On 9 September, 1653, a London publisher – one Humphrey Moseley – entered a batch of plays in the Stationers’ Register including ‘The History of Cardenio by Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare’. But no more is heard of such a play until, in 1727, a version of the story reappears under the title Double Falsehood or the Distrest Lovers.
The writer, Lewis Theobald, claimed that Double Falsehood was a ‘revised and adapted’ version of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Cardenio – manuscripts of which he claimed to own. Unfortunately for posterity, the “original” manuscript of Cardenio was housed in the library of Covent Garden Playhouse – which burned down in 1808. All that is left of this lost Shakespeare is Theobald’s revised version – and a lot of speculation.
Last year, Arden controversially decided to include it in their Complete Works – and now the play is being performed in London at the Union Theatre, for the first time in at least 164 years.
The media fuss around the “new” Shakespeare is misleading – academics have always known about the existence of Theobald’s script. Indeed, my copy of The Oxford Shakespeare, first published in 1988, refers to the play, but dismisses it as ‘no more than an interesting curiosity’.
Double Falsehood at The Union Theatre
Phil Willmott, who is directing Double Falsehood at The Union Theatre, is refreshingly realistic about the play: “I would never claim that Double Falsehood is a masterpiece but it does tell us things about Shakespeare’s psyche and when we see it, we can see echoes of other famous works.”
The central character of the play is Violante, who is raped by Henriquez early on. Henriquez then falls in love with another woman – Leonara – who also happens to be loved by his friend, Julio. Violante pursues Henriquez, determined that he should marry her, after having raped her. It is, as Willmott acknowledges, a plot which sits awkwardly with modern sensibilities: “Central to it there’s a very unpalatable premise that a woman is raped and she spends the rest of the play pursuing the rapist because she’s going to force him to marry her. When you read it on the page you think ‘this is outrageous!’ And in previews some people have been shocked by this but in actual fact when you break it down, what choice does she have? She could start a woman’s refuge, or marry a shepherd, but actually her best prospect is to pursue this aristocrat.”
As You Like It
One strong argument for unearthing this largely overlooked work is the light it may shed on other plays by Shakespeare: it shares plot points with, for example, King Lear – a good son and a bad son – and As You Like It – girls dressing as boys and escaping to the wilderness.
But the language – ay there’s the rub. If Shakespeare did have a hand in this play, he wasn’t at his best as a writer: “It’s very evocative, it’s very dramatic,” but Phil readily admits “there are no soaring, poetic flights of imagery. The lark doesn’t ascend to Heaven’s gates at any point.” But he thinks Shakespeare’s fingerprint is evident in another aspect of the text: “there’s terrific psychological insight in the language – more so than you would get from your standard Jacobean tragedy or comedy. [The language] does always beautifully capture the thought patterns and the processes and the journeys that the characters are going on.”
This is all academic. As the production’s designer, Javier de Frutos, rightly points out – the play needs to be put on if the question of authenticity is ever to be settled. “You cannot open the debate of whether or not it is Shakespeare by leaving it on the page – a play doesn’t exist on the page. As creators, we have the obligation to put it on the stage for the debate to open. It’s worth putting the play on just for that.”
Willmott has directed, he tells me, 11 or 12 other Shakespeare plays – so how does this work compare? “It feels like doing a piece of new writing,” answers Willmott immediately, “because nothing comes with any clutter or baggage, there’s no expectations so you approach the script as you would a piece of new writing and that feels very fresh and exciting.”
Both Willmott and de Frutos agree that directing Shakespeare can be terrifying: de Frutos admits he felt “paralysed” in the past by what he calls the “Shakespeare police”. Everyone has an opinion about the established Shakespeare plays, whereas with Double Falsehood, they were given the theatrical equivalent of a blank page. The pressure was off to find a new angle, to give it a new setting: there was no need for what Willmott calls a “gimmick”. “I think the key thing is that we were determined there would just be the simplicity of the language and the storytelling, and that we wouldn’t butter it up with our take on it. People who are coming to see it want to experience the play, they don’t want to see Phil Willmott and Javier de Frutos’ version of the play.”
So it’s up to you. Whatever the hype says, Willmott and de Frutos have not set Double Falsehood up as a lost masterpiece of the bard. Part of the fun of the project – both for them and for us – is that the audience can create their own theories as to the authorship. With this production, they are just facilitating and adding their twopennyworth to an ongoing debate. As Phil explains: “Academics have had their fun and now we’re standing [the play] up and seeing how it works as a piece of theatre.”
Double Falsehood is on at The Union Theatre until 12 February.
This article first appeared on www.thepublicreviews.com
