Double Falsehood: discerning Shakespeare by extraneity

Last night, I re-read a paper on Shakespeare's lost play, Cardenio - and belatedly understood its significance.

From my library, my immediate reference point for potted synopses of Shakespeare's plays is Liz Evers' To Be Or Not To Be... - supplemented by my own notes that give a chronology and lookup.

To summarise: there are 36 First Folio plays, but 42 known in all.  The six not included in the 1623 First Folio are:

• Edward III (between 1591 and 1594, attribution accepted in 1990s)
• Love's Labours Won (between 1594 - 1595 - lost)
• Sir Thomas More (between 1601 - 1606 - mostly lost)
• Pericles (between 1606 - 1608)
• Two Noble Kinsmen (between 1610 - 1616)
• Cardenio (between 1612 - 1616 - mostly lost)

Cardenio the play is accepted as being based on a tale in Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, translated to English 1612).  I only have a Motteux translation, which has this story at book III chapter X: the Adventure of the Sierra Morena continued.

Cardenio doesn't survive in the original.  To date, the only possible echo is Double Falsehood, a 1727 play "revised and adapted" by Lewis Theobald.  Theobald claimed to posess three manuscripts of the play on which it was based.

To summarise the "known facts" about the lost play Cardenio: there's a 1653 reference that attributes it to Shakespeare and John Fletcher - which reference was apparently unknown to Theobald.

(I recall reading today that all of Shakespeare's plays include a subplot.  Double Falsehood does not.  The only native subplot would have involved Don Quixote in the framing narrative.)

The paper I read last night is from the academic annual Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991): The Hand of John Fletcher in Double Falsehood, by Stephan Kukowski.

So.  Is Double Falsehood based directly on manuscripts of a Shakespeare play, or is it a pastiche, a forgery?

Kukowski doesn't try to detect traces of Shakespeare's hand in Double Falsehood.  Instead, he analyses it for evidence most typical of Fletcher's.  And he finds plenty of cases that are comparatively rare for Shakespeare, but monotonously regular for Fletcher.  For example, 

• Fletcher's use of the feminine verse ending (the final syllable is unstressed)
• Has vs hath
• Fletcher's use of the word 'fling'; 
• 'Billows'
• 'On my conscience'

Me, I leave it to the professionals to confirm these - and the weight is in the positive.  In itself, the fact that Arden Shakespeare has published Double Falsehood counts (last seen by me in Abbey's bookshop in York St, Sydney).

Then in crosschecking it last night, I found that Wikipedia's entry on Double Falsehood/Cardenio references that very Kukowski paper.  I don't claim to be trailblazing, but at least I came to understand for myself the significance of the paper.

If Double Falsehood was a forgery or pastiche of Shakespeare, how could it possibly include such strong evidence of John Fletcher's hand?

Shakespearean analysis - indeed literary analysis in general - was clearly not nearly so advanced in 1727.  Instead of analysing for evidence of Shakespeare - an inconclusive endeavour at best - Kukowski demonstrated that the unintended traces can only demonstrate good faith.

Having seen the positive case demonstated by the background evidence, it reminded me of David McInnis' book Shakespeare and Lost Plays, which philosophises at length on what can be surmised by the negative traces left by [Elizabethan] plays that are not able to be recovered.  A symmetry, it seems to me.

My thanks to E.T. for lending me his copy of Shakespeare Survey 43 - and for having rescued a number of these volumes from being discarded recently by whatever is the successor to "Sydney Technical College Library".