Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Illustration Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reading a Text That Does Not Exist
1: Cardenio at Court: London, 1613
Spain in England
Don Quixote in translation
Why Cardenio?
Dorotea's story
Happy ending
2: Cardenio and Don Quixote: Spain, 1605–1608
Don Quixote as he is depicted in his book
Double marriages
Don Quixote ‘gracioso de comedia’
The madman, the poet and the prince
Seeming and being: an exchange of sons
3: A French Cardenio: Paris, 1628 and 1638
Don Quixote in France
Luscinde's marriage
The mad fits of Cardenio
The mad fits of Don Quixote
Guérin de Bouscal: the queen of Micomicon
The bearded dueña and the wooden horse
The novel, the novellas and the theatre
4: Cardenio in the Revolution: London, 1653
Writing in collaboration: Fletcher and Shakespeare
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
The Two Noble Kinsmen
A play never published
Don Quixote in the revolution
From Shelton to Gayton: Cardenio in verse
5: Cardenio Rediscovered: London, 1727
The miracle of the Theatre Royal
Publishing and politics
Theobald, editor and author
Preliminaries, dedication and privilege
Theatrical enthusiasm: an authentically Shakespearean play
Editorial prudence: a play excluded from the canon
6: Cardenio as Represented: England, 1660–1727
Images and words: the illustrated Spanish text
The engravings of translations
Don Quixote without Cardenio: the booklets sold by peddlers
Cardenio abridged
Don Quixote in serial form
Cardenio in the theatre: first D’Urfey, then Theobald
7: Cardenio on Stage: London, 1727
The double betrayal
The interrupted marriage
Ruses and a denouement
1727, 1660, 1613
Double Falshood: a mystification or an adaptation?
Epilogue: Cardenio Fever
The manuscript recovered
How should a lost play be staged?
Cardenio published
The discrepancies between different periods
Postscript: The Permanence of Works and the Plurality of Texts
Index
First published in French as Cardenio entre Cervantes et Shakespeare © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2011
This English edition © Polity Press, 2013
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6184-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6185-8 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8332-4 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8331-7 (mobi)
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Illustration Acknowledgements
Figures 1–9: Madrid, Banco de imágenes del Quijote (www.qbi2005.com).
Figure 10: Courtesy of the E. Urbina Cervantes Collection at the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M University.
Figures 11–13: Texas A&M University, Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (www.csdl.tamu.edu).
Figures 14–16: Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com).
Introduction: Reading a Text That Does Not Exist
The theme of a manuscript discovered by chance, the writer of which is only a copyist or editor, has long haunted the imagination of authors and readers alike. Such was the fate of a story translated from Arabic about which the present book will have much to say. The story is that of Don Quixote of La Mancha, ‘written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian’. As is well known, the original author, the one who does not wish to remember the name of the village where the hidalgo lived, abruptly breaks off his account in chapter VIII of the book, at the point where the fight between Don Quixote and the Biscayan is about to begin. He does so on account of the dearth of documentation relating to the outcome of the battle and the later adventures of the knight errant. Frustrated in his reading and convinced that some sage has written of the further prowess of this knight, the ‘second author’, as the text puts it, sets out in quest of the end of the story. This he discovers in Toledo, in a manuscript written in Arabic, which he has translated by a ‘morisco aljamiado’, a converted Muslim who knows the Castilian language.1 The account by the Arab historian can now be set out, embedded in the added commentaries of this ‘second author’, the first person to read the story translated into Spanish.
In the course of this narrative, the presence of books within the book blurs the frontiers between works that truly exist and others that are solely the fruit of Cervantes' imagination. Such is the case in the inn run by Juan Palomeque, when the latter goes off to fetch from his room a little trunk forgotten there by some traveller. This contains two chivalric novels (Don Ciriglio de Tracia and Felixmarte de Hircania), one historical chronicle (Historia del gran Capitán Gonzalo Hernández de Córdoba) and ‘some papers written in a very fine hand’, which are the eight ‘pliegos’ or gatherings of the Novella of the Curious Impertinent. The curate later reads this aloud to his travelling companions (apart from Don Quixote, who is asleep), and we shall encounter it again in the course of the present enquiry.2 Cervantes introduces multiple figures in the guise of authors (the ‘I’ who narrates the first eight chapters, the ‘I’ of the second author, who appears in chapter IX, the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengali, the anonymous author of the Novella of the Curious Impertinent and others too. Likewise, in his own book he invents other forgotten or lost texts that are rediscovered by chance. He thus mobilizes, with particular force, a literary ploy of which he is certainly not the inventor3 but which he invests with dizzying power.
