Cardenio or the Second Maiden's Tragedy

Rating:
Summary: Proof that this play is NOT Cardenio
Review: Hamilton's arguments that the Second Maiden's Tragedy is really the lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio, are imaginative. Handwriting analysis is an interesting, but weak approach, as his methods and approach to this inexact art are at best questionable. Hamilton's suggestion that Shakespeare was credited for the play at one time is true; however, it is also true that scholars have determined that it was more likely that someone was trying to increase the value of the play by attributing it to Shakespeare.

Scholars have reviewed the play and have deemed it to be a play written by Middleton, not William Shakespeare. That would have been good enough to end most rationale assertions to the contrary, but Hamilton's attempt to reassert it as Shakespeare forces us to look closer.

First, as this play is a dramatization of Don Quixote De La Mancha, then how does the play coinside with the story line of Cardenio in Cervantes famous work. The answer? This play is about a different story line in the two volume, eight book work. Cardenio in Don Quixote is a separate story from the Second Maiden's story. That would make one seriously question why would someone dramatize a play about Cardenio but not use the story???

Second, and this is the killer for those who want A Second Maiden's Tragedy to be Cardenio, is the proof that the two plays were documented to be two DIFFERENT plays. How? Plays were registered in order to allow one person to lay claim to the rights of ownership of the play. This was done by paying a fee to register the name of the play with the Registrar's. Sometimes, to save paying two fees for two different plays, a person would give two titles as the same play. In this way someone could register, say, The Tempest OR Julius Caesar, and pay one fee for two plays. In this way they could claim both plays by paying only for one of them.

As it happens, The Second Maiden's Tragedy AND Cardenio were registered ON THE SAME DAY, BY THE SAME PERSON, AND AS TWO DIFFERENT PLAYS. If these were the same play as Hamilton proposes why would they pay the register fee TWICE, when the practice was to save money by registering two plays as one?

The fact is that A Second Maiden's Tragedy could not possibly be the lost play, Cardenio, and therefore the claim that Shakespeare wrote this play is weak at best.

Rating:
Summary: Proof that this play is NOT Cardenio
Review: Hamilton's arguments that the Second Maiden's Tragedy is really the lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio, are imaginative. Handwriting analysis is an interesting, but weak approach, as his methods and approach to this inexact art are at best questionable. Hamilton's suggestion that Shakespeare was credited for the play at one time is true; however, it is also true that scholars have determined that it was more likely that someone was trying to increase the value of the play by attributing it to Shakespeare.

Scholars have reviewed the play and have deemed it to be a play written by Middleton, not William Shakespeare. That would have been good enough to end most rationale assertions to the contrary, but Hamilton's attempt to reassert it as Shakespeare forces us to look closer.

First, as this play is a dramatization of Don Quixote De La Mancha, then how does the play coinside with the story line of Cardenio in Cervantes famous work. The answer? This play is about a different story line in the two volume, eight book work. Cardenio in Don Quixote is a separate story from the Second Maiden's story. That would make one seriously question why would someone dramatize a play about Cardenio but not use the story???

Second, and this is the killer for those who want A Second Maiden's Tragedy to be Cardenio, is the proof that the two plays were documented to be two DIFFERENT plays. How? Plays were registered in order to allow one person to lay claim to the rights of ownership of the play. This was done by paying a fee to register the name of the play with the Registrar's. Sometimes, to save paying two fees for two different plays, a person would give two titles as the same play. In this way someone could register, say, The Tempest OR Julius Caesar, and pay one fee for two plays. In this way they could claim both plays by paying only for one of them.

As it happens, The Second Maiden's Tragedy AND Cardenio were registered ON THE SAME DAY, BY THE SAME PERSON, AND AS TWO DIFFERENT PLAYS. If these were the same play as Hamilton proposes why would they pay the register fee TWICE, when the practice was to save money by registering two plays as one?

The fact is that A Second Maiden's Tragedy could not possibly be the lost play, Cardenio, and therefore the claim that Shakespeare wrote this play is weak at best.

