Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 5 (2016), pp. 353-379 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-18096 ISSN 2279-7149 (online) www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems 2016 Firenze University Press Fake Shakespeare Gary Taylor Florida State University () Abstract The essay examines the relationship between Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost play The History of Cardenio and Theobald’s 1727 adaptation Double Falsehood, and various twentieth-first century attempts (by Greenblatt and Mee, Doran and Álamo, and Gary Taylor), to recover the lost play by adapting Double Falsehood. Any such attempt requires the modern adapter to identify which parts of Double Falsehood preserve the Jacobean original (and should therefore be retained) and which are the work of a Restoration or eighteenth-century adapter (and should therefore be removed). That task is essentially empirical. But recreation of the lost play also requires sympathetic creativity: in particular, an effort to imitate Shakespeare (and Fletcher). Keywords: Adaptation, Authorship, Cardenio, Double Falsehood, Imitation You don’t write fake Shakespeare. Brean Hammond (2010)1 1. Forgery or Adaptation Plagiarism is easy. Imitation is hard. Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood is a Georgian adaptation of a Jacobean play by Fletcher and Shakespeare.2 It is not a forgery, as Tiffany Stern (2011) contends. Some of Stern’s claims were refuted in ‘A History of The History of Cardenio’ (Taylor 2012); some were disproven in other essays (Jackson 2012; Proudfoot 2012) in the same volume (Carnegie and Taylor 2012), and others in independent analysis of data-compression (Pascucci 2012). But all that research was in press before Stern’s article was published. Since its publication, further refutation has come in three essays (Nance 2013; Taylor 2013; Taylor and Wagschal 2013) in The Creation and Re-creation of Cardenio (Bourus and Taylor, 2013). My involvement in some of these refutations might cast doubt 1 Hammond’s statement is reported in Porter 2011, 353. 2 Quotations from Double Falsehood cite the line-numbering of Hammond 2010, but quote the text of Theobald 1728. gary taylor354 on the objectivity of my assessment of Stern’s case. But her argument was also roundly, independently challenged at a conference on the subject of Double Falsehood/Cardenio, organized by A.L. Braunmuller and Robert Folkenflik, at UCLA on 31 January and 1 February 2014; this event included devastating rebuttals, from entirely different perspectives, by Robert D. Hume, Robert Folkenflik, Jean Marsden, Deborah Payne, Diana Solomon, James Pennebaker, and Brean Hammond. Among the speakers at the UCLA symposium, only Hammond had also contributed to Carnegie and Taylor 2012, and none had contributed to Bourus and Taylor 2013. The organizers did not ask the invited speakers for their views on Double Falsehood in advance, but simply invited specialists on various aspects of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama that were relevant to the topic; none of the speakers endorsed Stern’s argument. Their rebuttals were based on many different kinds of evidence, argument, and critical stance. Two papers delivered at the conference have already been published (Hammond 2014, Boyd and Pennebaker 2015); the others are said to be forthcoming by 2016. Certainly forthcoming in 2016 are new essays by Giuliano Pascucci and Marina Tarlinskaja, which from different perspectives provide new evidence for the presence of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Double Falsehood. I will therefore assume, in this essay, that the accusation of forgery no longer needs to be addressed. If Double Falsehood is not a forgery, then it must be an adaptation. But what exactly does ‘adaptation’ mean? M.J. Kidnie argues that all editing is adaptation, and that, in particular, the editing of a play cannot be logically distinguished from its adaptation in performance (2009, 140-164). It’s true: the text of Julius Caesar in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2007 Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, and the 2012 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Julius Caesar, directed by Gregory Doran and set in modern Africa, retrospectively interpret and alter the text of the play printed in 1623 among ‘Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies’. Both the modern edition and the modern production mediate the past for the present. They differ, however, in their temporal allegiance. Historicist editing constructs, tests, and models a hypothesis about the past. Like a paleontologist putting together dinosaur fossils, modern scholarly editors attempt to reconstruct the past, undoing the damage done by time and chaos. In contrast, theatrical adaptation is intrinsically presentist. Like translation, or the modernization of spelling and pronunciation, adaptation seeks, with more or less fidelity to the original, to take something from ‘another country’ (the past) and make it intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically satisfying for a new target audience.3 Adaptation imagines what the past writer (or painter, or composer) would have 3 On modernization and translation, see Taylor 2009. The distinctions between editing and adaptation have been muddied, for Shakespearians, by the editorial practice of modernizing the spelling and punctuation of Shakespeare’s works (which began with the posthumous 1623 folio). fake shakespeare 355 done if s/he were alive now, here. Historicist editing instead imagines what a past object looked like, then, there. But Cardenio, or Double Falsehood, hurls a wrecking ball at this neat binary. Lewis Theobald’s ‘Preface by the Editor’ identifies him as the editor of Double Falsehood, but the title-page of the same book declares that the text has been ‘Revised and Adapted to the Stage / By Mr THEOBALD’. Was Theobald the editor or adapter? Tiffany Stern took this ambiguity as evidence that Theobald forged the entire text. But Theobald was, on some occasions, demonstrably and openly an editor, and on other occasions demonstrably and openly an adapter. Theobald’s life combined both activities, so he could certainly have combined both here. I know such combinations are possible, because I have also combined both in my own attempt to reconstruct The History of Cardenio. But unlike Theobald – because I work in an institutional and discursive environment unimaginable in 1728 – I must carefully distinguish my editing from my adapting. Lukas Erne describes all Shakespeare’s editors as collaborators: modernizing his meanings, punctuating his sentences, re-visualizing the layout of his verse, directing his actors, picking variants from the buffet of his texts, abridging titles, occasionally substituting their words for his (2008). Like other volumes in the Arden Shakespeare series, Brean Hammond’s 2010 edition of Double Falsehood does all those things, just as Pope and Theobald did in their editions of Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Hammond’s Arden Double Falsehood fundamentally differs from the theatrical adaptations of Double Falsehood by Taffety Punk, Bernard Richards, Classic Stage, Mokita Grit, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hammond does not add new lines, speeches, scenes, or dumb- shows; he does not systematically change names, transpose material from one part of the play to another, redistribute speeches to different characters, cut whole speeches or scenes, import material from other documents, or provide stage directions for major new properties. In the 2016 New Oxford Shakespeare edition of the Complete Works, I am editing Double Falsehood. My edition is not identical to Hammond’s, but it belongs to the same genre of intellectual activity. But in my 2013 recreation of The History of Cardenio (‘by John Fletcher, William Shakespeare, and Ga- ry Taylor’) I engaged in all those activities that Hammond’s edition avoids. In that respect my History of