wedding scene that has echoes of Much Ado; Cardenio’s madness not unlike Edgar’s in Lear; Don Quixote who is given a Puck-like epilogue after being treated almost as badly as Malvolio is in Twelfth Night, and his attempts at poetry earlier in the play sounding rather like Bottom’s lines from The Dream; and a suddenly reformed villain accepting his scorned lover as rapidly and unbelievably as Bertram accepts Helena at the end of All’s Well. If he did have a hand in it, Fletcher must have acquiesced in this retrospection.

Amongst a large and dedicated cast Jonny Potts as the fickle Ferdinando, Paul Waggott (particularly impressive in the mad scenes) as Cardenio, Christopher De Sousa Smith as a dotty Don Quixote, and Kelly Irvine as the long-suffering Sancho stand out in this world premiere of a play that Shakespeare could possibly have worked on in his old age with a younger partner.
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Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer