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PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
  Thursday, 03 August 2006
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The History of Cardenio is based on a story written by Miguel de Cervantes, one of Europe's greatest prose novelists; dramatized by William Shakespeare, one of Europe's greatest verse dramatist; in collaboration with John Fletcher, the most popular and respected English dramatist of the seventeenth century.

Shakespeare and Cervantes both died in 1616, within a few days of each another. Only three years before, Shakespeare wrote a play based upon Cervantes' most famous work Don Quixote, shortly after publication of its English translation. The title of the play refers to a character in Don Quixote.

Gary Taylor, who reconstructed the play, says "The History of Cardenio was the first play Shakespeare worked on after The Tempest. Cardenio was an immediate theatrical success. None of Shakespeare's other late plays received two court performances in their first season.

Despite its success, the play has been neglected, even considered 'lost.' There are historical reasons for this neglect. Shakespeare's part-authorship of Cardenio with John Fletcher was not accepted until the second half of the twentieth century. And like Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Cardenio was not included in the 1623 edition of Shakespeare's plays, presumably because it was written in collaboration.

"The word 'history' in the title is particularly charged, for this play is the history wholly fictional character. The history of Cardenio is both a story told about Cardenio, and a story told by Cardenio. Also, in Renaissance England, history could mean both "fiction" and "fact", both "words" and "events." Like Don Quixote, The History of Cardenio is an enactment of the tangled relationship between two opposed meanings of history.

The History of Cardenio is a remarkable play, a moving and amusing middle-class romance, or post-romance, written by Shakespeare and Fletcher in 1613, and well worth restoring to the repertoire of the English dramatic imagination.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=11310
15 years ago
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#1186
THanks for the summary. Many years ago I performed in a production promoted as Cardenio but the quick search your post triggered seemed to produce the same script under the title 'The Second Maiden;s Tragedy' http://www.tech.org/~cleary/2mt.html

At the time I did not question the origen of the script we used and am a little confused that there may be a couple of scripts attributed to Cardenio. Do you know much of the relationship between the Second Maiden's script and the history of Cardenio?

thanks in advance
Sorry for the late response... missed this post somehow...

Yes, The Second Maiden's Tragedy is VERY close to the presumed original of Cardenio so it's the closest reference and could "legitimately" be billed as Cardenio (though many still dispute this and we may never know the truth). It gets performed here and there...

http://www.exmouthjournal.co.uk/exmouth ... 3A12%3A567
14 years ago
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#1188
thanks for getting back to me on this. As an actor I really struggled to find much of the bards hand in this play (the second maiden) - are the records of Cardenio listing it as an early play? - putting aside whether the maiden script is the same play. In terms of unattributed works I am more of the camp that The Famous Victories fits with Williams style as an early play. Thanks again for your information, this site has been a valuable find for me.
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