Certain contemporary writers have borne this in mind and have, in their turn, mobilized certain procedures that can bring into existence books that are purely imaginary. Roberto Bolaño has put together a whole alarming library of such books in his Nazi Literature in the Americas.4 In it, this Chilean writer cites, summarizes and comments on 210 titles, arranged in alphabetical order in his ‘Epilogue for monsters’. They range from A, a book by Zach Sodenstern, published in Los Angeles in 2013, to Juan Mendiluce's Youthful Ardor, published in Buenos Aires in 1968.5 Roberto Bolaño proposes a series of short biographies of the authors of the books listed in the ‘Epilogue’. Let us take two examples. The biography of Silvio Salvático, born in Buenos Aires in 1901, who died in that city in 1994, and who was the author of Sad Eyes published in 1929, is accompanied by the biographies of three other authors, all – fortunately – just as imaginary, under the heading ‘Forerunners and Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment’. The passage starts as follows:
As a young man Salvático advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastic for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the skin color, darkened by years of promiscuity with the indigenous population; life-long writer's grants; the abolition of tax on artists' incomes; the creation of the largest air force in South America; the colonization of Antarctica; and the building of new cities in Patagonia. He was a soccer player and a Futurist.6
Zach Sodenstern (Los Angeles, 1962–2012), the author of A, for his part, belonged to the family of ‘science-fiction’ writers and was the successful author of the sagas of Gunther O’Connor and the Fourth Reich, in which the hero is Flip, ‘a mutant, stray German Shepherd [Alsatian dog] with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies’. His novel The Simbas is a ‘surreptitious manifesto directed against African Americans, Jews and Hispanics that gave rise to diverse and contradictory interpretations’.7 Roberto Bolaño has, on behalf of his readers, himself read these terrifying works which have existed only in his nightmares but the shadows of which have haunted the dictatorships of America and now threaten the future.
Another way of bringing into existence works that were never written is to imagine how very real authors might have composed them. This is what Ricardo Piglia did when he sketched in how Hemingway and Kafka would have told the story of Cries and Whispers, the origin of which is recalled by Bergman: ‘First I saw three women dressed in white, in a room in the clear light of dawn. They were very mysterious, moving about and whispering into one another's ears, and I could not hear what they were saying. The scene haunted me for a whole year. In the end I realized that the three women were waiting for the death of a fourth, who was in the other room. They were taking it in turns to watch over her.’ As this Argentinian author saw it, Hemingway would have ‘recounted an ordinary conversation between the three women, without even mentioning that they had assembled to watch over one of their sisters, who was dying.’ Kafka, on the contrary, ‘would have told the story from the point of view of the woman who was dying and who could not bear hearing the deafening murmurs of her sisters who were whispering and talking about her in the next room.’8 This is how texts are suggested that might have existed and whose continuation a reader might imagine for himself.
