Shakespeare: Cardenio – Charles Hamilton, 1994 ★½

In Search of Lost Shakespeare

It’s perhaps the world’s most exclusive club. They let in 36 members back in 1623; since then only two more have been admitted. Others wait beyond the velvet rope, including a knight named Ironside, a saint named Tom, and a crazed Spanish wanderer named Cardenio no one has seen in 400 years.

A wonderful assortment of strange characters occupy what is known as the Shakespeare Apocrypha. Some of these plays are widely championed as being at least in part authored by the Bard, like an early work entitled Sir Edmund Ironside and a later work, Sir Thomas More, based on the life of the English saint.

All have champions. Only one, Cardenio, has both a distinct identity, an itinerant, lonely character made mad by lost love who features in Miguel de Cervantes’ epic novel Don Quixote; and direct attribution to Shakespeare in the form of a 1653 register entry for the play.

But no play of that name has turned up. [Another elusive Shakespearean title, Love’s Labour’s Won, may likewise be a lost play or else an alternate title for an extant work, some say Troilus And Cressida.]

Where did Cardenio go? Was it lost in a theater fire, or repurposed as a pie liner or for a privy? Or has it been with us all along, in the form of a 1611 play attributed to the dyspeptic Thomas Middleton called The Second Maiden’s Tragedy?

One who claimed the latter was American handwriting expert Charles Hamilton, who after debunking the so-called “Hitler Diaries” back in the 1980s, turned his attention to other history mysteries. Here, he proclaims The Second Maiden’s Tragedy as being Shakespeare’s Cardenio, and even declares that the sole surviving original manuscript of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy was written in the Bard’s own hand.

The book includes a full text of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, along with several essays by Hamilton making his case for Cardenio. Readers should know he’s pretty much alone in this; the consensus view considers the play likely Middleton’s and quite a distance removed in style and content from material Shakespeare wrote.

The Second Maiden’s Tragedy begins with the usurpation of Govianus, ruler of an unnamed kingdom, by a rival named Tyrant who really wants Govianus’s lover, Lady. But Lady crosses Tyrant up by declaring herself for Govianus. Tyrant decides to let Govianus not only live, but live with Lady, albeit in “look-but-don’t-touch” mode:

…more to vex his soul, give command straight/

They be divided into several rooms,

Where he may only have a sight of her

To his mind’s torment, but his arms and lips

Locked up like felons from her.

[Act I, scene I, lines 234-238]

Elsewhere in the play, Govianus’s suspicion-plagued brother Anselmus charges his friend Votarius to prove Anselmus’s wife unfaithful by making a play at her virtue. Votarius begs off the assignment, but Anselmus is resolute and unyielding, to a degree Votarius finds too formidable to resist.

Man has some enemy still that keeps him back

In all his fortunes, and his mind is his,

And that’s a mighty adversary. [I.ii.407-409]

As Votarius reluctantly goes through with his assignment, he is observed by a treacherous servant, Leonella, and her lover. He also finds himself growing fond of Anselmus’s wife against his will, as she does with him.

Oddly, the two plots never come together except for a brief interlude when Govianus takes time out from his story to check in on his brother. The characters lack firmness of personality; frequently changing direction to accommodate an ever-shifting plot. For most of the cast, nothing becomes their part as much as the leaving of it; with eight of the 11 principal parts providing food for worms before the play’s end. Many give lengthy speeches before expiring; at least one's death speech goes on over three pages.

The most memorable moment of the play comes when [Spoiler Alert] Lady takes her life to escape an attempted royal abduction. Foiled but unbowed, Tyrant has her body removed from a church crypt so he can carry on his one-way love affair.

