Double Falsehood - Authorship

Authorship

Publisher Humphrey Moseley was the first to link Cardenio with Shakespeare: the title page of his edition of 1647, entered at the Stationers' Register on 9 September 1653, credits the work to "Mr Fletcher & Shakespeare". In all, Moseley added Shakespeare's name to six plays by other writers, attributions which have always been received with scepticism.

Theobald's claim of a Shakespearean foundation for his Double Falshood met with suspicion, and even accusations of forgery, from contemporaries such as Alexander Pope, and from subsequent generations of critics as well. Nonetheless Theobald is regarded by critics as a far more serious scholar than Pope, and as a man who "more or less invented modern textual criticism". The evidence of Shakespeare's connection with a dramatization of the Cardenio story comes from the entry in the Stationers' Register, but Theobald could not have known of this evidence, "since it was not found until long after his death". Scholarly consensus judges the play to be an 18th-century rewriting of the lost Cardenio by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. In March 2010, the Arden Shakespeare editors attributed the authorship partly to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, including it officially in Shakespeare's oeuvre for the first time. The inclusion in the Arden canon, notwithstanding the caution expressed in their editor's guarded endorsement, is criticised for harming Shakespeare's reputation as a playwright.