In the same essay, Ricardo Piglia repeats the experiment by imagining how Kafka and Borges would have written the story about Zhuang Zi told by Italo Calvino. It concerns a painter whose king asks him to draw a crab.9 Zhuang Zi asks for five years' grace, then for another five years, before picking up his paintbrush and, in a single gesture, drawing the most perfect crab ever seen. If Kafka had written the story, only on his deathbed would the painter have handed to the king a drawing that he had made many years ago, perfect in the eyes of everyone else but not in his. As for Borges, he would have turned the crab into a butterfly and would have written ‘Zhuang Zi dreamed that he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly and, when he awoke, did not know whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly that was now dreaming of being a man.’ Piglia then sketches in the plot of Borges' tale: ‘Borges would have two stories and would now proceed to write an account of his own’10 – an account that would attribute to Calvino's painter a similar dream, which Tchouang Tseu (another orthography for the philosopher also known as Master Zhuang) recounts in the Zhuangzi, one of the founding texts of Daoism.11
Borges, admired by both Bolaño and Piglia, decided to take action and resolved to write these texts that do not exist and that are attributed either to real enough writers who might well have written them or to authors just as imaginary as their works. This is how he proceeds in the ‘Et cetera’ part of his A Universal History of Infamy, which gathers together texts supposed to have been written by Swedenborg, extracts from the One Thousand and One Nights and from Richard Burton's The Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa, published in 1860, and, in the case of the famous text reprinted in The Author, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, which refers to a ‘map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the Empire’, along with an invented work by Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes (Travels of Praiseworthy Men), purportedly published in Lerida in 1658.12 In the Author's Museum, which collects together six texts, the supposed Suárez Miranda shares the paternity of those imitated or invented works with a Uruguayan poet, Juan Platero Haedo, the presumed author of the poem entitled ‘Limits’, Almotasim el-Mahgrebi, an Arab poet of the twelfth century, supposed to have composed the ‘Quatrain’ published in the appendix, Gaspar Camerarius, the author of a distich entitled ‘The regret of Heraclitus’, and H. Gering, a German scholar in one of whose works Borges is supposed to have found the poem addressed to Magnus Barford by the Irish King Muirchertach.13 False authors and false titles bring to life works or fragments of works the existence of which is troubling to the reader, since, while they are attributed to writers real or fictitious, they are also texts by an author who obliterates the frontiers between authentic citations, pastiches and original creations.
The force of words can sometimes confer the force of a reality upon these fictitious books. In his Autobiographical Essay, Borges indicates that such was indeed the fate of The Approach to Al-mu'tasim, a novel purportedly published in Bombay and written by an Indian lawyer, Mir Bahadur Ali, on which he wrote a commentary that was published in The History of Eternity in 1935.14 In describing it as ‘at once a hoax and a pseudo-essay’, Borges conferred upon this imaginary tale the weight of reality: ‘Those who read “The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim” took it at face value, and one of my friends even ordered a copy from London.’15 This ‘friend’ convinced of the existence of the book was, as Borges himself stated, Bioy Casares.16 According to the preface to the collection entitled The Garden of Forking Paths, published in Spanish in 1941, writing notes on imaginary books is the surest way to avoid ‘a laborious and impoverishing extravagance’ that inspires one to compose vast books, ‘to go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes’.17 The proliferation of imaginary texts thus serves to rarefy useless and invasive writings.
Inventing texts that never existed but that could have been written is balanced by the opposite: the painful and powerful realization of the irremediable loss of works that have disappeared forever. Despite all the Byzantine rescues, Arabic translations and medieval copies that have passed down to us what has become the canonical corpus of Greek and Roman literature, antiquity constitutes a huge continent of lost texts. Luciano Canfora has established the laws that have ruled ‘the process of back-to-front selection’ which has cast into oblivion texts that we know of only because other texts mention them. The most extensive disappearances are characteristic of certain particular genres (for example, historiography, in which the ratio of preserved to lost texts may be as great as one to forty), the texts that are the most ancient, and fully integral works, for these are more vulnerable than abridged versions. The very attempt to safeguard texts may itself have contributed to losses, as is attested by the absence of certain preserved works, in particular historical ones and a certain number of ‘books’ (usually five) that corresponded to the same number of scrolls and that were all gathered together in the same codex of which no copy has survived. The extent of these losses, which must be even more numerous if we take into account texts that have vanished without trace, has prompted Luciano Canfora to remark gloomily, ‘The disappearance of such a great quantity of books, despite their wide diffusion within this immense geographical space [that of the Greek world and the Roman empire,] is an almost unique phenomenon in human civilization.’18
‘Almost unique’ – for Luciano Canfora reminds us that the tormented history of public libraries in the ancient world may not be the only cause of the disappearance of such an immense textual patrimony.19 Another cause has been the deliberate destructions that recur throughout the course of history, as is shown by the example, both historical and legendary, of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang Di who, in 213 bce, ordered the burning of all the books that recorded the history of the millennia previous to his own reign. This was also the emperor who had the Great Wall of China constructed. The excessive nature of both these undertakings attracted the attention of Borges, who remarks, ‘Burning books and erecting fortifications was the usual preoccupation of princes. Shih Huang Ti was unusual only in the scale on which he worked.’20 China, seen as that ‘great reservoir of utopias’ by the Western world,21 thus seems to present a twofold paradox: ‘Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled his empire because he knew it was fragile, and destroyed the books because he knew that they were sacred books (another name for books that teach what the whole universe and each man's conscience teaches).’22 So the loss of the books is not so dramatic after all if, as the ancient metaphors put it,23 the book of Nature or that of one's conscience teaches the very same truths as all those written words.
