On 13 December 1727, the Drury Lane Theatre in London staged a new play titled Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers, advertised as “Written Originally by Shakespear.”1 It had a successful run of ten nights, with three further performances later in the season. When the text was published early the following year, the title page declared that it was “Written Originally by W. SHAKESPEARE; And now Revised and Adapted to the Stage By Mr. THEOBALD, the Author of Shakespeare Restor’d” (DF, 1728). While the idea of “revising and adapting” Shakespeare for the stage may strike the modern reader as anathema, it was not uncommon for the period in which Double Falsehood was originally produced. From the reopening of the theaters in 1660 onward, a host of adaptations of Shakespeare appeared and many of these, notably Nahum Tate’s King Lear (1681) and Colley Cibber’s Richard III (1700), survived throughout the eighteenth and even into the nineteenth century. Theobald himself also authored adaptations of Richard II (1719) and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1733).
Double Falsehood is, however, an unusually complex palimpsest. Many scholars now believe that the work is an adaptation of the lost play Cardenio written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher in 1613. The playwrights based their drama on the Cardenio episode in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which had been published in an English translation in 1612. Cardenio seems to have been modified in turn by a Restoration dramatist, perhaps William Davenant, although there are no records of performance or publication of this text. Theobald then apparently adapted the Restoration version into Double Falsehood. More recently, theater director Gregory Doran and scholar Gary Taylor have each attempted to reconstruct Cardenio from the text of Double Falsehood, working back from Theobald toward Shakespeare.
Recent interest in Double Falsehood to date in terms of both text and performance has largely centered on the contested question of its authorship, fueled in part by the publication of Brean Hammond’s edition of Double Falsehood in 2010 as part of the Arden Shakespeare series. This move was denounced as much as it was supported by articles in scholarly journals and the popular press. Ron Rosenbaum’s article for Slate, for example, denigrates a number of lines in the play, concluding that anything so “truly, madly, deeply bad” could not be Shakespearean. Gary Taylor shares Rosenbaum’s sense that Double Falsehood is an inferior play; his reconstruction of Cardenio has attempted to remove as much of Theobald’s writing as possible. However, he does not doubt its connection with Shakespeare, and the canonization of Double Falsehood will be cemented later this year with the play’s inclusion in the New Oxford Shakespeare, of which Taylor is one of the general editors. Thus far, most scholarship on Double Falsehood focuses on the play’s putative early modern origins. Essay collections such as The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play (Carnegie and Taylor) and The Creation and Re-creation of Cardenio (Bourus and Taylor) largely investigate the Jacobean and Cervantean contexts. These essays are written by scholars of the early modern period, and the volumes pointedly use the Shakespearean title of the lost play and not the title Theobald assigned to his adaptation.
Revisiting Shakespeare’s “Lost” Play differs sharply from previous scholarship in offering a detailed consideration of Double Falsehood as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, assessing the play fully on its own terms as a drama staged for playgoers of the 1720s. Through a sustained emphasis on the work’s immediate milieu, the contributors demonstrate how and to what end Double Falsehood engaged with contemporary cultural issues. Robert D. Hume’s opening essay offers a new take on the authorship question by examining Double Falsehood in the theatrical and literary context of the long eighteenth century. Hume pays particular attention to the period’s attitude toward adapting the works of early modern dramatists and takes account of the changing status of Shakespeare’s reputation over the course of the Restoration and eighteenth century. His work offers the fullest investigation to date of the intermediary manuscripts from which Theobald claimed to be working. Hume concludes that the play is not a forgery but ultimately remains skeptical about the extent of Shakespeare’s involvement in the text.
The three subsequent essays in this volume demonstrate compellingly how scholarship on this play can move beyond the question of Shakespearean authorship. Diana Solomon examines the treatment of rape in Double Falsehood, arguing that this element of Theobald’s work is more in step with Jacobean tragicomedy than eighteenth-century drama. She notes that rape victims in the she-tragedies of the period usually die, often by their own hands. Conversely, rape is usually treated as marginal in Restoration comedy, either involving secondary characters or lacking influence over the main plot. Henriquez, the redeemed rapist of Double Falsehood, has ancestors in Jacobean tragicomedy rather than peers in the drama of the 1720s. The play’s epilogue, Solomon contends, deliberately mediates such unfamiliar aspects of early modern dramaturgy for an eighteenth-century audience.
Jean I. Marsden considers how Double Falsehood compares with other dramas of the 1720s, aiming to situate the play in its own moment, no matter its source. She compares this adaptation with other reworkings of Shakespeare from the period, demonstrating that Theobald uses many of the same adaptive practices. Compared with early modern drama, eighteenth-century adaptations contain, for example, a larger number of female characters and a more streamlined plot, with elements of low comedy removed and a closer attention paid to morality. Marsden notes, however, that Double Falsehood also contains tropes that were uncommon in the drama of the 1720s, such as the pastoral, and therefore concludes that the play is likely to be an adaptation, even if we lack a definitive point of origin.
