#double falsehood

I know of my other Shakespeare genre polls only the comedy one is really blowing up, but I thought I'd go counterintuitive and make an even more obscure category. Some of these claims are more substantiated than others, of course-- put your own collaboration theories in the tags if you've got em.

Cardenio is a lost play now almost universally believed to have been written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher in or around 1612-13...in 1727 the lawyer and dramatist Lewis Theobald caused a sensation by claiming to have discovered the manuscript of a lost Shakespeare play. He adapted the play to conform to current sensibilities and it was performed and published as Double Falsehood, which broadly follows the tale of Cardenio, a novella inserted into Cervantes’s Don Quixote. However, Theobald’s critics argued that play seemed far more like Fletcher than Shakespeare.

Confirmed by Science: A New (to Us) Shakespeare Play

For years, Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University has been convinced that Double Falsehood, a romantic tragi-comedy credited to Lewis Theobald, was more than based off of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio. In 2010, The Guardian quoted Professor Hammond as saying:

I don’t think you can ever be absolutely 100% but, yes, I am convinced that it is Shakespeare…This version of the Shakespeare…

As part of our ongoing effort to bring you the most current reporting from the world of literature, Message in a Bottle shares with you today a story about the latest work from one of today's hottest writers. We're talking, of course, about that up-and-coming poet and playwright William Shakespeare. What's new about this very old author? A professor at the University of Texas is attesting that Shakespeare contributed a few hundred lines of verse to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. According to this researcher, awkward expressions in these lines are the result of typesetting errors, mistakes that perfectly match those that other compositors made from known samples of Shakespeare's handwriting.

Fairly abstruse stuff that might not stand up to scrutiny alone, but the study supports earlier claims. Those were based on language analysis of the kind that revealed the author of the anonymously published Primary Colors (and is also regularly used to detect student plagiarism). Together, it's enough evidence to convince the Royal Shakespeare Company. They've added The Spanish Tragedy to their forthcoming anthology Collaborative Plays, which contains what we might call the Outer Canon, those dramatic works that orbit around the core Shakespearean planets.

If you're not the sort of person who wears a doublet on weekends or carries a souvenir bodkin, you might not know, but the list of dramas at least partially attributed to the man from Stratford has grown significantly in recent years. Aside from this most recent one, there are:

Double Falsehood, inspired by an episode from Don Quixote

Arden of Faversham, a tale of adulterous murder

Edward III, about the king who instigated the Hundred Years War

Sir Thomas More, the extant manuscript of which includes a scene allegedly inscribed by Shakespeare himself

There are several other plays with more doubtful, though still arguable, attributions. And the classic oeuvre isn't just being altered through addition, but also via subtraction. Scholars are carefully teasing the contributions of other authors out of plays such as Timon of Athens, Pericles, and Titus Andronicus, showing that Shakespeare wasn't as solitary a genius as previously thought. He wasn't averse to running around with thugs, in fact.

                    What I like about this line of study isn't the opportunity to nitpick the authorship of individual lines, but how it enriches our understanding of the Elizabethan-Jacobean theatrical milieu. That environment, equally devoted to commerce and art, was the perfect cradle for Shakespeare's talents. He stands out in a crowd of other brilliant writers, and he'd never have reached the heights he did without them. Stanley Wells paints their portraits in his Shakespeare & Co., mapping out the web of cooperation and competition that connected these creative characters.

Ben Jonson was the stepson of a bricklayer who killed a man in a duel, but rose to become the best-known author in the land and the official entertainer of the king. Shakespeare is known to have acted in his Every Man in His Humour. Christopher Marlowe introduced blank verse to the English stage, and was almost certainly a spy for Elizabeth I. Thomas Kyd was a one-time roommate of his and was tortured to reveal damning information about him. Marlowe was killed shortly afterward in mysterious circumstances. The era was full of personality and a hotbed of intrigue; the collective story of these entertainers' lives is at least as interesting as the plays they wrote.