All the same, historians and philologists find it hard to resign themselves to knowing nothing, saying nothing, imagining nothing with regard to works of which they know only the titles and, in some cases, the names of their authors. For certain genres and in certain times, the situation is not so very different from that of the ancient world. That may be the case for the most popular of works (little books produced by the ‘Bibliothèque bleue’, English ‘chapbooks’, Spanish ‘pliegos de cordel’), ephemeral publications and school textbooks of which only a few copies remain, if any at all.24 The same applies to the English theatre of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With respect to the years 1576 to 1642, a comparison between the number of known titles as recorded in the Annals of English Drama, edited by Alfred Harbage, and that of existing texts, either in manuscript or printed, indicates that there is no textual trace of 60 per cent of the plays mentioned.25
And that is the case of the text whose mystery the present book will try to resolve. It was performed at the English court in the winter of 1612–13. Its title seems to have been Cardenio.26
Notes
1 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico, Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes/Critica, 1998, I, ix, pp. 107–8: ‘Estando un día en la Alcaná de Toledo, llegó un muchacho a vender unos cartapacios y papeles viejos a un sedero; y como yo soy aficionado a leer aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles, llevado desta mi natural inclinación tomé un cartapacio de los que el muchacho vendía y vile con carácteres que conocí ser arábigos. Y puesto que aunque los conocía no los sabía leer, anduve mirando si parecía por allí algun morisco aljamiado que los leyese, y no fue muy dificultuoso hallar intérprete semejante.’ English translation: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman, New York: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 67: ‘One day when I was in the Alcaná in Toledo, a boy came by to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant; as I am very fond of reading, even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural inclinations to pick up one of the volumes the boy was selling, and I saw it was written in characters I knew to be Arabic. And since I recognized but could not read it, I looked around to see if some Morisco who knew Castilian, was in the vicinity, and it was not very difficult to find this kind of interpreter.’
2 Ibid., I, xxxii, p. 268: ‘He entered his room and brought out an old travelling case, locked with a small chain, and when it was opened, the priest found three large books and some papers written in a very fine hand.’ Spanish text: Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, pp. 370–1: ‘Y entrando en su aposento, sacó dél una maletilla vieja, cerrada con una cadenilla, y abriéndola, halló en ella tres libros grandes y unos papeles de muy buena letra, escritos de mano.’
3 As Judith Schlanger writes, in Présence des oeuvres perdues, Paris: Hermann, 2010, ‘There is nothing more hackneyed than a scenario that consists in presenting a fictional work as an anachronistic revelation. There is nothing more common than the author who claims to be the editor of his text.’
4 Roberto Bolaño, La literatura nazi en América, Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1996. English translation, trans. Chris Andrews: Nazi Literature in the Americas, New York: New Directions, 2008.
5 Ibid., pp. 220–7. In the original Spanish, the list of titles in the ‘Epilogo para monstruos’ begins with A and ends with La voz por ti marchita, the first anthology of poetry by the Mexican Irma Carrasco (Puebla, Mexico, 1910 – Mexico Federal District, 1966), known as ‘Guadalupe o el ángel de las trincheras’ (‘Guadalupe, the angel of the trenches’), by Falangist fighters in the Spanish Civil War.