The issue of authorship that has provoked so much recent interest was also, of course, at stake during Theobald’s lifetime. Double Falsehood’s 1728 title page (quoted previously) asserts the play’s Shakespearean provenance and the Shakespearean credentials of the dramatist who had adapted it. Indeed, as well as authoring Shakespeare Restored in 1726, Theobald later produced his own edition of Shakespeare in 1733. Eighteenth-century detractors of the play included the most famous poet of the era, Alexander Pope, who dismissed it as a forgery. Pope was also an editor of Shakespeare’s works; in fact, Shakespeare Restored was a critique of the flaws Theobald perceived in Pope’s edition. Pope’s ill judgment of Double Falsehood may therefore have been less motivated by his concerns over Shakespearean authorship and more deeply influenced by a sense of rivalry, as indicated by the crowning of Theobald as “King” of the Dunces in the three-book version of The Dunciad (1728). Deborah C. Payne’s essay closes the volume by recovering this crucial context for Double Falsehood, linking the play not with Shakespeare or his peers but instead with Theobald’s own contemporaries. Payne considers the play in the context of the Scriblerus Club, of which Pope was a prominent member. She reads the work as Theobald’s deliberate rebuttal to the Scriblerians’ distrust of the theater as evidenced in the burlesques written at the time by John Gay, aided and abetted by Pope. Payne argues that Double Falsehood counteracts these satirical plays by offering an affective and ethical tragicomedy designed to evoke sympathy and teach virtue.
All four essays in this volume clearly demonstrate that understanding the play’s eighteenth-century context is crucial to our ability to interpret it. Double Falsehood’s performance history supports this reading of the play as deeply imbricated within eighteenth-century culture. After its initial run in 1727, Double Falsehood was revived on 13 December 1740 at Covent Garden starring Margaret “Peg” Woffington as Violante. The reason for this revival is clear when we consider the eighteenth-century theatrical context of the play. Woffington achieved great success that season with her performances of cross-dressed roles such as Sylvia in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (which she first performed on 6 November 1740) and, even more daringly, travesty roles such as that of Harry Wildair in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple (which she first performed on 21 November 1740 and acted sixteen times that season). The Drury Lane managers responded to Woffington’s popularity in male attire by reviving several Shakespeare plays that feature cross-dressing, including As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice.2 The 1740 revival of Double Falsehood can best be understood as forming part of this trend. The play was revived again in 1767 and in 1770. The latter performance occurred soon after David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon, which many have seen as the zenith of eighteenth-century bardolatry. Both of these revivals provoked enough public interest to occasion new editions of the text. The prompt copy for the 1770 production, held by the Furness Shakespeare Library at the University of Pennsylvania, reveals that the play was being updated for a later eighteenth-century audience (Hammond, “Introduction,” 109–11). The play’s final professional performance in London took place on 6 June 1791 at Covent Garden with a new setting by William Shield for the “Fond Echo” song in act four, which was performed by Rosemond Mountain, a popular singer of the period (Hammond, “Introduction,” 113).
In addition to this London stage history, the play had numerous performances outside the capital. The Bristol Gazette of 4 July 1793 puffed an upcoming performance of the piece, declaring it “admirable” and “one of the best Plays that ever Shakespeare wrote.”3 The great actress Sarah Siddons even played the part of Leonora in Bath in the early 1780s, shortly before she achieved success on the London stage (Hammond, “Introduction,” 117). About 15 years later she was cast in the lead role in the pseudo-Shakespearean play Vortigern but subsequently refused to appear when it was staged at Drury Lane, perhaps because she shared her brother, John Philip Kemble’s, doubts about the work’s authenticity. The actress may have felt she had less control over her repertoire in the early part of her career but seems to have had no such qualms about appearing in Double Falsehood. Similarly, the eminent Shakespearean scholar of the late eighteenth-century, Edmond Malone, eventually acknowledged the play’s possible Shakespearean connection, even though he debunked assiduously the Shakespearean forgeries of William Henry Ireland, including Vortigern, in the 1790s (Hammond, “Introduction,” 80). Hammond notes that Double Falsehood’s last professional performance took place in Bath on 5 July 1793. Since then, it has occasionally been performed by amateur groups, and there have been recent productions of the play. But as this stage history reveals, and as this volume clearly demonstrates, Double Falsehood is very much an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The essays collected here shed important new light on the play by recovering what it meant to playgo...