Double toil and trouble

‘Shakespeare’s Lost Play Re-imagined’, thus Gregory Doran’s subtitle to Cardenio. The play appears to have been lost in the Globe fire of 1613, but why should the RSC’s chief associate director have wanted to ‘re-imagine’ and stage it as the inaugural production in the refurbished Swan?

‘Shakespeare’s Lost Play Re-imagined’, thus Gregory Doran’s subtitle to Cardenio. The play appears to have been lost in the Globe fire of 1613, but why should the RSC’s chief associate director have wanted to ‘re-imagine’ and stage it as the inaugural production in the refurbished Swan? There was nothing to go on other than a dubious trail leading back from a 1727 effort by one Lewis Theobald (Double Falsehood) through an MS ‘conceivably’ adapted by Sir William Davenant (who gave himself out as Shakespeare’s ‘lost’ son) from a play by Fletcher and Shakespeare, performed at Court in 1612/13, and which ‘may’ have been based on an episode in Don Quixote.