Lady’s disembodied spirit returns to Govianus to explain what happened:

I am now at court

In his own private chamber. There he woos me

And plies his suit to me with as serious pains

As if the short flame of mortality

Were lighted up again in my cold breast,

Folds me within his arms and often sets

A sinful kiss upon my senseless lip,

Weeps when he sees the paleness of my cheek,

And will send privately for a hand of art

That may dissemble life upon my face

To please his lustful eye. [IV.iv.l.1775-1785]

If necrophilia strikes you as an underutilized device in Shakespeare’s canon, maybe you might be willing to allow for this being one of his plays. Otherwise, it seems a stretch. The language of Second Maiden’s Tragedy is clumsy when it strives to be lyrical, lacking subtlety and shading. One line Hamilton calls attention to for what he regards as its beauty, Tyrant lamenting as he looks upon Lady after she jilts him, seems representatively pedestrian to me: “There’s the kingdom/Within yon valley fixed, while I stand here/Kissing false hopes upon a frozen mountain.”

There’s some bawdy humor in evidence, mostly with the Anselmus subplot, like when Anselmus accuses Votarius of being “too slack” in his wooing of Anselmus’s wife. “She never found it so,” Votarius answers. How-you-doin’!

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote some of the most successful plays of the early Jacobean era. Most scholars see him as the sole author of The Second Maiden's Tragedy, which Charles Hamilton disputes in his book claiming it as Shakespeare's lost Cardenio. [Image from nosweatshakespeare.com]

But such humor was not the sole province of Shakespeare; many other playwrights employed it then, including Thomas Middleton. His most famous play, A Chaste Maid In Cheapside, employs a knowing cuckold happy that someone else has taken on his husbandly duty. Similarly, we get in this play a minor character named Sophonirus, who is grateful “to have his children all of one man’s getting” and calls his wife’s lover a “barricado” against other men having her, too.

Infidelity is a constant theme of Shakespeare, but I am not aware of a grateful cuckold in any of his plays.

Hamilton, who died in 1996, two years after this book was published, makes minor headway toward his thesis with a series of images showing the handwriting which appears in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy manuscript and comparing it with writing which appears in Shakespeare’s will. The matches, he says, are exact, and indeed, there are strong resemblances in the spidery scripts with their backward-slicing “y”s and “g”s.

But the will could have been copied down by a scribe, just as one would expect a scribe would have produced the manuscript for The Second Maiden’s Tragedy.

Hamilton’s thesis is that Shakespeare wrote the play in collaboration with John Fletcher, another noted playwright commonly believed to have collaborated with Shakespeare on two extant plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, as well as the missing Cardenio. But why would Shakespeare, easing toward retirement by 1611 and clearly the senior figure in any collaboration, trouble himself to jot down an entire manuscript of which he was only a co-author?

And if this was the “Cardenio” segment from Don Quixote being dramatized, why does it not look anything like the Cervantes’ story? There’s no necrophilia in the Cervantes original, and very little bloodshed. There is a contested marriage, but it is resolved quite differently by characters who bear no resemblance to those featured in the “Cardenio” segment in Don Quixote and have different names.

Hamilton would argue it both ways, saying Shakespeare was a creative person who always worked his own ideas into his source material, but that the “Cardenio” parallels are still there if you look hard enough. If there are weaknesses in the play, they can be blamed on Shakespeare’s collaborator Fletcher, though again Hamilton seems to want to have it both ways.

“It is significant that The Second Maiden’s Tragedy is virtually a cornucopia of superb poetry and brilliant ‘sayings’ that evoke the masterful touch of the Stratford dramatist,” Hamilton writes, a short time after singling out Lady and Tyrant as special characters.

But elsewhere in the book, Hamilton seems clearer regarding the merit of the play: “Certainly, Cardenio is a rough tumbling from the high peak of The Tempest, only a year or so earlier and one of Shakespeare’s sublimest plays. Perhaps The Tempest was the brilliant flare of the candle just before it gutted.”

A point Hamilton leans on heavily, and which does merit consideration, is that the secondary plot of  The Second Maiden’s Tragedy is clearly derived from a three-chapter narrative featured in Don Quixote, subtitled “A Tale Of Ill-Advised Curiosity.” Here indeed there is a character named Anselmo who like Anselmus leans on a friend to test his wife’s virtue with unhappy results. But this is not the Cardenio story in Don Quixote.

A reader looking at this play from any clear-headed perspective would be hard-pressed not to conclude that what Hamilton calls Shakespeare’s Cardenio is clearly another play entirely, the product of a clever if secondary playwright and too minor to have been attributed even to him until centuries after his death.