So What Is the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?

S Synopsis

Conclusion:

So What Is the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?

Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous and Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood

Henriquez: “This forgery confounds me!”

Duke: “Read it, Roderick.”

Lewis Theobald, Double Falsehood, 5.2. 177 (Arden p. 295)[1]

Prithee, be gone, and bid the bell knoll for me.

I have had one foot in the grave some time.

Lewis Theobald, Double Falsehood, 3.3.68-69 (Arden, 249)[2]

What Shakespeare Didn’t Write, Or What Will Wills

Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011) is not the worst thing you can do to Shakespeare. Nor, for that matter, is Lewis Thebald’s Double Falsehood. Emmerich is best known for his disaster films—Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012—and Anonymous is not only a disaster film, it is a disaster as a film. It is confused and incoherent. We go back four years earlier, then forty years, then … where are ? Oh, OK . . . . I guess. Correctly spelled, the film’s title is actually Anonymess. Yet the film’s messiness has nothing to do with cinematic incompetence. The film had a huge budget. The messiness has to do with the title of the film, with what happens when you deal with authorship controversies as conspiracy thrillers and detective mysteries based on an anonymous writer. Anonymous is in many respects a failure when it comes to the authorship question. The fails to give any forensic evidence that Oxford wrote Shakespeare. It is not historically accurate. Marlowe is still alive when Hamlet is performed, for example. Moreover, the least plausible elements of the play, which make up most of it, have nothing to do with the authorship Oxford turns out to be the bastard son of Elizabeth, and they in turn have a bastard son, the Earl of Southampton. (Shakespeare murders Marlowe, by the way.)

A value judgment is even more difficult pass on Double Falsehood because no one any say what the play really is: an adaptation of a lost play by Shakespeare and Fletcher named The History of Cardenio aka Cardenio akaCardenna that was never performed? A forgery by Lewis Theobald? A multi-authored palimpsest of a lost manuscript, a revised Restoration version (for which there is no evidence), and Theobald’s edition as the Arden editor believes? According to Hammon, Double Falsehood is not a forgery, but a composite text: “Freehafter postulates that between the original and Theobald’s version was an intermediate version prepared in the Restoration. With Theobald’s own further alterations, what we now have is a palimpsest or pentimento—nothing that is straightforwardly Shakespeare-Fletcher.” Of course, Hammon’s metaphor of the palimpsest has no textual referent. And were Hammon to follow out the logic of his metaphor, he would arrive at the conclusion that the text he has edited is indecipherable and unreadable,in the ordinary sense of the word.

While we freely concede thatAnonymous is a really badly made film and while we aver that the Arden third series edition of Double Falsehood may have inadvertently rendered the play unreadable, we think boththe film and the edition attention because of the way it shows how bibliographical codes of authorship attribution, codes that inform the Shakespeare authorship controversy,are based on shared genres of murder mysteries, forgeries, conspiracy thrillers, ghostwriting, and detective fiction. These codes and the legal model of textual forensicsand character criticism to which they are attached continue to operate in Shakespeare editions of Shakespeare and early modern dramatists, the Oxford Middleton edition being the most noteworthy. Anonymous as and Hammon’s Double Falsehood are for us about what happens when these codes cease to operate: anonymity as a default for authorship turns character into an author who can’t sign and Hammon’s Double Falsehood (the consensus view about it not being a forgery Hammon claims to represent as an edition, turnscharacter into “characteristic” criticism about what happens when the title of a lost play replaces the author, we return to our earlier discussion of textual faux-rensics in order to show that the normal routine of resorting authors and texts (Middleton wrote The Revenger’s Tragedy, not Cyril Tourneur) concerned with so-called documentary evidence are enabled by a structure of pre-sorting, (everything is already fact, including what is obviously inaccurate historically, within the diegesis of the film or of the editor).

We bring Anonymous and the Arden edition of Double Falsehood to bear on Oxfordian / Stratfordian authorship debate, particularly on attempts like James Shapiro to stop proposing that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays. To show that Oxfordians are delusional (and they are delusional, of course) as Stratfordians wish to do is to miss the ways in which the Shakespeare canon is no longer determined, if it ever was, by the kinds of forensic evidence of authorship to which Stratfordians cling as fast as do Oxfordians.