Cardenio resembles the adaptations by the Taffety Punk et al. theatre company. But my adaptation fundamentally differs from all those, because, like an edition, it also ‘attempts to reconstruct the past, un- doing the damage done by time and’ – Theobald. In this essay I will try to distinguish between editing, adaptation, and imitation by focusing on how different authors treat two female characters in Don Quixote and in a series of dramatizations of that novel. In Double Falsehood one of those women is na- med Leonora; in Don Quixote she is named Lucinda. What should we call her? Who is she? What is her role in the story? What answers we get to those questions are a function of which author we ask. gary taylor356 2. Leonora Consider a short speech by Leonora at the end of Double Falsehood. These are, in fact, her last words in the play: Leon. The righteous Pow’rs at length have crown’d our Loves. Think, Julio, from the Storm that’s now o’erblown, Tho’sour Affliction combat Hope awhile, When Lovers swear Faith, the list’ning Angels Stand on the golden Battlements of Heav’n, And waft their Vows to the eternal Throne. Such were our Vows, and so are they repaid. (5.2.251-257) Even without knowing anything about stylometric analysis, I think any reader of this journal would recognize this speech as unShakespearian, and particularly uncharacteristic of Shakespeare’s late style. A comprehensive search of digital databases demonstrates that Theobald, not Fletcher or Shakespeare, overwhelmingly dominates the language of these seven lines (Appendix A). Gregory Doran, Artistic Director of the RSC, singled out this speech as containing ‘one of my favorite lines’ (actually, three of his favorite lines).4 Which is to say: Doran cannot distinguish Theobald from Shakespeare. Another speech by the same character in the same scene belongs to an entirely different stylistic register: For such sad Rites must be perform’d, my Lord, E’er I can love again. Maids, that have lov’d, If they be worth that noble Testimony, Wear their Loves here, my Lord; here, in their Hearts; Deep, deep within; not in their Eyes, or Accents; Such may be slip’d away; or with two Tears Wash’d out of all Remembrance: Mine, no Physick, But Time, or Death, can cure. (5.2.94-101) Anyone who has read and studied all of John Fletcher’s work will recognize this as Fletcherian (and scholars have done so for a century). A comprehensive search of digital databases demonstrates that Fletcher, not Theobald or Shakespeare, overwhelmingly dominates the language of this speech (Appendix B). Not only is Fletcher immeasurably more likely than Theobald to have written this speech. He is more likely than any other known seventeenth or eighteenth century playwright to have done so. 4 Doran 2012, 131 (quoting ‘When lovers swear .... eternal throne’, comparing the image to El Greco). Doran here treats ‘line’ as a synonym for ‘sentence’, a mistake no poet would make. fake shakespeare 357 We can now compare these two Leonora speeches with a third. Because it is shorter than the two I’ve just quoted, I include the lines by Julio that cue her speech: —No Impediment Shall bar my Wishes, but such grave Delays As Reason presses Patience with; which blunt not But rather whet our Loves. Be patient, Sweet. Leon. Patient! What else? My Flames are in the Flint. Haply, to lose a Husband I may weep; Never, to get One: When I cry for Bondage, Let Freedom quit me. (5.2.109-116) Doesn’t this sound very different than the other two passages? A comprehensive search of digital databases demonstrates that Shakespeare, not Theobald or Fletcher, overwhelmingly dominates the language of these lines (Appendix C). A comparison of these lines with Theobald’s imitations of Shakespeare demonstrates that he was utterly incapable of imitating Shakespeare with anything remotely resembling this level of concentrated linguistic similarity (Taylor 2013, 157-161). Moreover, no other early modern playwright comes anywhere near the number of unique links between this passage and Shakespeare. So, Double Falsehood contains passages written by Shakespeare, passages written by Fletcher, and passages written by Theobald. It represents an eighteenth-century adaptation of a Jacobean play. As a scholar, I can try to identify passages clearly by one of the two original collaborators, and passages by the man who adapted it more than a century later. No one would dispute that this is a scholarly, indeed a highly technical and specialist form of historical scholarship, and I could easily devote the rest of this essay to describing it. But what do we do after we’ve distinguished each author from the other two? Once scholarship has identified, and removed, the most obvious specimens of Theobald’s writing from the text of Double Falsehood, what we are left with is a collection of Jacobean fragments. Any attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again requires, not just scholarship, but a combination of scholarship and creativity. 3. Greenblatt and Mee, Doran and Álamo It may be useful at this point to compare Theobald’s Double Falsehood with two more recent adaptations that also capitalize on the brand name of Shakespeare. The Cardenio of Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee (2008) belongs to the long history of adaptations of Don Quixote, and particularly gary taylor358 of the stand-alone tale of ‘The Curious Impertinent’.5 But despite the title of their play and of the larger, Mellon-funded ‘Cardenio Project’ that it initiated, their Cardenio has almost nothing to do with the Spanish Cardenio or the Jacobean Cardenio. It restricts its use of Double Falsehood to a play-within- the-play, preserving only about sixty-three of the lines published by Theobald in 1728, scattered in Greenblatt and Mee’s play across four different segments of dialogue.6 The wording has been changed in eleven of those lines (21%), and on seven other occasions regular verse lines are broken into hanging, or awkwardly rejoined, part-lines. Altogether, the adaptation ruins the meter of seventeen lines (27%). Even when presenting what is advertized (in and out of the script) as ‘a lost play by Shakespeare’ (18%), Greenblatt and Mee consider Shakespeare’s verse immaterial to Shakespeare’s style, meaning, or impact. They do not even consider Shakespeare’s achievement as a great prose writer, and do not reproduce any of Double Falsehood ’s prose – even though Jackson (2012) and Nance (2013) have demonstrated that the prose is much more authentically Jacobean and Shakespearian than the verse. Although they reproduce less than four percent of Double Falsehood, they include phrases (‘let the gay scene’, ‘by proxy’, ‘her charms’, and ‘love is contagious’, for instance) that clearly come from Theobald, not Shakespeare.7 Most of the lines Greenblatt and Mee preserve come from a single part-scene of Double Falsehood, the encounter of Julio [their ‘Cardenio’] and Leonora [their ‘Luscinda’] in the middle of 1.2. However, they skip over the third passage I quote above, the longest uninterrupted stretch of dialogue between these two characters that seems entirely Shakespearian. Why would Greenblatt and Mee spotlight adjacent baser matter, and at the same time discard such powerful, poetic, Shakespearian writing? Because the lines so conspicuously Shakespearian do not fit the Lucinda they desire. Not surprisingly, the speech Shakespeare wrote for Lucinda yokes together elements of strong women (Kate, Diana, Cordelia, and Cleopatra) with the language of warriors (Henry V, Richard III) and princes (Ferdinand). Lucinda at this point in the play is – as Cardenio complains – impatient, demanding, 5 Between 1605 and 1616 Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb, Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy, and Nathan Field’s Amends for Ladies all dramatized the same tale, but Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio apparently owes nothing to any of those (more interesting) plays. 