Rating:
Summary: Hamilton makes a solid prima facie case
Review: I recently asked a friend, a Shakespeare professor, what she thought about the argument advanced in this book, which I had read perhaps a year previously. I was surprised to hear her say she wasn't acquainted with it. Hamilton seems to demonstrate soundly that the text known to us as the "Second Maiden's Tragedy" could originally have been titled "Cardenio" (a known "lost" Shakespeare play) since its plot appears to be drawn from a character of that name in "Don Quixote" and the current title appears to have been a working title applied by the royal censor. More dramatically, Hamilton (a nationally prominent forensic handwriting authority) argues that the handwriting in the survivng original manuscript of this play and that of Shakespeare's will are by the same man. Given Hamilton's stature in that field alone, I'd have expected the book to have drawn more attention. I don't know if the arguments in the book have been subjected to sound refutation by someone more expert than me, but to this journeyman Shakespeare buff he makes a solid enough case to bear hearing out

Rating:
Summary: A mystery of the greatest import. Read it and weep
Review: The reader above wants to know if there has been a refuation of the case Hamiltom makes in this book. The fact that it's in Shakesperae's writing cannot be refuted, but the fact that it's a Shakespeare play can, for the simple reason that until the handwriting was revealed to be what it quite clearly is, no one suspected Shakespeare as the author, and nearly everyone had it pegged sa Middleton (or someone very like him), which it is. T. S. Eliot believed that as a writer Middleton was second only to Shakespeare, but that's partly because his style was so very different and very much his own. What we have here is a
mansucript copied by a scribe who happens to have William
Shakespeare's handwriting. This would mean to someone like Sherlock Holmes that the man from Stratford was a scribe who happened to be lucky enough to earn his living pretending to be a playwright in order to protect the identity of the true aurhtor. Thus without meaning to, Hamilton has offered some of the very best evidence there is that the modest William did not write the works attributed to him. This is clearly the reason Shakesperean scholars don't want to go near this book, which
contains one of the most important discoveries ever made in the history of Elizabethan scholarship. Read it and revel in its dramatic values, and then try to see if you can find any way to marry the style of this work with that of any of the Shakesperae plays. This would be easier if you could use the play developed from it, called Double Falsehood, which actually sounds a good deal more like Shakespeare than this version.
Next see what scholars had to say about this play before anyone thought it might be by Shakespeare. At the very least you'll have a lot of fun with this fascinating detective story, and maybe you'll do some of your own thinking about it instead of pretending that the truth about William Shakespeare is well established. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There's a great mystery here, and there always has been.

Rating:
Summary: A mystery of the greatest import. Read it and weep
Review: The reader above wants to know if there has been a refuation of the case Hamiltom makes in this book. The fact that it's in Shakesperae's writing cannot be refuted, but the fact that it's a Shakespeare play can, for the simple reason that until the handwriting was revealed to be what it quite clearly is, no one suspected Shakespeare as the author, and nearly everyone had it pegged sa Middleton (or someone very like him), which it is. T. S. Eliot believed that as a writer Middleton was second only to Shakespeare, but that's partly because his style was so very different and very much his own. What we have here is a
mansucript copied by a scribe who happens to have William
Shakespeare's handwriting. This would mean to someone like Sherlock Holmes that the man from Stratford was a scribe who happened to be lucky enough to earn his living pretending to be a playwright in order to protect the identity of the true aurhtor. Thus without meaning to, Hamilton has offered some of the very best evidence there is that the modest William did not write the works attributed to him. This is clearly the reason Shakesperean scholars don't want to go near this book, which
contains one of the most important discoveries ever made in the history of Elizabethan scholarship. Read it and revel in its dramatic values, and then try to see if you can find any way to marry the style of this work with that of any of the Shakesperae plays. This would be easier if you could use the play developed from it, called Double Falsehood, which actually sounds a good deal more like Shakespeare than this version.
Next see what scholars had to say about this play before anyone thought it might be by Shakespeare. At the very least you'll have a lot of fun with this fascinating detective story, and maybe you'll do some of your own thinking about it instead of pretending that the truth about William Shakespeare is well established. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There's a great mystery here, and there always has been.