Instead of integrationists versus disintegrationists (1930s) who argue over which single author wrote what text or what part of which text, conjencutral emdners versus uneditors, we now have reconstructionists versus attributionists, and attributionists include both Oxfordians and Shakespeareans (and Baconias, Marlovians, and so on). There is nothing polemical about reconstructionists, however, as there was about conjectural emendation as restration, rescue form corruption or disintegrationism.[3] Whereas Oxfordians and Stratfordians want to determine who wrote Shakespeare, both Anonymous and the Arden Double Falsehoodare concerned with what an author did not write. What is most evident is what is most radically missing: the signature in Anonymous and the play Cardenio in Double Falsehood. Whereas anti-Stratfordians have always proposed there have a single author of Shakespeare’s plays (Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford, and so on), Hammon more ecumenically allows that all authors who have ever been said to have had a hand in Cardenio may be included.[4] Only Shakespeare’s “presence” (160) in Double Falsehoodmatters, detectable through “characteristic”that effectively make the play Eucharistic. Shakespeare’s body and blood are in there somewhere. The conjectural emendation of editing practice adopted by Theobald and restricted to local cruxes has now morphed and expanded into what Hammon calls “conjectural reconstructions of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio (2010, 48).[5] By positing a lost Cardenio, Hammon and his allies permit themselves to do what they want, namely, nothing at all to Shakespeare. By disappearing Shakespeare and replacing his name a reconstruction of a lost play, be it Cardenio or Double Falsehood, Shakespeareans have managed to create something like an Oxford wrote Shakespeare cottage industry of their own, the difference being that Oxfordians still remain focused on who wrote the plays while Roland Emmerich, Hammon and others who think Double Falsehood contains a ghost of Cardenio are concerned by what Shakespeare didn’t write.

See the Anonymous DVD at the bottom right page for Doran's Cardenio book and Shapiro’s Contested Will.

From Folio to Olio: The Missing Cipher

Like Anonymous, the ArdenDouble Falsehood does not operate through the biobibliographical codes through which authors and titles of texts are connected. Or to put it both more paradoxically and more accurately, both the Emmerich film and Cardenios operates by departing from them. Brean Hammon, the editor of the Arden Third Series Double Falsehood (2010), and Roger Chartier in his book on Cardenio, both mention a number of novels, murder mystery and science-fiction thrillers that concern Cardenio: Jaspser Fforde, Lost in a Good Book (2002), sci-fi, 131; J. L. Carrell, The Shakespeare Secret (2007), 133; Jean Rae Baxter, Looking for Cardenio (2008); David Nokes, The Nightingale Papers (2005), 132;

To be sure, these works get little more than a mention and a plot summary as they are relevant to Cardenio. Hammon stops his increasingly wild speculations by drawing a line between his edition of Double Falsehood and genre fiction about Cardenio: “It is time to time to stop, or I will be in the terrain of The Shakespeare Secret (2007), J.I. Carrell’s murder mystery thriller-of which more later.” (2010, 8). And neither Gregory Doran’s book Shakespeare's Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio and Gary Taylor and David Between Cervantes and Shakespeare are the most recent additions include any work on the mass-market fiction and literature concerned with Cardenio. Nevertheless, the purpose of the Arden edition and current scholarship is not to recover Shakespeare’s original by purging Double Falsehood of alterations made by Theobald (assuming the text is not a forgery) and but to constitute “Cardenio” as a crypt, a sort of coffin that is housed in different texts.

Consider the Arden Double Falsehood for a moment.

By giving ground on questions of evidence, Anonymous and reconstructions and editions of Cardenio can engage in groundless, playful speculation. But to be legitimate, scholarly (Stratfordian) speculations about Cardenio require a kind of double book keeping: some kinds of play are legitimate and others aren’t, and the distinction between them is based on the non-existence of the referent, the lost play or the lost manuscript.

Like anonymity in Anonymous, the “lost play” aka Cardenio aka Double Falsehood serves in work as a sort of open coffin to which may be added more treasure. Critics are feel to reconstruct it, revise it, as they now believe Theobald probably / no doubt did.

