Contrary to the Romantic image of him as a solitary scribbler in a garret, William Shakespeare was a deeply collaborative artist. He wrote his plays for a particular theatre company, tailoring each part to the actor he knew would perform it. He began his career patching up old plays in the existing repertoire and ended it working in partnership with John Fletcher, his chosen successor as company playwright for the King’s Men. Never mind the Keatsian genius with fevered brow; a better comparison for early and late Shakespeare would be the team player banging out scripts in the golden age of Hollywood or, for that matter, in the quick forge and working-house of television sitcom or soap opera.
It is clear from the surviving account books of the theatre impresario Philip Henslowe that collaboration was the norm, solo authorship — which Shakespeare practised in the middle period of his career — the exception. Frequently we find Henslowe paying a few pounds to Master Dekker for the first and last acts, and a guinea apiece to Masters Chettle and Heywood for the middle sequence and the subplot.
In the case of our Will’s final two surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, an array of sophisticated tests have shown conclusively which scenes were by Shakespeare and which by Fletcher. We all have little stylistic fingerprints, DNA patterns of linguistic behaviour. In solo-authored plays by Fletcher, the word ‘them’ is regularly abbreviated to ‘ ’em.’ In solo-authored plays by Shakespeare it is not. In the two collaborative plays, some scenes have ‘them’ and others have ‘ ’em.’ The distribution coincides with that of other differences, such as a Fletcherian preference for so-called feminine endings (iambic pentameter verse lines with an extra redundant syllable at the end). As any scientist will tell you, when lots of different tests by lots of different researchers all come to the same conclusion, you can be pretty confident about your results.
We don’t know why Henry VIII was included in the Folio of Shakespeare’s collected works, despite Fletcher’s hand in it. Nor why The Two Noble Kinsmen was added to Beaumont and Fletcher’s, despite Shakespeare’s hand in it. It happens that there is more Shakespeare in the former play and more Fletcher in the latter, but the printing history may have been more to do with questions of publishers’ rights than those of authorship.
In 1727, Lewis Theobald, a rival to Alexander Pope for the position of Shakespeare’s editorial representative on earth, announced that he had the manuscript of a lost Shakespeare play. It was duly published the following year, with a special royal licence giving him exclusive rights to the text, under the title Double Falsehood: or the Distrest Lovers. The play was staged to some acclaim.
A fierce debate raged in the periodical press and the coffee houses: had Theobald discovered a lost jewel or fabricated a monstrous forgery? Professor Brean Hammond’s new Arden edition of the play magisterially surveys the large body of circumstantial evidence in the case. He adds weight to a scholarly consensus that has been growing over the last two decades: we can now say with near certainty that Double Falshood was not a forgery. It was based on a Restoration theatrical adaptation of a third Shakespeare-Fletcher collaboration, now lost, called The History of Cardenio.
There is firm evidence that this was played, at least twice, at the court of King James I. It was even registered for publication, though never printed, as the work of Masters Shakespeare and Fletcher. There can be no doubt that it was written in late 1612 or early 1613, when there was something of a political rapprochement with Spain, and a concomitant interest in all matters Spanish. The plot is based on the love-madness of Cardenio, a character encountered by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Cervantes’ immortal novel, which had been translated into English for the first time by one Thomas Shelton, in that very year of 1612.
The trouble is, Restoration acting companies played fast and loose with old plays. Remember Nahum Tate, author of ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night?’ His 1681 version of King Lear held the stage for 150 years. It has no Fool, and a happy ending in which Cordelia marries Edgar.
Imagine that the early printed texts of Shakespeare’s Lear had not survived, and we only had the Tate reworking. That is the situation with Cardenio, which makes it slightly cheeky for it to have been published in the Arden Shakespeare series. Not a double falsehood, then, but a double distance from Shakespeare himself: there’s Theobald and behind him there’s the Restoration adapter, and behind them there’s a lot more Fletcher than Shakespeare. Just now and then, however, the authentic late Shakespearean note is sounded in the verse:
. . . Home, my lord!
What you can say is most unseasonable; what
sing,
Most absonant and harsh. Nay, your perfume,
Which I smell hither, cheers not my sense
Like our field-violet’s breath.
I wager my Bardic reputation that that’s the man himself.
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