Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/37

 12 S. V. FEB., 1919.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

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informed " that this last manuscript " was early in the possession of the celebrated Mr. Betterton, and by him designed to have been usher' d into the world " ; but he did not know what accident had prevented the fulfilment of this purpose. This cannot be said to be a very sufficient statement ; but it is quite understandable that, if there were such manuscripts in Theobald's pos- session, he could give no reasonable account of their previous history : they were not likely to be stamped with a record of their experiences. I am not aware that any one of his critics was refuted by a sight of these manuscripts ; but neither can it be said that any of them demanded an in- spection.

There have been adduced three reasons to make one doubt Theobald's good faith : the first is, the unlikelihood of his having three manuscripts of the play ; the second is, the disappearance of those manuscripts ; the third is, the omission of the play from his edition of Shakespeare's works sub- sequently issued.

The first of these does not strike me as of much weight. Theobald, if meditating a revising of the play to fit it for the stage (for it seems to have been a genuine belief of Theobald's that it had never been acted, the memory of its having been produced having probably died out long before the time of Mr. Dowries), would probably seek to get all the copies he could, especially as the value of his copyright would be seriously impaired if some one else published the play as it had stood in the original.

The second argument is more cogent. Theobald's library, containing a number of old plays, was sold in 1744 after his death, and it has been suggested that the Shake- speare play in manuscript subsequently destroyed by Warburton's notorious cook was one of the copies of the original version of ' Double Falsehood.' If we could say definitely that when Theobald's effects were sold there was among them no manuscript of a play purporting to be by Shakespeare, the opponents of Theobald would have a good case ; as it is, all that is to be said is that the matter is left indefinite : we have had other cases of manuscripts of old plays disappearing ; and, moreover, the early part of the eighteenth century did not attach the importance to Shakespeare's that we do.

The third point to which I have referred has not much in it : to have included ' Double Falsehood ' in his edition of Shakespeare would presumably have inter- fered with Theobald's copyright of the play, or at any rate with his profits. This copy- right had been granted to him for fourteen years, and he naturally would not wish it disturbed, as it still had some eight years to run when his edition of Shakespeare was produced. There is, then, no really sound reason for doubting Theobald's honesty in the matter.

The source of the play is to be found in the story of Cardenio in ' Don Quixote,' which was first published in the original Spanish in 1605, and in its English trans- lation by Shelton in 1612. It is note- worthy that the publication of this English translation was quickly followed by the appearance of a play on the subject of Cardenio. On May 20, 1613, John Hemings was paid on behalf of the King's players for presenting at Court half-a-dozen plays, among which was one called c Cardano ' or presented this play, which a later entry described as ' Cardema ' and ' Cardenna.' There need be no question that this was a
 * Cardenno ' ; and on June 8 he again

Elay on the subject of the Cardenio story, ike so many other plays, it drops out of notice after these early productions, and the next we hear of it is the entry of a drama described as *'The History of Car- denio by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare " in the Stationers' Register in 1653 for publication by Humphrey Moseley.

It will be said that an attribution after a lapse of forty years is not of much value, especially when made by a publisher who was in the habit of fraudulently securing the registration of two separate plays as one by the simple device of entering the one not only under its own title, but under that of another play as well, the two titles being given as alternatives ; but there are some very strong reasons nevertheless for thinking Moseley 's entry genuine. In the first place, he did not, so far as is known, ever deliberately ascribe a play to some one who had had nothing to do with its author- ship. Presumably, therefore, the names of Shakespeare and Fletcher were on the manuscript he possessed. Secondly, we now know that a play on this very subject was presented by the company with which Shakespeare and Fletcher were most pro- minently connected the only company, indeed, with which, so far as is known,