6 Double Falsehood 1.2.149-153, 156-157, 160-164, 169-177 (Greenblatt and Mee 2008, 47); 1.2.63-66, 68-69, 70-72, 74-82 (66), 1.2.81-88, 116-119, 123-124, 126-127, 129-130, 141 (67-68), 4.1.49-61 (96). This last passage seems to be a mix of Fletcher and Theobald. 7 Theobald, The Persian Princess 2 (‘Let the gaudy scene’); Theobald’s editorial note 41 on Antony and Cleopatra 3.8 (‘by proxy’) in his 1733 edition of Shakespeare’s Works; in the anachronistic modern sense, ‘her charms’ occurs in Theobal’s Decius, Orpheus, Captive, and Fatal; Perfidious (‘Grief is grown contagious’), Persian 4.1 (‘Sorrow were contagious’). fake shakespeare 359 and intellectually at least his equal, probably his superior. Greenblatt and Mee, like Theobald, want, instead, a soft-focus romantic heroine. After their sampling of uninspiring quotations from Double Falsehood, they climax their ‘Shakespearian’ play-within-the-play with nineteen lines of inserted dialogue (69), during which ‘everyone gets quieter and quieter, / more and more attentive’. This versified stage direction insists that their actors must physically assert that this fake-Shakespeare is more dramatic, more affecting, than anything from Double Falsehood. Here are the two speeches Greenblatt and Mee supply for their Luscinda: My gracious Lord, no deity dwells here. The servant to your will affects no flattery... Stay, stay and hide, The blushes of the bride; Stay gentle night, and with thy darkness cover The kisses of my lover. (69) followed by another versified stage direction [they kiss and kiss and, finally, they kiss, a long, lingering kiss that is astonishing] (69) The two blank verse lines come from a Fletcher scene in Fletcher and Massinger’s Rollo, Duke of Normandy; or, The Bloody Brother; the lyric rhymes are taken from Beaumont’s ‘Masque’ in the first scene of The Maid ’s Tragedy.8 Perhaps they expect specialists to recognize Fletcher here, but if so they equate Fletcher with ‘the Beaumont and Fletcher canon,’ not distinguishing his collaborative work or recognizing the existence of his collaborators. But they treat Cardenio as ‘a lost Shakespeare play’, systematically ignoring Fletcher. What Greenblatt and Mee expect audiences to recognize as a Shakespearian woman is a suitably modest ‘servant’ who speaks regular, end-stopped iambic pentameter, then ‘blushes’ and descends into lyric rhyme (capping a romantic scene with a prolonged and ‘astonishing’ kiss). The wonder so often identified as the emotional signature-tone of Shakespeare’s romances comes, here, not from leaps of language – not one simile or metaphor – but from the most conventional of romantic comedy stage directions. That direction affects a verse style that any reader of contemporary Walmart poetry will recognize; 8 Greenblatt and Mee do not identify these sources; I found them by searching Literature Online. They change ‘her lover’ to ‘my lover’ (69). gary taylor360 it aspires to the excited adolescent banality of Rod McKuen and Jewel (though even McKuen and Jewel would probably have been embarrassed by the comparison). Whether we judge it as poetry, or as theatre, or in terms of its gender politics, Greenblatt and Mee’s imitation of Shakespeare is worse than Theobald. It assumes that a bricolage of writing by other early modern playwrights is effectively indistinguishable from Shakespeare. Gregory Doran’s adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company was both more scholarly and more creative than Greenblatt and Mee’s. It retained much more of Double Falsehood, and it was based on a better understanding of early modern theatre, Shakespearian and Fletcherian. But what do you remember about Doran’s Cardenio, if you saw it in the theatre? What I remember is the loud, raunchy, chaotic street festival – and the haunting voice of the flamenco singer Javier Macías, floating high above the stage in the Swan Theatre – and the prolonged Fight Club physical battle between Cardenio and Fernando in the final scene. These were the moments that justify Michael Billington’s praise of the RSC Cardenio as ‘theatrically powerful’. They were certainly more engrossing than anything I saw in the Classic Stage Company’s earnest, faithful, dull, 2011 New York City revival of Double Falsehood. But the most passionate, most dramatic, most interesting elements of Doran’s production were wordless. They belong to Doran’s directing, rather than Doran and Álamo’s written adaptation of Double Falsehood. Javier was singing words, but they were in a foreign language, and no playwright wrote them; effectively, for the overwhelmingly Anglophone audience Javier’s voice was simply a musical instrument, rising above the other instruments in the band, providing the script with a movie soundtrack.9 Likewise, when Greenblatt and Mee want to convey passion, they have Simonetta sing Donizetti’s ‘Il barcaiolo’ (2008, 16) and later have Melchiore sing Rossini’s ‘La danza’ (56). Both adaptations import packaged passion. They outsource emotion to the Mediterranean. Shakespeare and Fletcher did not. Both created, in their own language, what C. Stephen Jaeger calls the ‘enchantment’ of ‘charismatic art’, an art that conveys ‘the sense of living a heightened form of life’ and promises ‘to transport the viewer into that world’ (2012, 3). Jaeger contrasts normative Aristotelian ‘mimesis’ with a ‘hypermimesis’, associated with Longinus, in works that ‘violate the mimetic and ignore or subordinate realism and the real’ (38). Shakespeare’s plays have enchanted audiences for more than four centuries by combining the personal magnetism of star actors with the sublime emotional stimulus of hyperarticulate poetry. Great roles, great words. In the ‘secular magic’ of ‘synthetic experience’ in the seventeenth-century theatre, 9 For more on the music, see Della Gatta 2013. fake shakespeare 361 ‘abnormally interesting people’ speak abnormally interesting English sentences (Roach 2007, 1-3). Greenblatt and Mee’s script, Doran and Álamo’s script, never deliver the interesting sentences. As the famous RSC voice coach Cicely Berry said, after an early workshop reading, ‘It’s the language, isn’t it? It’s just not Shakespeare. Not surprising enough. It doesn’t fly’ (Doran 2012, 76). When Doran realized that he would need to write some new scenes and new dialogue for the play, he went to John Barton to learn how to ‘bombast out a line or two’. Barton gave him, as an instructive exemplar of blank verse, the line ‘I want to go and have a cup of tea’ (Doran 2012, 44). Very British, but not very passionate. Barton’s iambic pentameteacup might have been convincing when inserted into scenes from the three Henry VI plays, where the verse of Shakespeare and his collaborators is not much better (Barton and Hall 1970). But twenty or more years later, when The History of Cardenio was written and performed, dramatic verse had been radically transformed by the poetic experiments of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, Middleton, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Donne. One thing we absolutely and undeniably know about Shakespeare’s lost play is that it was not written in the verse style of the late 1580s and early 1590s. Doran and Álamo (and almost everyone else who has tried to imagine the lost play) agree that Theobald omitted a scene, narrated in Don Quixote, in which Fernando bribes his way into a woman’s house in order to seduce her (if possible) or rape her (if necessary). That scene must have been placed early in the Jacobean play; somewhere between 1.3 and 2.1 of Double Falsehood. It thus belonged to the portion of the play apparently written by Shakespeare. Cervantes tells the story from the woman’s perspective, so he provides the foundation for her speeches. For instance, she recalls that she told Fernando ‘With me your violence shall not prevaile, your riches gaine any grace, your words have power to deceive, or your sighes and tears be able to move’ (Cervantes 1612, 4.1.290). Doran’s version of the woman’s passionate Shakespearian resistance changes just a few words to turn Shelton’s prose into verse. Here’s a sample of Doran’s mechanico-pentameter: