In 1613 the King's Men, the theater company to which Shakespeare belonged, gave two performances of a play called "Cardenio." Forty years later an entry in the Stationers' Register lists the planned publication of a play called "The History of Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare." What happened to the play after that is anybody's guess.
Charles Hamilton's guess is that a copy of the play, written out in Shakespeare's own hand, ended up in the British Museum Library, and he found it.A production of the work by the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival is being staged at Musical Theater Works with the unabashed billing: "Cardenio. By William Shakespeare." If you believe that, perhaps I could interest you in some oceanfront real estate in Kansas.
For 350 years scholars have regarded "Cardenio" as a lost play, and Shakespeare's contribution, if any, to a work generally ascribed to John Fletcher has been open to speculation.
But the past decade has been a fertile period for literary prospectors discovering "lost" Shakespeare works, so it is hardly surprising that someone would turn up claiming to have found "Cardenio."
The play Hamilton found is titled "The Second Mayden's Tragedy" and scholars have ascribed it to Thomas Middleton. Hamilton posits that not only is this play the long-lost "Cardenio" but that it was written in Shakespeare's own hand as well.
Never mind that there are only a half-dozen or so examples of Shakespeare's handwriting extant: Hamilton, a handwriting expert, further theorizes that Shakespeare penned his own will, and he used that document for his comparisons. (He does not appear to have considered that this could inversely prove that Shakespeare's lawyer wrote the play he found.)
Of the myriad objections that leap to mind, the most salient is the one A.L. Rowse put forward to claims of Shakespeare's primary authorship of "The Two Noble Kinsmen": If Shakespeare wrote it, why did Heminges and Condell leave it out of the First Folio?
As for the work itself, if Shakespeare did write any of it, he should be ashamed of himself. What is presented by the Palm Beach company is hardly a play at all, almost masquelike in its simplistic morality and emphasis on plot to the exclusion of character development and the absence of any real dramatic conflict. What passes for poetry is unimaginative and virtually devoid of imagery.
The source for "Cardenio" was presumed to be the tale of Car-den-io and Lucinda in Cervantes' "Don Quixote." Unfortunately there is no character in Hamilton's play named Cardenio. What is presented here is an 80-minute playlet that tells of a Tyrant who is obsessed over a beautiful Lady and is determined to bed her at any cost.
The Lady, who loves another, finally opts for death over the fate worse than. There is one subplot: a husband, doubting the fidelity of his wife, persuades his best friend to try to seduce her, with predictable results. Nearly everyone ends up dead. Cervantes tells it better.