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Among the odd pairings you sometimes come across at the celebrity hangout Elaine's, perhaps the oddest this weekend was David Black, an Elaine's regular and a producer and writer for television dramas like "Law & Order," and Gary Taylor, an editor of the Oxford edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, who is also partial to black nail polish. The subject was a reading of Taylor's reworking of a play that he believes Shakespeare had a hand in writing and that features Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Needless to say, Black was excited. "Let's get a reading just so we know what it sounds like," he recalled saying a few weeks ago to Taylor, a professor at Florida State University, who has been working on the play, "The History of Cardenio," on and off for more than 15 years.
So the next day, 15 actors, including Sam Waterston, Whoopi Goldberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Blair Brown and James Naughton, sat around a table at the Greenwich Village house of Tom Fontana, the creator of the HBO prison drama "Oz," and read through the play. "I don't think anyone has really played this in 400 years," Dreyfuss said in a telephone interview before the reading. "Everyone has to get humble here."
This is not, strictly speaking, a lost Shakespeare play. It is accepted by many Shakespearean scholars that a play called "The History of Cardenio" was written in or around 1612 by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, a young, successful playwright with whom Shakespeare collaborated in his later years. The play was based on a rather Shakespearean episode involving disguises and thwarted lovers in "Don Quixote," published in English that same year. It was performed at court but not included in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. What happened to the original manuscript is unknown. Charles Hamilton, a handwriting expert, argued in the early 1990s that "The Second Maiden's Tragedy," a play generally attributed to Thomas Middleton, was actually "Cardenio." Scholars have generally dismissed that claim, though some theater companies have still advertised it as Shakespeare.
There are other contenders. As far back as 1727, Lewis Theobald, an accomplished editor of Shakespeare's works, announced that he had several manuscripts of "Cardenio," which he adapted into a play titled "Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers." Heavily reworked adaptations of older plays, like the remakes of movie classics continually coming out of Hollywood today, were not at all rare at the time.
The original manuscripts that Theobald claimed to have apparently were lost, and so the debate over "Double Falsehood" has raged ever since. Taylor, like many scholars, accepts Theobald's claim. He is trying to unravel the revisions in "Double Falsehood" to reveal the original "Cardenio." This means deleting passages that seem to be Theobald's and even writing passages that seem to have been cut, based on the way Shakespeare and Fletcher wrote; the original passages in the 1612 translation of "Don Quixote"; and what is known about Theobald's process of adaptation.
The result is not authentic, as Taylor writes in an unpublished essay about the play, "but it is at least, I hope, authentish."
Of course, among academics there is no absolute consensus on any of this.
Jonathan Bate, author of "The Genius of Shakespeare" and one of the scholars who has seen a draft of Taylor's play, declared in an interview that Taylor is "absolutely right that 'Double Falsehood' is 'Cardenio.'"
Brian Vickers, author of "Shakespeare, Co-Author" and a professor at the University of London, is more skeptical. "To me," he said, "the problem is that Theobald was so steeped in Shakespeare that he could well have written a pastiche, knowing the story of 'Cardenio.'"
Then there is the other matter of a scholar drawing on speculation and even gasp! imagination to reconstruct a lost play. In the 1986 Oxford edition of Shakespeare's complete works, Taylor made a controversial decision to include a version of "Pericles" that he reconstructed, albeit to much less an extent, from the corrupted manuscript that exists. Taylor and some of his defenders argue that as long as he is transparent about his changes, there is no harm in a project like this. "Shakespeare was a working actor who worked in the same theater company his whole life, and we need to take seriously his own commitment to the theatrical realization of his work," Taylor said.
Which is why he ended up sitting with Black at Elaine's. In September, Black, a fan of Taylor's books, contacted him, and was excited when Taylor pointed out that the modern television landscape was quite similar to the Elizabethan theater scene, with intense commercialism, a ferocious demand for material and a low reputation in the eyes of the contemporary culturati. After reading a draft of Taylor's "Cardenio," Black went to his Rolodex, called his friends and scheduled a reading. "It worked, and it was exciting and it was fun," Taylor said of the reading. What's next, he said, "depends upon who's interested, if anybody's interested."
And as for the collaboration between the two on some television project, that, too, is still in the works.
"If I can lure him away from academia, I'd be delighted," Black said.
"How can we merge the best of Elizabethan drama," he added, "with the best of cable or network TV?"
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
