They're known as the sniffer dogs of Shakespeare's plays - unstoppable academics who refuse to admit that the Bard's famous lost plays are really, truly gone forever.
You've never heard of Shakespeare's historical romance Cardenio?
That's hardly surprising, since it was performed just twice, in 1613, and then failed to crack the first authoritative text of the playwright's works published in 1623. But four centuries of absence haven't been enough to discourage Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University in England, who yesterday claimed that he had turned up the missing play.
I have to admit that I have doubts about Prof. Hammond’s claim to have unearthed this “new” Shakespeare play. My area of specialization is 18th/19th-century English literature, but looking at the excerpt provided in today’s newspaper (see below), I don’t get the sense that it “feels” like something Shakespeare could have written, even leaving aside the rewrite imposed on it by Lewis Theobald.
It may well be possible that Theobald’s Double Falsehood used bits and pieces, or the general plot, of Cardenio, but whatever is preserved of it today can hardly qualify for inclusion in the Shakespeare canon, can it?
Lopez [to Fabian]: Soft, soft you, neighbour; who comes here? Pray you, slink aside. [They withdraw.]
Henriquez: Ha! Is it come to this? O the devil, the devil, the devil!
Fabian [to Lopez]: Lo you now, for want of the discreet ladle of a cool understanding will this fellow's brains boil over!
Henriquez: To have enjoy'd her, I would have given - what?
All that at present I could boast my own,
And the reversion of the world to boot
Had the inheritance been mine. And now -
Just doom of guilty joys! - I grieve as much
That I have rifled all the stores of beauty,
Those charms of innocence and artless love,
As just before I was devour'd with sorrow,
That she refus'd my vows and shut the door
Upon my ardent longings.
Lopez [to Fabian]: Love! Love! Downright love! I see by the foolishness of it.
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