Roger Chartier, The History of Cardenio

Professor Chartier is Directeur d'Etudes, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris, and Professeur, College de France.

Seminar on The History of Cardenio

The story begins with a warrant signed by the treasurer of the Privy Chamber and dated May 20th, 1613. It ordered the payment of 153 pounds to Johh Heminges and the company of the King’s Men for having performed at the court at Whitehall nineteen plays during the previous months. Among them is listed a play of which the title is ‘Cardenno’. The play is without any doubt the first English theatrical adaptation based on Don Quixote whose translation into English by Thomas Shelton was published in 1612. It is only in 1653 that the first attribution of the play appeared when the stationer Humphrey Moseley entered into the register of the Stationers’ Company among forty-one plays “The History of Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher. & Shakespeare”. But Moseley never used the right in copy he had on Cardenio and he never published the play that seems lost forever. In this seminar I would like to examine how this very absence has recently transformed the lost Cardenio in a good plot for novels, a matter for multiple theatrical plays, and an obsession for Shakespearean criticism. I would like also to look at Cardenio without Shakespeare and to analyze how other European playwrights (Guillén de Castro in Spain, Pichou in France) responded to the challenge launched by the difficulty to construct a play based on the complex narrative of Don Quixote. And, finally, coming back to England, to deal with the only possible trace of the play performed in 1613. In 1727 Lewis Theobald had not written a play title The Double Falshood, or the Distrest Lovers published the following year and presented on the title-page as “Written Originally by W. Shakespeare; and now Revised and Adapted to the Stage by Mr. Theobald, the author of Shakespeare Restor’d”. Theobald who was at the time preparing his edition of Shakespeare’s works claimed to possess three copies of the mid-seventeenth century original play. He gave new names to the characters but his play staged faithfully the story as it is narrated in Cervantes. Faithfully, but without Don Quixote and Sancho who are not protagonists in Theobald’s adaptation. Was it the case in 1613? Did Moseley really own copies of the play performed at Whitehall? And if he did not lie, how did he “revise” and “adapt” the old play to the new theatrical conventions established during the Restoration? To answer such questions leads to an exercise in imaginative literary criticism contrasting, on the one hand, the freedom of textual experiments made possible by the absence of the Ur-text and, on other hand, the fixity of the authorial attribution.  RSVP: https://www.mcgill.ca/iplai/events/registration/