THE HISTORY OF CARDENIO

By

William Shakespeare and John Fletcher

Adapted for the eighteenth century stage as

DOUBLEFALSEHOOD

OR

THE DISTRESSED LOVERS

By

Lewis Theobald

For Hammon, the point is not to decide on authentic or what is forged or to sort out who did wrote what, as is the case in editions of Pericles, for example, but to create a template that graphically connects title and authors that just as graphically divides them the adapter (and editor). In addition to the Arden edition of Cardenio, Gary Taylor’s reconstruction, Greenblatt and Mee’s Cardenio project, and other reconstructions repeating what Theobald did on the title page of his edition: attribute an author to the original play and then name yourself as adapter. There is no graphic unconscious, only a graphic conscious for editors and reconstructors alike.

This biobiliographically normalized template then licenses speculation that necessarily borders not only on fiction involving Cardenio but crosses over into on the kind of Oxfordian speculations about authorship presented as givens of Anonymous, givens rather than facts presented as proof. Whereas Theobald claimed he had published a “newly discovered” play by Shakespeare, the Arden editor and others who share his view inadvertently advertise their reconstructions of a newly lost (again) play and fabricate plays they suppose existed.

Not Doing Anything to Shakespeare

Part of the looniness of the Arden Double Falsehood is that the editor forges a consensus that is really nothing more than an alliance. Scholars who propose different sources are discounted and scholars who continue to argue that DF is a forgery are not even given minority report status. But that is mere rhetorical loneness that is symptomatic of the way that editor cannot propose that the edition is speculative and that his characteristic based conjectural reconstruction / editing is an experiment. The really looney thing is that the Shakespeare canon is turned into a totally stable given to which nothing may be added. DoubleFalsehood is treated as being entirely external to it been though it supposedly contains a later of play at least partly written by Shakespeare. Hammon samples the canon as a database (and he turns the already “attributed” collected works in the same thing) to which DF can then be compared and contrasted. It never occurs to Hammon that if Shakespeare wrote Cardenio, he could have, probably would have added to the database he uses as his Shakespearebase. So the algorithms and other math done by “expert analysts” are based on an entirely bogus notions of canonical fixity and literary production. They do not add up. Or they add up to zero, which is presumably what Hammon and his editors want: null.

How would one read the missing supposedly “intermediate version”? Hammon twice concedes that he does not have what he regards as decisive evidence that Double Falsehood is not a forgery, namely, a manuscript. “Finding a manuscript of the lost Cardenio would be the only way of proving beyond all doubt that Theobald did not forget it. I cannot claim to have achieved that, but I hope that this edition reinforces the accumulating consensus that the lost play has a continuing presence in its eighteenth-century great-grandchild. . . . Only discovery of Theobald’s manuscripts or reliable external evidence that they existed can clear his name altogether of the stigma of forgery. I cannot claim to have found the manuscripts, but to the documentary story it is possible to add a widow’s mite.” 8; 122. Just as manuscripts twice fail Hammon, so too does the documentary, or external evidence that would separate what Hammon calls the “original” play from Theobald’s forgery / alteration. Hammon regularly refers to “Cardenio / Double Falsehood”, and even this conflated / confused title disappears as Hammon frequently drops Cardenio in favor of “the lost play.” The play (of whatever title is an “enigma,” a “conundrum.”

The “vestigial element” (putative) amounts to a missing prequel some scholars feel thereis a need for. (Their felt need is on the order of a scene in Macbeth with Lady Macbeth nursing her baby.)

Curiously all of the Hammon adds to establish resemblances between Double Falsehood and Shakespeare have nothing to do with Cardenio, of course, but to other plays. He points to similarities between plays, in terms of plot, like Two Noble Kinsmen and Two Gentlemen of Verona, or to plays like Cymbeline and Hamlet. But he does not consider that Two Noble Kinsmen, based on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, recycles A Midsummer Night’s Dream and that it has a framing prologue making reference to Chaucer: “Chaucer (of all admir'd) the Story gives, “ (15). So why not assume that like Ancient Gower in Pericles, Cardenio had a framing prologue as well with Cervantes presenting it?

