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

How to read a text that doesn't exist, perform a play whose manuscript has been lost and whose author is unknown? This is the enigma posed by Cardenio—a play first performed in England in 1612 or 1613 and attributed forty years later to Shakespeare (and Fletcher). Its plot is that of a "novella" inserted into Don Quixote, a work that circulated in the major European countries where it was translated and adapted for the stage. In England, Cervantes's novel was known and cited even before it was translated in 1612 and inspired Cardenio. Retracing the history of this play, then, leads to the question of what, in the past, was the status of works considered canonical today. The reader will discover here the malleability of texts, transformed by their translations and adaptations, by migrations from one genre to another, and by the successive meanings constructed by their various audiences.