The Creation and Re-Creation of Cardenio

Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes

T. Bourus, G. Taylor, T. Bourus, G. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137344205, 9781137344212
• eBook ISBN: 9781137344229
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Did Shakespeare really join John Fletcher to write Cardenio, a lost play based on Don Quixote? With an emphasis on the importance of theatrical experiment, a script and photos from Gary Taylor's recent production, and essays by respected early modern scholars, this book will make a definitive statement about the collaborative nature of Cardenio.

Part I

CERVANTES, FLETCHER, SHAKESPEARE, AND PERFORMANCE

1

THE PASSION OF READERS, THE IMITATION OF TEXTS: THE HISTORY OF READING IN THE QUEST FOR CARDENIO

Elizabeth Spiller

The quest for Cardenio has been the story of a lost text. This text itself has a kind of instability—perhaps “Cardenno,” maybe “Cardenna,” or simply The History of Cardenio—that seems particularly appropriate as a textual afterlife to the fictional hero whose own name was not Quixote, but rather Quesada, or perhaps Quixada, Quijana, or Quixano.¹ Much of the excitement of this quest has involved reading backward from Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood (1728) and forward from Thomas Shelton’s translation The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant Don-Quixote of the Mancha (1612), to the text that may have stood between them. Yet, these recent critical acts of readers—and the remarkable and evolving readings of the play text that have emerged from them—remain modern ones. But Cervantes’ Don Quixote articulates and practices its own, decidedly early modern, theory of reading. This theory of reading emerges out of an engagement with the one text that is very much not missing from this story, at least as Cervantes imagined it and as early modern audiences to The History of Cardenio would have experienced it: the romance of Amadis of Gaul.

Threatened by the inquisitorial fire of the barber and the priest in Cervantes’ version and torn apart onstage to make an improved “second” edition in the Taylor rendition (THOC 1.6), Amadis of Gaul was the most widely read of the Renaissance romances. For early modern readers Amadis also became the central text in contemporary debates about the nature and consequences of reading. Quixote, Quesada, Cardenio: they are each overcome by the passion of reading this book, a passion that is tied to acts of imitatio. They were not alone. In Spain, Amadis went through about 100 bibliographically distinct editions and was arguably the first modern best seller; in France, there were as many as half a million readers of the Herberay translations; in England, copies of the romance were collected by readers from Philip Sidney and Robert Burton to Robert Boyle. The story of Amadis—whether told within and across the pages of the story of Cardenio or in the experiences of historical readers—connects acts of imitatio to humoral imbalance in ways that are at the heart of early modern understandings of reading. This essay will outline key developments in contemporary attitudes toward reading and the consequences that reading theory and practice might have had on this story about reading.

What does it mean for later scholars, writers, or editors to recreate an early modern text? Jorge Luis Borges asks us to consider this question when he imagines the “interminably heroic” quest by which “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” sets out to write chapters 9, 38, and parts of 22 of the first part of the Quixote, “word for word and line for line.”² In this meditation on the nature of mimesis and fiction, Borges begins by suggesting that there are two forms of imitation that Menard might pursue: copying the text or copying the author. The first Menard rejects out of hand: “he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it” (91). The second—in which one would need to “Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918”—involves copying not the text but Cervantes himself. This, too, Menard rejects as “too easy” (91).

Both of these forms of imitation resonate across various attempts to create, recreate, or edit an original literary text, whether the Quixote or The History of Cardenio. Menard’s initial choices suggest that the frame for thinking about such possibilities depends on one’s assumptions about the nature of authorship. Menard, however, decides to at once remain himself and yet also “reach the Quixote” through his own experiences. What starts as a comic meditation on the nature of authorship thus becomes a reflection on reading. In concluding that “every man should be capable of all ideas,” Menard echoes Quixote’s own convictions about the truth of the imagination. Menard also follows Quixote’s method of imitating his heroes primarily through his acts as a reader. Borges gives us a story that seems to be about authorship but turns out to be about reading because, for him, acts of authorship are always forms of reading. With this comes the related lesson that, far from being “a contingent work” and “not necessary” in the way that the decidedly French Menard imagines (91), the Quixote is in some sense the only story: all stories begin with the reading of Quixote, and the most powerful forms of imitation come from and through its reading.