With me your violence cannot prevail, Your wealth gain grace, your words have power to cheat, Nor yet your sighs and tears have power to move. (Doran and Álamo 2011, 29) No metaphor, no ruffled syntax, no passion, no originality. No risk. What can be safer? If anyone objects to the dullness of these lines, Doran can always reply, ‘Don’t blame me if you don’t like it; blame Cervantes’, But in poetry, on stage, safety is death. Doran’s verse is better than Greenblatt’s, but it is not Shakespeare. As poetry, it is actually less metaphorical and imaginative than Theobald. gary taylor362 4. Names and Actors Theobald was adapting a seventeenth-century play for the ‘here, now’ of London’s Drury Lane theatre in 1727. The original play did not, apparently, give Leonora a long final speech – something that the company’s leading actress, Mary Porter, may have desired or demanded.10 In 1613, all female roles would have been played by juvenile males, apprentices in ‘the art of the stage’ (Astington 2010, 76-107). Those Jacobean apprentices did not have the power or importance to demand changes to the script. Georgian actresses had much more leverage. Moreover, the speech Theobald provided for Mrs. Porter explicitly enunciates the play’s moral lesson: God rewards, repays, ‘true’ fidelity to ‘vows’. It would have reassured the Drury Lane audience that art served morality; it asserted that the marriage of Leonora and Julio also celebrated the divinely-sanctioned union of aesthetics and ethics. Theobald’s added final speech for Leonora addresses, and names, ‘Julio’. This cannot have been the name of the protagonist in a seventeenth-century play entitled The History of Cardenio or simply Cardenio. But ‘Julio’ (easily elided to the disyllabic, trochaic ‘Jul-yo’) perfectly fits the meter of Theobald’s new line, where ‘Cardenio’ would not. So the word ‘Julio’ supplies yet another indication of Theobald’s hand in Leonora’s speech: it substitutes a common Spanish name for a very unusual one.11 This change of name probably reflects Theobald’s desire to avoid any association between his adaptation and Thomas D’Urfey’s crude but popular Comical History of Don Quixote (1694). Drury Lane already had one play in its repertory that featured a theatrical adaptation of the Cervantine love story of Cardenio and Luscinda. Audiences might not want another. At least, they would have to be persuaded that this new adaptation, full of Shakespearian poetry and romantic moral sentiment, radically differed from D’Urfey’s musical farce. Between 1613 and 1727, the character-name ‘Cardenio’ had acquired theatrical associations that undermined the aesthetic value associated with Shakespeare’s brand-name. The name ‘Julio’ occurs another twenty times in Leonora’s speeches, and all those twenty lines must be either (a) written in their entirety, like this one, by Theobald, or (b) rewritten by Theobald to accommodate the changed name. With ‘Cardenio’ we can be certain, and with ‘Fernando’ reasonably confident, of the original names. No editor can be so sure of the name of the woman they both love. Cervantes calls her ‘Luscinda’; so does D’Urfey. Fletcher used that name in The Knight of Malta (1618). Double Falsehood ’s ‘Leonora’ does not appear elsewhere in an English play until Webster’s 10 For Mrs. Potter playing the leading female roles in this period, see Goff 2007, 34, 40, 61, 92, 101, 130. 11 On the editorial principle that rare words are probably more authentic than common ones in literary texts, see Taylor 1988. fake shakespeare 363 Devil ’s Law Case (1617-1619). The same motive for changing the original ‘Cardenio’ and ‘Fernando’ would also have required ‘Luscinda’ to be changed to something else. And unlike the commonplace ‘Leonora’, ‘Luscinda’ means something. ‘Luscinda’ derives from the Latin lux, light, and its English pronunciation also suggests the pun ‘loose’ (as in ‘loose woman’, or ‘light woman’). Could Shakespeare, or Fletcher, have resisted the temptation to pun on the name Cervantes gave her? Luscinda would sit naturally among the symbolically christened heroines of Shakespeare’s late romances: Marina, Perdita, Innogen, and Miranda.12 Of the twenty-nine appearances in verse of ‘Leonora’, six would be better served, metrically, by the Cervantine trisyllable.13 That allows an editor to restore ‘Luscinda’ without disturbing the context. But in other cases, the name’s context seems to be Theobald’s writing. For instance, in the following passage that suspicious vocative begins a sequence of thirteen lines crammed with Theobaldisms. (I print in bold type words, phrases and collocations found in Theobald but not Fletcher; in bold small caps Theobald language not found anywhere else in English drama 1576-1642): Henr. O Leonora, see! thus SELF-CONDEMN’D I THROW ME AT YOUR FEET, and sue for Mercy. If I have err’d, impute it to my LOVE; The TYR ANT GOD that bows us to his SWAY, REBELLIOUS TO THE LAWS OF REAS’NING MEN; That will not have his Votaries Actions scann’d, But calls it Justice, when we most obey him. He but COMMANDED, what your Eyes INSPIR’D; Whose SACRED BEAMS, darted into my Soul, Have purg’d the Mansion from IMPURE DESIRES, And kindled in my Heart a Vestal’s Flame. Leon. Rise, rise, my Lord; this well-dissembled Passion Has gain’d you nothing but a deeper Hate. (5.1.25-37) 12 Violante would be another example. For its associations with flowers, violence, and deflowering, see Leigh 2012, 258-259. These associations are even clearer if we adopt the odd spelling of the name that occurs twice in the first editions of Shakespeare’s plays, ‘Violenta’ (All’s Well that Ends Well 3.5.0.1, Twelfth Night 1.5.160.1). Moreover, unlike Dorotea, ‘Violenta’ echoes the other three lovers’ names: -enta, -inda, -den, -nando, the ‘l’ in ‘Lucinda’, the associated V- and F-. 13 Double Falsehood 1.2.196, 2.4.30, 3.1.32, 3.3.59, 4.2.56, 5.2.237. Hammond 2010 asserts that ‘Leonora’ could be pronounced as ‘three syllables’ (179, 232, 274), but he gives no evidence for the currency of such an elision in Jacobean or Georgian verse. Contrast the explicit elision ‘Rod’rick’ (5.2.27, 32, 38). gary taylor364 In my own early attempts to unadapt Theobald’s adaptation, my initial response to this sequence was to try to improve Henriquez’s speech, by rewriting it, or shortening it, or both.14 By the time the Indianapolis cast began rehearsal, in January 2012, only three (modified) lines remained. But I could not, and still cannot, imagine what Fletcher might have written here that Theobald would need to rewrite so extensively. Actors always found these two speeches difficult, and they created problems for the whole scene. Immediately after her two lines to Henriquez, Leonora begins speaking of him in the third person: ‘Should I imagine, he can truly love me’ (5.1.38). Henriquez is not given an exit line. When Roderick asks Leonora to ‘go with us’ (5.1.44), the plural pronoun apparently includes Henriquez. Roderick then sends her off with Henriquez, without accompanying her himself: ‘Look to the Lady there. – I follow’ (5.1.53). Why does he leave her with Henriquez, after she has just asked him to protect her from Henriquez? Why would Violante want to intervene at precisely this point, thereby insuring that her lover Henriquez has time alone with her rival Leonora? Why does Roderick depart with Violante at the end of the scene? In the interim, he hears even more damning evidence of his brother’s bad behavior – but apparently has no compunctions about leaving him with Leonora. Violante also is willing to leave the pair alone together – in order to take Roderick to see Julio. Why? Does Julio matter more to her than Henriquez? All four actors had difficulty accommodating this sequence to their understanding of the characters. Other recent adaptations of Double Falsehood have all expanded the role of Henriquez/Fernando in the second half of the play, and male directors of my own adaptation had encouraged me to clarify Fernando’s trajectory between the wedding and the final reunion. But in fretting over Henriquez/Fernando, I had been neglecting Leonora/Luscinda (and Roderick and Violante). It was apparently Theobald who put into Henriquez’s mouth ‘I throw me at your feet’ (5.1.26). That Theobald sentence, which appears nowhere in English drama before 1642, in turn prompted Leonora’s Theobaldian reply, ‘Rise, rise’ (5.1.36).15 The rest of Leonora’s opening sentence – ‘this well-dissembled Passion / Has gain’d you nothing but a deeper hate’ (5.1.36-37) – contains nothing Fletcherian, but does sport other Theobald parallels.16 Both Henriquez’s address to Leonora, and her response, seem to be Georgian interpolations. 