-
Portrait of poet William Shakespeare - Source: Reuters
The discounted claims of an 18th century author to have
re-shaped the words of Shakespeare into a play are finally being
taken seriously by a respected publisher of the Bard's works nearly
300 years on.
Double Falsehood, a play written by Lewis Theobald and first
performed in 1727, was based substantially on another work
co-written by William Shakespeare more than a century earlier, a
leading academic said.
Adding weight to the claim of Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham
University is the fact that the respected Arden Shakespeare
publishers will release it in print on March 22.
Its appearance, and the attribution to Shakespeare, is likely to
trigger another round of scholarly debate over what the
English-speaking world's most famous and influential playwright
wrote and what was falsely attributed to him.
For Hammond, the publication of the play next week will be the
culmination of years of research.
"I started working on it in the 1980s and wrote a couple of
articles on the play," he said.
"At the time I was hoping to get the play brought out by Oxford
University Press. It was revived in around 2002 when the Arden
series general editor got in touch and said he would like to bring
this out.
"He subjected it to very, very stringent scrutiny and of course all
the way through we've tried to tread a cautious line. But you can't
really control what people say about it."
Based on Don Quixote?
Theobald always claimed his play was based on a lost version by
Shakespeare that was in turn based on the story of Cardenio, taken
from the novel Don Quixote, by Spanish author Miguel de
Cervantes.
Hammond said modern scholarship had established that the early
work, performed in 1613, was co-written by Shakespeare and John
Fletcher. Theobald then substantially re-worked and cut it, meaning
the presence of three hands in the present version.
"Shakespeare wrote most of the first half (of the original) and
Fletcher wrote most of the second half - you could detect a new
hand from the style of writing," Hammond said.
Theobald's work, a story of love and betrayal, was popular with
18th century audiences, but the playwright was widely dismissed as
a fraudster for claiming he had used the words of
Shakespeare.
"The play has been rubbished in the past," Hammond said.
"It did have a successful theatrical run when it came out, but
soon after people began asking questions and thought that it was
not a single author play by Shakespeare and we know that it's
not."
That interpretation became widely accepted and the play has
languished in relative obscurity until now, when the work will be
widely accessible for the first time in more than 250 years.
"What's left in it now for the modern reader is Shakespeare's DNA,"
Hammond concluded.