6 Ibid., p. 47. Spanish text, La literatura nazi en América, p. 55: ‘Entre sus propuestas juveniles se cuenta la reinstauración de la Inquisición, los castigos corporales públicos, la guerra permanente ya sea contro los chilenos o contra los paraguayos o bolivianos como una forma de gimnasia nacional, la poligamia masculina, el exterminio de los indios para evitar una mayor contaminación de la raza argentina, el recorte de los derechos de los ciudadanos de origen judío, la emigración masiva procedente de los países escandinavos para aclarar progresivamente la epidermis nacional oscurecida después de años de promiscuidad hispano-indígena, la concesión de becas literarias a perpetuidad, la exención impositiva a los artistas, la colonización de la Antártica, la edificación de nuevas ciudades en la Paragonia. Fue jugador de fútbol y futurista.’
7 Nazi Literature in the Americas, pp. 105 and 106; Spanish text, La literatura nazi en América, p. 113: ‘un pastor alemán mutante y vagabundo, con poderes telepáticos y tendencias nazis’, and p. 114: ‘Los Simbas es un manifiesto soterrado contra negros, judíos y hispanos que sufrió lecturas diversas y contradictorias.’
8 Ricardo Piglia, Formas breves, Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000, ‘Nueva tesis obre el cuento’, pp. 113–37, citations pp. 126–7: ‘Primero vi cuatro mujeres vestidas de blanco, bajo la luz clara del alba, en una habitación. Se mueven y se hablan al oído y son extremadamente misteriosas y yo no puedo entender lo que dicen. La escena me persigue durante un año entero. Por fin comprendo que las tres mujeres esperan que se muera una cuarta que está en otro cuarto. Se turnan para velarla’ … ‘Hemingway por ejemplo contaría una conversación trivial entre las tres mujeres sin decir nunca que se han reunido para velar a una hermana que muere’ … ‘Kafka en cambio contaría la historia desde la mujer que agoniza y que ya no puede soportar el murmullo ensordecedor de las hermanas que cuchichean y hablan de ella en el cuarto vecino’ (English translation by Janet Lloyd).
9 Italo Calvino, Lezioni americane: sei proposte per il prossimo millenio, [1988], Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 2000, ‘2. Rapidità’, pp. 36–62. (The story is told on p. 62: ‘Allo scadere dei dieci anni, Chuang-Tsu prese il pennello e in un instante, con un solo gesto, disegnò un granchio, il più perfetto granchio che si fosse mai visto.’ Original English: Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creach, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 54: ‘At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.’
10 Piglia, Formas breves, pp. 135–6: ‘Chuang Tzu soñó que era una mariposa y no sabía al despertar si era un hombre que había soñado que era una mariposa o una mariposa que ahora soñaba ser un hombre. Borges tendría dos historias y podría entonces empezar a escribir un relato’ (English translation by Janet Lloyd).
11 Zhuangzi, The Butterfly's Dream, trans. Janet Lloyd: ‘Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting about, happy with his lot, not knowing that he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he awoke and noticed he was Zhuangzi. He no longer knew whether he was Zhuangzi who had just dreamed that he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly that had just dreamed that he was Zhuangzi. The difference between Zhuangzi and a butterfly is called the transformation of beings.’
12 Borges, Historia universal de la infamia [1935], Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995, pp. 105–32. English translation: A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972, pp. 99–141.
13 Borges, El Hacedor [1960], Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997, pp. 117–25. English translation: Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964, p. 92.
14 Borges, Autobiographical Essay, in The Aleph and other Stories, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, London: Jonathan Cape, 1971, p. 151.
15 Ibid., p. 152.
16 Borges, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Pierre Bernès, Paris: Gallimard, 1993, Vol. I, p. 1537, n. 1.
17 Borges, Ficciones [1944], Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997, citation on pp. 11–12: ‘Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros: el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos’, Prologue to El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941). English translation: Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962, p. 15.