14 The two-decade evolution of my reconstruction is traced by Bourus 2012. 15 Theobald’s Perseus begins a speech ‘Rise, rise, at once’ (15), but neither Shakespeare nor Fletcher ever began a speech with that doubled imperative, and Fletcher never doubled it at all (though Beaumont did). 16 Theobald, Perfidious, 57 (‘Passion / ... Gain’). Hammond 2010 notes that ‘well- dissembled’ is ‘very popular in drama of the Restoration period’. Jackson 2012 cites an example from Love’s Pilgrimage, but it occurs in Act Four, attributed to Beaumont. The only Literature Online examples of ‘dissembled passion’ before 1728 are Braithwait (1641), and twice in Aaron Hill (1711, 1716); although not specifically Theobald’s, it is anachronistic for 1613. fake shakespeare 365 This combination of lexical and theatrical evidence suggests that Leonora’s entire encounter with Henriquez in 5.1 is Theobald’s melodramatic addition to the scene. Nothing else she says requires his presence on stage. Remove Henriquez, and everyone else’s actions make sense. The elegant chiasmus of the scene also becomes apparent: Roderick speaks first with the second female victim of his brother (who has become a nun), and then speaks second with his brother’s first female victim (who has become a shepherd); he enters with one, and exits with the other, moving forward by moving backward chronologically toward the font of his brother’s betrayals. Theobald might well have been encouraged, or compelled, to write Henriquez into the scene to satisfy the demanding ego of Robert Wilks, who played the role, and who was also one of the triumvirate of managers that ran Drury Lane. For the ‘twenty years’ of his tenure there, Wilks would not support production of any play ‘wherein it was not his Fortune to be chosen for the best Character’; his ‘petulant Opposition’ could be expected if ‘he had but a middling Part’, and he resented any success ‘that he was not himself at the Head of.’17 In Don Quixote, until the reunion in the inn, the story of Fernando is narrated entirely from the point of view first of Cardenio, then of Dorothea; consequently, between the aborted wedding and the Coincidental Inn, Fernando and Lucinda almost entirely disappear from the story. We do not know what they are thinking or doing, and neither do the other characters. Then, when they first ride into the novel in propria persona, what Cervantes emphasizes above all else is their silence. That silence, first of the narrator and then of the characters, creates a vacuum that our curiosity rushes to fill. Why should we imagine that Shakespeare, or Fletcher, was oblivious to the dramatic effect of that silence, or that absence? Double Falsehood brings Henriquez on stage twice during that interim. But here and at 4.1.212-257, his presence is theatrically awkward and his speeches reek of Theobald. Much of his soliloquy in 2.1, and of his speeches in 2.3, is also Theobald’s.18 The expansion of Wilks’s part also entailed an expansion of Mary Porter’s role in 5.1 and 2.3 (not to mention the added speech in 5.2, with which we began). In Double Falsehood, Leonora has more stage time with Henriquez than with Julio, and Henriquez speaks much more to and of her than to and of Violante. That is not true in Don Quixote, and need not have been true of the Jacobean Cardenio, either. 17 Lowe 1889, II, 227-228. Lowe cites in a footnote the corroborating comment by John Dennis, that ‘any Author who brings a Play to Drury-Lane, must . . . flatter Mr. Robert Wilks’ (II, 226). 18 For 2.1 see Taylor and Nance 2012, 198-212, and Taylor 2012, 40-44; for Theobald line- endings in 2.3, see Proudfoot 2012, 173-174. More generally, since Oliphant (1927), attribution scholars have found the most concentrated evidence of Theobald’s hand in Act Two. gary taylor366 5. Trajectories I have been working on the problem of unadapting Double Falsehood for twenty-five years, and in that time I have seen nine different incarnations of my own evolving script (sometimes including prolonged rehearsals, and always culminating in a rehearsed reading or public performances); I’ve also seen as many other productions and adaptations as possible. In my experience, the play cannot work if it is dominated by Fernando, as it was in the RSC production, the Classic Stage revival of Double Falsehood, and all the versions of my own reconstruction before Indianapolis. In obvious ways, the plot hinges on Fernando; he is psychologically interesting, and almost certainly the character and the actor bring to the story a personal charm or charisma that explains his powerful emotional effect on other people. To secure the happy ending that Cervantes imagined, Fernando must change; that change is a challenge for the writer(s) and the actor; audiences watch for it, and respond to it, positively or negatively, in a way that affects their evaluation of the whole story. Of course, Shakespeare and Fletcher might have wanted a more realistic, or more cynical, or more complicated, ending. But just as Benedick is more important to Much Ado About Nothing than Claudio, so Cardenio is more important than Fernando. The play’s original title, and the Cervantine source, focused on Cardenio, who also appears before Fernando in both Don Quixote and Double Falsehood. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes changes; in Cymbeline, Giacomo changes; in The Tempest Alonso changes; all three men have behaved appallingly, but none of them dominates the second half of his play. Fernando, likewise, does not dominate the second half of Cardenio’s story in Don Quixote; he does not even dominate the scene at the Coincidental Inn. Shakespeare and Fletcher made it even more impossible for him to tower over that final scene, because they expanded the roles of the three fathers and of Fernando’s brother, and they brought all those other older men onstage at the end, producing an irresistible coalition of patriarchal authority that is completely absent in the Cervantine episode. Emotionally, the two women dominate the final scene (just as the women dominate the final scene of The Winter’s Tale). The romance ending depends on the harmonious ensemble of the two young women and the four older men. In the end, Cardenio’s return – which is, effectively, a resurrection that enables a romantic reunion – matters far more than anything that Fernando can say or do. If the earlier scenes have made Fernando the play’s primary dramatic focus, then an audience will be dissatisfied by his necessarily constrained and secondary role in the final scene. (It took me more than twenty years to recognize this fact; I suspect that Shakespeare and Fletcher would have known it instinctively.) Unlike Gregory Doran, Terri Bourus cast Cardenio before she cast Fernando, and the published reviews, audience talk-backs, and private feedback we received all recognized Cardenio as the protagonist. He shares fake shakespeare 367 the spotlight with Fernando through the first third of my version of the play, up to the moment when he declares ‘Falseness my business now’ and exits. But then Cardenio challenges his dominance in three consecutive scenes, culminating in the wedding (Double Falsehood 3.1, 3.2). In my latest version of the script (Fletcher, Shakespeare and Taylor, 2013), Fernando then virtually disappears between the wedding and the final scene. He appears on stage only once (where his older brother persuades him to hide in the coffin), and in that scene speaks only