Shakespearian editor John Kerrigan has suggested that any such lessons about reading have not been well learned by textual scholars. Taking W. W. Greg’s “The Rationale of the Copy-Text” (1950) as his point of departure, Kerrigan notes that an editorial practice that charges the editor with the goal of identifying and eliminating textual corruption tends to assume a highly idealized notion of the text as intended by the author, one “free from historical contingency and the accidents of material circumstance.” While this critique of traditional bibliographic methods is a familiar one, Kerrigan also argues that this approach necessarily “pays little or no attention to the role of the reader,” if only because the reader becomes largely irrelevant when the goal of the editor is to arrive at the text that most closely approximates the intentions of the author.³ It is perhaps not a coincidence that both of Menard’s initial approaches to creating the Quixote, the first with its commitment to the achievement of a perfect text and the second with its intentionalist suppositions, have affinities with the editorial assumptions of Fredson Bowers, G. Thomas Tanselle, and other editors working in the tradition of Greg.

Yet, for Kerrigan, the same charge can also be made against Jerome McGann. Kerrigan identifies McGann’s inclination to overlook both the act and history of reading as a “grave deficiency” in his work (104). His assessment of McGann’s attitude toward reading is worth detailing because it provides a framework for thinking about why having a history and theory of reading might be important, especially in the case of texts such as Quixote and Cardenio. McGann’s The Textual Condition (1991) was primarily interested in offering a model of reading to align with the editorial practice that he developed in such works as A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). In keeping with his corrective to traditional editorial theory, McGann was committed to articulating a material, rather than transcendent, model of reading. Addressing those who would suggest that reading, as he depicted it, is “an affair of the mind alone, of the individual standing silent before the mute text, building invisible cities of meaning to unheard melodies of truth,” McGann insisted that the act of reading is not separable from the physical: “Reading appears always and only as text, in one or another physically determinate and socially determined form . . . Textuality cannot be understood except as a phenomenal event, and reading itself can only be understood when it has assumed specific material constitutions” (my emphasis).⁴

In tethering reading to the physical reality of the text itself in this way, though, McGann constructs a model of reading in which readers tacitly disappear into the text: “Various readers and audiences are hidden in our texts, and the traces of their multiple presence are scripted at the most material levels” (10). In assuming that the physical reality of reading is nothing other than the material fact of the text, McGann unintentionally assumes a surprisingly ahistorical model of reading. As Kerrigan notes, McGann is “damagingly indifferent to the synchronic variety and historical complexity of reading practices” (104). Another Pierre Menard.

Equally important, McGann’s interest in correcting for transcendence and textual idealism leads him to an arguably narrow and rigid view of the physical: despite his references to the phenomenal, he tends to assume that the text alone comprises the physical. Even as he derides those who would ignore the physicality of text to comprehend reading as “an affair of the mind alone,” his reader remains strangely disembodied. In the early modern period, though, any such account of reading would have been largely incomprehensible. Quixote’s windmills of the imagination seem like the perfect image for reading as “an affair of the mind alone,” but within early modern faculty psychology, the act of reading happened not just in the mind but in and to the body, and Cervantes makes clear that reading changes Quixote’s blood and complexion at least as much as it transforms his mind.

Both traditional and recent editorial theory too often overlooks the role and importance of readers. In a scholarly field that has largely continued to focus on the production and transmission of texts in ways that have sometimes seemed to suggest that actually reading what is in a book may be entirely beside the point, readers are relegated to the third and last place in the cycle of the “sociology of texts.” Yet, authors often, and editors must, begin as readers. As Alberto Manguel makes clear, reading always comes before writing.⁵ This lesson is particularly acute in this case, which is a labyrinthine mise en abyme of readers reading readers. The Taylor History of Cardenio is compelling as an experiment in editorial and performance practice, but it is also a kind of reading laboratory, an achievement of an act of reading that emerges out of and through a whole archaeology of earlier readers and other reading practices.

Working through this history of readers, to get back, as it were, to Shakespeare and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I
• Part II   The History of Cardenio, 1612–2012
• Contributors
• Index