“Double Falsehood,” a play written by Lewis Theobald and first performed in 1727, was based substantially on another work co-written by William Shakespeare more than a century earlier, a leading academic said on Tuesday.Adding weight to the claim of Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University is the fact that the respected Arden Shakespeare publishers will release it in print on March 22.
For Hammond, the publication of the play next week will be the culmination of years of research. “I started working on it in the 1980s and wrote a couple of articles on the play,” he told Reuters. “At the time I was hoping to get the play brought out by Oxford University Press. It was revived in around 2002 when the Arden series general editor got in touch and said he would like to bring this out.”
Theobald always claimed his play was based on a lost version by Shakespeare that was in turn based on the story of Cardenio, taken from the novel “Don Quixote,” by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes.
Hammond said modern scholarship had established that the early work, performed in 1613, was co-written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Theobald then substantially re-worked and cut it, meaning the presence of three hands in the present version. “Shakespeare wrote most of the first half [of the original] and Fletcher wrote most of the second half -- you could detect a new hand from the style of writing,” Hammond said.
Theobald’s work was popular with 18th century audiences, but the playwright was widely dismissed as a fraudster for claiming he had used the words of Shakespeare.