twenty words (to his brother’s 211).19 That appearance reminds us of Fernando, but answers none of our questions. What happens to him after the wedding? What is he thinking? Where is he moving, emotionally? His prolonged absence, then taciturnity, makes his transformation in the final scene more plausible and more moving.20 I started with emending Leonora’s word ‘Julio’, and wound up transforming the structure of a scene (5.1) and the arc of a character (Henriquez/Fernando). No editor would stretch speculation so far, or intervene on such a scale. But the logic remains historicist: restore the past, remove the accretions of intermediaries. The only difference is that, in this case, the intermediary has intermediated macrographically, and his doing cannot be undone with a scrupulous toothpick. Does my collaborative reconstruction reconstruct exactly what was performed before King James in 1613? Absolutely certainly no. Is my reconstruction more Jacobean in its language and its dramaturgy than the corresponding moments in Double Falsehood? Absolutely certainly yes. My title promised you fake Shakespeare, but the first rule of writing fake Shakespeare is that you must not fake Shakespeare when you should be faking Fletcher. Attending to the singularities of Fletcher sharpens your ability to identify, and imitate, the singularities of Shakespeare. It prevents you from writing a generalized Jacobethan pastiche. Actors are told, ‘Never generalize’. The same rule applies when you are trying to capture, and vicariously convey, the personality of another writer. Imitating someone else’s style is, after all, what writers and other mimics do all the time when they try to capture the way another person behaves. I started with a systematic analysis of language, and wound up analyzing entrances, exits, a man throwing himself at a woman’s feet, and the accidentals of theatre history. I started with Leonora, then changed her name back to 19 Bourus in the 2012 Indianapolis production cast in the older brother’s role a taller, bigger actor, who physically dominated Fernando. This is not required by the script, but it makes sense, within the semiotics of the theatre, for the older brother to also be the bigger brother. We still speak of ‘my big brother’ (mio fratello più grande). 20 As Gerald Baker has since pointed out to me (private communication, 17 July 2012), my interpretation of Fernando here makes him resemble Giacomo in Cymbeline, who drives much of the action of the first half, then disappears until almost the end, when he returns and repents. gary taylor368 Luscinda, and wound up discussing Cardenio and Fernando. In all forms of story-telling, characters are created through their relationships with other characters, but that rule particularly applies in theatre, where one embodied character shares space and time with other embodied characters. What the performer, or the audience, makes of Luscinda depends on what other people call her, say to her, say about her, and on what we make of the men who share and shape her story. A character does not just act; she reacts. We come to know her by how she reacts to whom. But the actor-managers of Drury Lane prided themselves on ‘keeping the Stage clear of those loose Liberties it had formerly too justly been charged with’, and by means of ‘the Decency of our clear Stage’ making it suitable for ‘the appointed Assembly of the First Ladies of Quality’ (Lowe 1889, II, 233, 248). And the writer Lewis Theobald believed that ‘The Poet who writes for the Stage, should principally aim at pleasing his female Judges’.21 Theobald consistently removed the misogyny in Cervantes’ story of Cardenio’s madness. There is no reason to think that Shakespeare would have done so. After all, Shakespeare’s portrayal of the madness of Othello, of Lear, of Posthumus, and of Leontes bubbles with vicious generalizations about the perfidy of the female half of the species. Each of those Jacobean Shakespearian protagonists believes that a woman has betrayed him, and so does Cardenio. He ought to offend every woman in the house. He ought to remind every man in the house that misogyny is madness. 6. Imitatio Having held up for scrutiny the faux-bard speeches written for Cardenio’s two female leads by other adapters, I feel obliged to offer a target of my own. I have imagined only one new long speech for Lucinda, so it will have to serve, here, as my hostage to criticism. It is, as it happens, Lucinda’s first speech, written because directors have repeatedly told me that something seems missing in her first scene in Double Falsehood, something to convince us that Cardenio and Lucinda really love each other, so that we will care what happens to them. Male directors had focused on the end of their scene together, but Jaq Bessell told me that Lucinda needed something before ‘Patient? What else’, and Terri Bourus more specifically located the emotional lacuna at Lucinda’s entrance. In Double Falsehood Julio, before the audience has even seen Leonora, complains about her coldness. But his tone changes when, in the middle of his speech, she comes on stage: 21 Theobald, The Fatal Secret (1735), sig. A4v (Preface). fake shakespeare 369 Enter Leonora and Maid See how her Beauty doth enrich the Place! O, add the Music of thy charming Tongue, Sweet as the Lark that wakens up the Morn, And make me think it Paradise indeed. I was about to seek thee, Leonora, And chide thy coldness, love. Leon. What says your father? (Double Falsehood 1.2.74-79) Below is my version of the same moment. It actually abridges his speech, but then expands hers from four words to 124: Enter Lucinda and maid But O her beauty doth ingem the night! – Lucinda, speak, make this place paradise. Is heaven silent? Lucinda. Hear you not my heart? That claps and dances, leaps, like steeple-bells Triumphing, like the laughing girl unguarded Who took your boyhood hand, then not yet heeding Propriety of distance, or the miles ‘Twixt boy and man, nor could imagine years Nor count the many mornings since one lark’s alarum Child Cupid woke, musk-roses opened, and Vowed heart what tongue lacked language to pronounce Until tonight – is it night? Happiness Eclipses darkness – this long longed-for star-time When my Cardenio (name I adore More than thirst worships water) at the gate Of my unwillingly-still-virgin garden Knocks now at last to tell me – For why else knock so late, if not to tell me? – (Fletcher, Shakespeare and Taylor 2013, 1.4) I set the scene at night, because in Cervantes Cardenio’s conversation – first with Luscinda, then with her father, just before Cardenio’s departure for court – takes place ‘on a certaine night’ (Cervantes 1612, 3.10.222). Why would Shakespeare have abandoned that evocative romantic setting? As scholars conjectured long before me, I have split Double Falsehood ’s 1.2 into two separate scenes: keeping the first part, between Cardenio and Camillo, where it is, then inserting 1.3, then continuing with the second half of 1.2, between Cardenio and Lucinda, at her father’s house, rather than his. Theobald (or Davenant) would have combined the scenes – as Theobald, Davenant, and other neoclassical adapters so often did in other plays – for the sake of greater gary taylor370 unity of place, time, and action. But the adaptation thereby sacrificed the structural alternation, in the first Act, between the two pairs of lovers. We understand Lucinda differently, when her first scene is sandwiched between two Violenta scenes. Moreover, the novel makes it clear that Luscinda’s parents had restricted Cardenio’s access to her. That sense of constraint, so important to the story, is lost if she first appears outdoors, coming to visit Cardenio, apparently free to move whenever and wherever she wants. Cervantes, here, helps me undo Theobald. My inspiration for Lucinda’s speech also comes from Cervantes: the passage when Cardenio begins his story, invoking ‘the beauty of Luscinda’, calling her ‘a heaven’, explaining that ‘I loved, honoured and adored this Luscinda, almost from my first infancy; and