18 Luciano Canfora, ‘Les bibliothèques anciennes et l’histoire des textes’, in Le pouvoir des bibliothèques: la mémoire des livres en Occident, ed. Marc Baratin and Christian Jacob, Paris: Albin Michel, 1996, pp. 261–72 (citation, p. 267).
19 On the very unequal survival of copies of printed editions, see Jean-François Gilmont, ‘Livre, bibliographie et statistiques: à propos d’une étude récente’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 65/3–4 (1970), pp. 797–816, who analyses the presence in 240 libraries of copies of the eighteen editions of the Martyrologe by Jean Crespin published between 1554 and 1619. (This article is reprinted, along with other studies, in Gilmoint, Le livre et ses secrets, Geneva: Droz; Louvain-la-Neuve: Catholic University of Louvain, 2003, chapter 5: ‘Mesurer la survie du livre’, pp. 279–338.) For an overall perspective, Arnold Esch, ‘Chance et hasard de transmission: le problème de la représentativité et de la déformation de la transmission historique’, in Les tendances actuelles de l’histoire du Moyen Age en France et en Allemagne, ed. Jean-Claude Schmitt and Otto Gerhard Oexle, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002, pp. 15–29.
20 Borges, Spanish text, ‘La muralla y los libros’, in Borges, Otras inquisiciones [1952], Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997, pp. 9–13 (citation p. 10: ‘Quemar libros y erigir fortificaciones es tarea común de los príncipes; lo único singular en Shih Huang Ti fue la escala en que obró’). English translation: Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964, p. 3.
21 Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaine, Paris: Gallimard, 1966, pp. 7–11; English translation, The Order of Things, London: Tavistock, 1970, p. xv. The text on which he comments is the one in which Borges cites a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge; cf. Borges, Otros inquisiciones, ‘El idioma analitico de John Wilkins’, pp. 154–61; English translation: ‘The analytical language of John Wilkins’, in Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, pp. 101–5.
22 Borges, ‘La muralla y los libros’, pp. 12–13: ‘Acaso Shih Huang Ti amuralló el imperio porque sabía que éste era deleznable y destruyó los libros por entender que eran libros sagrados, o sea libros que enseñan lo que enseña el universo entero o la conciencia de cada hombre’. English translation: Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, p. 5.
23 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Age [1947], trans. Willard R. Trask, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953, chapter 16: ‘The book as symbol’, pp. 302–47.
24 Peter Stallybrass, ‘ “Little jobs”: broadsides and the printing revolution’, in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist and Eleanor F. Shevlin, Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007, pp. 315–41, who writes on p. 322: ‘Reprints and job printing had to support the deluxe volumes. But the deluxe volumes, surviving in substantial numbers, dominate accounts of the history of printing, while the great majority of broadsides, almanacs, pamphlets, and schoolbooks have disappeared completely.’
25 Douglas A. Brooks, From the Playhouse to the Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 172: ‘Of the some 1,200 listed there [i.e. in The Annals of English Drama], only forty percent – 469 complete plays in 961 complete editions – are extant, and nearly ten percent of these extant plays survive only in manuscript.’ For the inventory of known titles, see The Annals of English Drama, ed. Alfred Harbage, Samuel Schoenbaum and Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim, 3rd edn, London: Routledge, 1989.
26 I am using italics for the play (or for its plot) Don Quixote de la Mancha and Roman characters for the figure of Don Quixote.