Only four lines are thought to be “unadulterated Shakespeare” see note 53-56, p. 209 of Arden and intro “Quoted in Carrell, Secret, 185. In those a contemporary thriller writer hears genuine Shakespeare, and I am no the one to gainsay it.” 134

We can focus on this novel since it is so central to Hammon in his introduction. We can also justify attention ot these works because they are placed ona continuum with Greenblatt and Mee , Talyor, etc in the Arden intro (same section) and by Chartier. Mentioed summarized, invoked, but not read. The novel triangulates our trianglualtion of Anonymous , Cardenio, and Oxfordianism (except it is Bacoonianism in Carrell’s case).

Entre Cervantes y Shakespeare : sendas del Renacimiento = Between Shakespeare and Cervantes : Trails Along the Renaissance

eds. Zenón Luis-Martínez, Luis Gómez Canseco.

Author: Entre Cervantes y Shakespeare: Sendas del Renacimiento (2004: Huelva, Spain) Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006.

Robin Chapman, Shakespeare's Don Quixote: A Novel in DialogueBook Now Publishing, 2011

Interesting that the title is creates yet another aka for Cardenio and actually misattributes authorship since only Cervantes can rightly be linked with a possessive to Don Quixote. The conjunction of Shakespeare and Don Quixote, both part of a title separated from the author (like film director Baz Luhman is from William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet) is obviously meant to be thought-provoking.

SHAKESPEARE'S DON QUIXOTE recreates what might have been: a lost play presented at Whitehall Palace in 1613. That year Shakespeare's company provided 14 plays for a royal wedding. One was called Cardenio. The original script has never been found but an 18th century version, retitled Double Falsehood, may contain echoes of their work together. Cardenio's story occurs in Don Quixote, Cervantes's universal best-seller, wherein the vexed teenager protagonist encounters the would-be knight errant and his sceptical squire. If Shakespeare's attention was drawn to the story's dramatic potential it seems likely it would have featured Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, since by that time Cervantes's double act was appearing on stage and in carnivals worldwide. Acting upon this hypothesis Robin Chapman's novel plays out today in a theatre of the mind. Among the audience the reader will find the attentive spirits of Shakespeare, Fletcher and Cervantes who soon become involved with each other and in the performance.

Frazier, Harriet C. 2009. A babble of ancestral voices: Shakespeare, Cervantes and Theobald, Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland & Co.,

Roger Chartier, Cardenio Between Cervantes and Shakespeare: The Story of a Lost Play

(Polity Press, 2012)

The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play

David Carnegie (Editor), Gary Taylor (Editor)

Oxford UP, Sept / November 2012

Shakespeare's Don Quixote: A Novel in Dialogue [Paperback]

Robin Chapman(Author)

Double Falsehood Fever (see n53 on “fever” in Arden, p. 214AND THE FOLLOWING SCENE CONTAINS TWO LINES THT OTHERS THIKN ARE THE FORGER’S SIGNATURE. N8-17, p. 212 Arden

HAMMON (AND OTHERS) THNK THAT FORGERY HAD TO BEGIN WITH THOBALD,THAT IF HE FORGED IT HE HAD no mANUSCRIPTS AND THAT IF HE ADAPATED IT THE MANUSCRIPTS WERE GENUINEE. BUT OF COURSE THEOBALD COULD HAVE BOUGHT FORGED MANUSCRIPTS.

Editing by free association in Arden, n20 p. 219

Don Quixote itself has a frame narrative—it’s a found text framed as a translation from Arabic, an archive (literally).

A la Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quioxote, we have Lewis Theobald, not author of Cardenio.

Erdman, David V., and Ephim G. Fogel, eds. Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1966.

[on this, the last page ofthe introduction, Hammon does a sort of reverse Oxfordian argument—instead of trying to limit authorship to one writer, Hammon allows all of the authors he mentioned on p. 1 to be possible co-authors]

“there is no reason, though, why [Cardenio being by Beaumont and Fletcher] should rule Shakespeare out. As we have seen, Gildon reports the play as the work of all tree authors. Neither, perhaps, is there a clear case of testing Beaumont’s authorship that that, say, of Massinger. 160