she affected me likewise, with all the integrity and good will, which with her so young yeares did accord’ (Cervantes 1612, 3.10.220). This last passage makes sense to me, personally, because my oldest son met his future wife in kindergarten; their wedding invitations featured a photograph taken of them holding hands, on a school field trip, when they were five years old. That sort of thing may be uncommon in the modern world, but it surely happened often in early modern villages (like Stratford-upon-Avon). I transposed four details of Julio’s preliminary speech into hers; Theobald in adapting other plays often transferred material to another character. His usual abstract manner could have turned specific ‘steeple bells’ into generic ‘Music’. Theobald’s anachronistic cliché ‘charming tongue’ becomes, in my version, the ‘tongue’ that ‘lacked language’, by contrast with her ‘heart’ and ‘hand’. Theobald’s ‘add’ (which adds nothing) I imagined to have originated in ‘count’, the impatient measuring of time. Likewise, the gaseous, routine ‘Sweet as the lark that wakens up the morn’ seems to me impossibly bland, metrically and lexically, imagistically and grammatically, for Shakespeare in 1612. I imagined that it might be the faint Georgian remnant of something more particular and idiosyncratic (‘mornings since the lark’s alarum / Child Cupid woke, musk-roses opened’). I assumed that Lucinda must have said something that Theobald (or Davenant before him) deleted or transformed because it was too complex and/ or too indecorous for his audiences and his actress. I turned a man’s nostalgic narrative recollection of a childhood romance (in Don Quixote) into a young woman’s present-tense first-person impatience with his delay – combined with her breathless expectation that the long wait is finally over. I imagined that what he perceives as her ‘coldness’ is the barely contained frustration of a woman living in a world where men must make the first move – and the man that she desires keeps failing to make it. For him, it’s easier to blame her coldness than consciously acknowledge his own attraction to another man. I imagined that Lucinda’s quarrel with Cardenio, which immediately follows this exchange, is intensified precisely because, having so flamboyantly exposed herself in her first speech, she is then mortified and infuriated to learn that fake shakespeare 371 he still hasn’t even managed to talk to his dad. In the performances of Maria Souza Eglen, under the direction of Terri Bourus, the speech successfully communicated all that information to audiences. In their different ways Theobald, Greenblatt and Mee, and Doran and Álamo all demonstrate the limits of their understanding of Shakespeare in their effort to imitate him. So, undoubtedly, do I. But unlike them, I am interested in how he do that voodoo that he do. Unlike them, I believe that hard-core empiricist statistical scholarship can identify some of the differences between one writer and another. Empiricism is necessary, but it is also insufficient. I believe, as did the humanist European scholars and teachers of the sixteenth century, that ‘imitation’ is the first step toward creation, and that an essential component of the ‘imitation’ of classical texts is the ability to recognize the distinctions between one writer’s style and another’s: if your translation of Herodotus sounds just like your translation of Thucydides, then you have not understood one of them, and probably have not understood either of them. One could say the same about Ovid and Vergil, Horace and Juvenal, Plautus and Terence, Shakespeare and Fletcher (or, in another part of the forest, Shakespeare and Middleton). And I believe that we cannot learn anything new about Shakespeare, or Fletcher, unless we first accept the legitimacy of empiricist research; it is the necessary but insufficient foundation of all the palaces of our imaginations. Greenblatt and Mee and Doran don’t teach us anything about the lost play, about Fletcher, or about Shakespeare, because they felt that they could understand what was important about Shakespeare without engaging with style. But if Shakespeare had not been a brilliantly idiosyncratic writer, you would not be reading this essay, and nobody would care about Double Falsehood or the Jacobean Cardenio. Plagiarism is easy. Imitation is hard. Appendix: Language Data In all these lists, asterisked items are unparalleled in Literature Online’s database of English drama, 1576-1642 (accessed January 2013). I give page numbers for Theobald’s works; for Shakespeare and Fletcher, more easily searchable, I give only an abbreviated title, and (where the work in question is collaborative) a scene number. I do not cite parallels in passages of collaborative works now attributed to another author. A. Double Falsehood 5.2. 251-257. Citations are from Theobald, unless otherwise specified. *The righteous Pow’rs] Perfidious 24; ‘Ye righteous powers’ Antiochus 117; ‘You righteous Pow’rs’ Orestes 38, Richard 56. Fletcher does not collocate ‘righteous’ and ‘power(s)’; the adjective appears only eight times in his canon, never gary taylor372 describing deities. By contrast, it appears sixteen times in Theobald’s smaller canon, ten times referring to deities (in an immediately following noun). *righteous Pow’rs at] ‘Ye righteous Powers at’ Perseus 3 (also at the beginning of a speech). at length have] Richard 84; have at length Antiochus 105; has at length Harlequin 11 *have crown’d ... Loves] the Fates with Love have crown’d us Harlequin 12. Only early dramatic parallel is Samuel Daniel’s Hymen’s Triumph (‘haue crown’d his loue’), but that is not first person plural, and the verb is not governed by a supernatural noun. the storm that’s now o’erblown] the Storm was a little overblown Censor 54: 165 the storm ... o’erblown] The storm o’erblown Electra 29 sour affliction] hard affliction Odyssey; stern Affliction Fatal 36; sharp affliction Perfidious 42. No comparable adjective in Fletcher. Affliction ... Hope] Which false Hopes linger out for new Afflictions Richard 44 combat] Of Literature Online’s 24 examples of ‘combated’ in drama between 1576 and 1750, the pre-Restoration examples refer to real or imagined combat, but during Theobald’s career they more often involve a contest of abstractions: Obedience v. Love (1737), Love v. Pride (1736), Reasons v. Resolves (1717). Compare Theobald’s ‘thoughts to combat with Irreligion and Prophaneness’ (Censor 56:180), ‘combating that rage’ (Metamorphosis XIV: 176), ‘combated the opinion’ (Antiochus 199), ‘Comfort ... combats with my Fears’ (Captive D2). awhile, When] Fletcher’s Lovers’ Progress 1.1 (a while, when); also Shakespeare’s Lear true Faith ... Vows] Orestes 46 (true Faith from Vows) the list’ning Angels] The word ‘listening’ appears only once in Fletcher (as a verb, not an adjective). But the adjective ‘list’ning’ appears seven times in Theobald: ‘Vows ... the list’ning Heav’ns’ (Captive 7), ‘ye list’ning Heav’ns, that register’d her Vows’ (Richard 13), ‘the list’ning Winds’ (Persian 19), ‘the list’ning Throng’ (Mausoleum 4), ‘ye listening Ecchoes’ (Mausoleum 4), ‘the list’ning birds’ (Metamorphoses XIV:171) and ‘the list’ning train’ (Metamorphoses XI: 63). fake shakespeare 373 Stand on the] Censor 25: 178 on the golden] Clouds 58. Only 3 times in Literature Online drama 1576-1642. *Heav’n, And waft their Vows] ‘Waft ‘em [= Vows], like Incense, to the purple Heavens’ (Captive 8). No other parallels for ‘vow(s)’ (or a pronoun referring to them); only one parallel for ‘waft ... to heaven’ (J.W., Valiant Scot, 1637). *waft ... to ... Throne] ‘waft the Hero to his native Throne’ (Orestes 28). The verb ‘waft’ appears only twice in Fletcher, but eight times in Theobald’s smaller canon (Immortality 35, Censor 18: 126, Metamorphosis IX:13; XI:69; XIV:166; Orestes 44). their Vows to] Send up their Vows to Jove Proserpine 9. Only one early parallel (Jonson, Pan’s Anniversary) *the Eternal Throne] th’eternal throne Proserpine 2. Compare also ‘his eternal throne’ (Oedipus 42). *Such were our vows, and