1
Cardenio at Court: London, 1613
Our story starts with an accounts register that refers to payments made by the Treasurer of the Chamber of the King of England. It is dated 20 May 1613 and mentions the payment of £93.6s.8d. to John Heminges, one of the actors and shareholders of the troupe the King's Men, officially known as Grooms of the Chamber, for the performances of fourteen plays presented in the course of the past weeks and months in the presence of ‘the Princes Highnes the Lady Elizabeth [daughter of James I/VI] and the Prince Palatyne Elector [Frederick V, Elector Palatine]’. It lists ‘Filaster, The Knott of Fooles, Much Adoe abowte Nothing, The Mayeds Tragedy, The Merry Dyvell of Edmonton, The Tempest, A Kinge and no Kinge, The Twins Tragedie, The Winters Tale, Sir John Falstaffe, The Moore of Venice, The Nobleman, Caesars Tragedye, Love lyes a bleedinge’. There is no mention of the authors of these fourteen plays (actually thirteen, since Love Lies a Bleeding is another title for Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster). Six of them, however, are easily attributable by a modern reader, for they are mentioned in 1623 in the First Folio volume in which the same John Heminges and his fellow actor Henry Condell collected, for the first time, the Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies of Shakespeare:1 The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing and The Winter's Tale among the comedies and The Life and Death of Julius Caesar and Othello the Moore of Venice among the tragedies, while ‘Sir John Falstaff’ may refer either to the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor or to The Second Part of King Henry IV, in which case it would be the only ‘history’ in the list of the six plays definitely written by Shakespeare. That same ‘warrant’ dated 20 May 1613 orders that the payment of £60 be made to the same John Heminges for the six other plays also performed in the royal palace: ‘A badd beginininge [sic] makes a good endinge, The Capteyne, The Alcumist, Cardenno, The Hotspur, and Benedicte and Betteris’ (which may be Much Ado about Nothing).
A month and a half later, on 9 July 1613, the sum of £6.13s.4d. was paid to John Heminges and ‘the rest of his fellows his Majesties servants and Players’ for a play ‘called Cardenna’,2 performed before the Duke of Savoy's ambassador, who was the guest of the English sovereign. This play with an unstable title, Cardenno or Cardenna, is the one surrounded by mystery that the present essay will seek to unravel.
Thanks to the payments made to the King's Men for the plays performed at court at the end of 1612 and the start of 1613, we know, if not the exact date of the performance, at least the circumstances surrounding it. The play was one of the spectacles staged in the course of the two festive cycles which, throughout Christian Europe, were periods of rejoicing and amusements: the first was the cycle of twelve days between Christmas Day and Epiphany, known in England as Twelfth Night or the Night of the Kings; the second was the Carnival period, which stretched from 2 February to 2 March. Intense theatrical activity in both courts and towns accompanied the festivities and customs that marked these two essential moments in the calendar. It was, for example, on one 2 February that John Manningham, a student at the Middle Temple, one of London's Inns of Court, went to see a performance of Twelfth Night.3
In England, in the winter of 1612–13, these regular circumstances were compounded by other, more exceptional ones. On 6 November 1612, Prince Henry, the eldest son of James I, died, and on 7 December he was buried in Westminster Cathedral. Then, on 14 February 1613, St Valentine's Day, James's eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married the Palatinate prince.4. The festivities of the Twelve Days and those of Carnival were thus marked by both mourning and wedding joy.
Of all the twenty plays mentioned by the payment register of the King's Chamber on 20 May 1613, why take particular interest in ‘Cardenno’? Clearly because this refers back to a book published by Edward Blount in 1612: The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant Don-Quixote of the Mancha.5 This book, whose author is not named,6 is a translation by Thomas Shelton of the ‘history’ written by Cervantes, the first part of which (at this date, not yet actually the first part) had been published in late 1604 but dated 1605 by the publishing house of Juan de la Cuesta in Madrid.7 One year after its publication, this inspired a play that was performed at the English court, for there can be no doubt that Cardenno is Cardenio, the young Andalusian noble, born in Cordova, who, as a lover in despair, withdrew into the Sierra Moreno, where he lived as a savage, clothed in rags, leaping from rock to rock, with his face burnt by the sun. Don Quixote encounters him in chapter xxiii (in actual fact, chapter ix of Book III of Cervantes’ work, published in 1605, which was divided into four parts) and in the following chapter he learns the young man's name and hears his story: ‘My name is Cardenio, the place of my birth one of the best Cities in Andaluzia, my lineage noble, my parents rich and my misfortunes so great, as I thinke my parents have e’er this deplored.’8 The misfortunes of Cardenio, the unhappy lover of Luscinda, who is betrayed by his friend Fernando, and the final happy denouement to the story provided a fine subject for a play at once tragic and comic, which was performed in a period of both grief and joy in the royal court of England.