so are they repaid] Such is thy rage, and so art thou restrain’d Persian 58. No early dramatic parallels for ‘Such were’ followed by ‘and so are’ (including variant forms of verb). and so are] Fletcher’s Loyal, Goose, Pilgirm, H8 4.1; also Shakespeare’s Verona, Shrew (twice), Coriolanus. so ... repaid] so scurvily repaying Plutus 52. B. Double Falsehood 5.2.94-101. Citations are from Fletcher, unless other noted. *sad rites must be] These sad rites must be done first Rollo 5.2 rites ... perform’d] rights / Perform’d Shepherdess Ere I can] Mill 5.2a (twice). I can love] Shepherdess, Loyal, Goose, Captain 2.2, Pilgrimage 2.3. (Though there are 26 other occurrences of this phrase in early English drama, no one but Shirley uses it as much as Fletcher.) can love again] cannot loue againe Shepherdess 1.1, Canst thou not love again Shepherdess 4.1 gary taylor374 *Maids that have lov’d] Mayde, that haue Shepherdess; Maides that ever lov’d Kinsmen 3.6; Maides, that love Kinsmen 4.1 (and Sampson, Vow-Breaker) If they be] Island, Night, Rule lov’d ... testimony ... love] Goose (I shall love thee. As a Testimony, I’ll burn my book.) Wear their] Theobald and Shakespeare use this phrase only when followed by physical objects (hats, heads, faces, plackets). Fletcher has ‘weare their actions’ (Valentinian) and ‘weare their places in their petticoats’ (Money). loves here] love here Corinth 2.3 here, my lord] Loyal, Mill 5.2a my lord, here] Valentinian in their hearts] Theobald’s Persian 43, Censor (22:160). The only phrase in this scene that might suggest Theobald’s presence. But it occurs in the Robert Johnson song ‘Woods, rocks, and mountains’, attributed to Fletcher on other grounds. See Taylor 2012, 27-33. their eyes or] Shepherdess slip’d away] Kinsmen 4.1 Wash’d out] wash out Rule, Scornful 3.1 all remembrance] Chances, Four Plays (Time), Double 5.2, Rollo 5.2, Very Woman 4.3..173. The other seven examples in Literature Online all postdate Fletcher: Cowley, Glapthorne, Killigrew, Marmion, Ford’s Lover’s Melancholy, Massinger’s Picture and Emperor. mine, no] Loyal, Island, Voyage 4.1 no ... can cure] No promise of base peace can cure Loyal no physic But ... death can] My love, that nothing but my death can Double 4.3 (spoken by a woman) physic ... time] H8 1.3 fake shakespeare 375 *physic ... time ... cure] That gentle physic, given in time, had cured me (H8 4.2, where the immediately preceding word is execution, making ‘death’ implied though not spoken) *no ... time or death can] Nor time nor death can Mad 4.1. no ... or death can] nor death can Mad 5.1, Four Plays (Death) time ... cure] time will cure that Island, I’le find time to cure ‘em Rule. C. Double Falsehood 1.2.109-116. Citations are from Shakespeare unless otherwise noted. no ... but such] 3H6 4.1, Ado, TN, Lear, Winter no impediment] Ado, Merchant, Coriolanus *impediment ... bar] Any bar ... any impediment Ado shall ... my wishes] shall I sin in my wish MWW delays as] Hamlet *presses ... patience with] Do not press My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain (sonnet 140.1-2) *blunt not ... whet] Be this the whetstone of your sword, let grief Convert to wrath: blunt not the heart Macbeth22 blunt ... whet] whet thy almost blunted purpose Hamlet; blunt, / Till it was whetted R3 *blunt not ... loves] blunt not his love 2H4 Be patient, sweet] Sweet York, be patient R2, most patient, sweet, and virtuous wife Shrew, Sweet Sir Toby, be patient TN Be patient, sweet. – Patient! What else?] Compare Cleopatra’s ‘By sea! What else?’ (AC 3.7.28), where ‘by sea’ echoes the last two syllables of the preceding 22 Jackson 2012 cites only ‘blunt not’, without recording the ‘whetstone’ in the preceding line. gary taylor376 speech (by Antony). This is the closest parallel in the Shakespeare canon (which contains eighteen other examples of ‘what else’). The only other use of that idiom in Theobald is ‘Agreed! What else?’ in the later Orestes (1731), 42 (which does not echo the end of the previous speech). *Patient! What] Alas, sir, be patient. What say you sir? TN ; be patient; / What I can do Othello (Desdemona speaking). My flames are in the flint] Both Hammond 2010 and Jackson 2012 notice the parallel in Timon (‘the fire i’ the flint / Shows not till it be struck; our gentle flame’). But also compare ‘And to the flame thus speaks advisedly, / As from this cold flint I enforced this fire’ (Lucrece). Patient ... flames] Hamlet (Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper Sprinkle cool patience) *are in the] Compare ‘our hearts are in the trim’ (H5) and ‘my friends are in the north’ (R3), both at the end of verse line, both containing six monosyllables in the sequence ‘[first-person possessive pronoun] [concrete plural noun] are in the [concrete singular noun]’. I have found no comparable sentences in Theobald or pre-1642 English drama. *Haply ... weep] then haply she will weep R3 Haply ... never] Lear (Cordelia): Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters. *Haply to] Haply to wive Shrew (beginning of verse line). to lose a] Romeo. *to lose ... to get] Coriolanus (To lose itself in a fog ... to help to get thee a wife). Not only in the same order, but concerning marriage. lose a husband] AWW (Since you lack virtue, I will lose a husband;) Lear (Burgundy, to and about Cordelia). Jackson 2012 notes the All ’s Well parallel, but not that it is spoken by a defiantly chaste woman (Diana) and preceded by ‘I must be patient’ (two lines before in the same speech). a husband ... to get] to get a husband Shrew *husband ... bondage ... freedom] Tempest (My husband then? – Ay, with a heart as willing / As bondage e’er of freedom). fake shakespeare 377 I may weep] 3H6 2.5 get one] 2H4 when I ... let] AYLI (when I break that oath, let me turn monster: Celia); 3H6 1.3 (And when I give occasion of offence, Then let me die: Rutland, boy actor); Meesure (When I, that censure him, do so offend, Let mine own judgment pattern out my death: Angelo); Merchant (And when I ope my lips let no dog bark: Gratiano); Ado (‘When I do name him, let it be thy part to praise him’: Hero). In all these passages, as here in Double Falsehood, ‘When I’ begins a preliminary conditional clause to the imperative ‘let’ of the main clause. for bondage] Cymbeline Works Cited Astington John (2010), Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Barton John and Peter Hall (1970), The Wars of the Roses, London, British Broadcasting Corporation. Bate Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen, eds (2007), William Shakespeare: Complete Works, The RSC Shakespeare, Basingstoke, Macmillan. Billington Michael (2011), ‘Cardenio: The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon,’ The Guardian, 27 April. Bourus Terri (2012), ‘May I be metamorphosed: Cardenio by Stages’, in D. Carnegie and G. Taylor, eds, The Quest for Cardenio, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 387-403. Bourus Terri and Gary Taylor, eds (2013), The Creation and Re-Creation of ‘Cardenio’: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Boyd R.L. and W.J. Pennebaker (2015), ‘Did Shakespeare Write Double Falsehood? Identifying Individuals by Creating Psychological Signatures With Text Analysis’, Psychological Science 8, 1-13. Cervantes Miguel de Saavedra (1612), The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight- Errant, Don Quixote Of the Mancha, trans. by Thomas Shelton, London, William Stansby for Ed. Blount and W. Barret. Carnegie David and Gary Taylor, eds (2012), The Quest for ‘Cardenio’: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes and the Lost Play, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Della Gatta Carla (2013), ‘Performing Spanish Culture through Flamenco: Aurality and Embodiment in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Cardenio” ’, in T. Bourus and G. Taylor, eds, The Creation and Re-Creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 185-196. Doran Gregory (2012), Shakespeare’s Lost Play, London, Nick Hern Books. 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