The Enduring Mystery Of Shakespeare's Missing Play

I’ve always been shamelessly omnivorous when it comes to mysteries, and real-world literary puzzles and hijinks are my favourite kind. Give me long-lost documents hidden in a bank vault in Switzerland for decades before unexpectedly being uncovered by somebody’s unsuspecting great-niece. Give me a fraud, a forgery, an abandoned library, a dispute between antiquarians that turns vicious, scientific tests on the age of ink, millionaire art collectors who hoard Bibles or First Folios or (horror!) cut up priceless medieval tomes for the illuminations. Above all give me missing bibliographic treasures, things that appear to have vanished from everybody forever - or, perhaps, from almost everybody. There’s so much to be done with the gaps between.

When I first heard of a missing Shakespeare play based on Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, I thought it was a literary hoax. (People like doing those, too. Australia, where I’m from, specialises in them.) Surely we don’t lose Shakespeare plays. But sometimes, as it happens, we do.

We can start on solid ground. There’s credible evidence that Shakespeare collaborated with playwright John Fletcher on a play called The History Of Cardenio, based on an episode in Cervantes’ tale, in 1653. So far, so normal; Fletcher and Shakespeare had collaborated before. The play was performed by the King’s Men, but, unfortunately, no copy of it actually survives - as far as we know.

 There were many players in the drama that led the Don Quixote play to be lost, possibly found, and then lost again, but the most crucial for my purposes is Lewis Theobald. He was a writer in 18th century Britain, otherwise most famous for an ignominious feud with Alexander Pope. The History of Cardenio had vanished from view — and then Theobald suddenly threw his hat into the ring. In 1727, he released his own play, Double Falsehood, which he claimed was a restoration and ‘improvement’ on three editions of The History Of Cardenio he’d somehow found. (Found where? He didn’t say.) Academics have argued extensively over whether there’s any basis for this ‘improvement’ business or whether he just made it up to sell his own work. As of now, though, Double Falsehood has enough similarities to Shakespearean language that it’s been tentatively accepted as a part of the canon, though nobody knows exactly what’s Shakespeare, what’s Fletcher, and what’s Theobald.

What happened to this trio of plays Theobald supposedly had? Was it real? Where did it go, and why didn’t he do anything seemingly sensible with it, like publish it, or bequeath it to a university, or give it to the Crown? Alas, paper is vulnerable. Libraries burn down, mould gets into storage boxes, precious materials are invaded by time and worms. (One of my favourite facts about the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford is that it uses old salt mines as storage, because they keep the books dry.) Even if Theobald had attempted to lock the thing up tight or preserve it for the ages, it may not have worked, and Shakespeare scholars might be left despairing with a handful of partly-eaten wet paper. As for publication, there could have been legal reasons, or Theobald may simply have been obstreperous. Infuriatingly, we may never know.

Fortunately, imagination forges into the breach left by history and fact. In Marked For Death, I made up an entirely new story for Shakespeare’s Cardenio, featuring a fictitious university crammed full of my favourite flawed academic types: egoists, fanatics, the pompous, crude, monomaniacal, aloof, overly romantic and just not sensible. (In detective fiction, there’s nothing so fun as a profoundly down-to-earth character meeting somebody who’s never had a sensible thought in their life.) It is a truth universally acknowledged by anybody who has spent time in academia that it attracts the passionate, and passionate people can tend towards extremes.

The world contains many lacunae. Some knots will never be fully and finally tied; there are voiceless parts, fragments, theories, but no concrete answers. Humans love an answer, so we strive to fill those ambiguities, and mystery novels carry that comfort: by the final page we will know. In reality, unfortunately. there are no such easy solutions, and the full History of Cardenio will likely be lost to us forever, without any sleuthing to save it. I do, however, live in hope that some enterprising researcher — or perhaps just a plumber exploring some pipes — will go into a basement and come up to the light holding a cobwebbed lockbox from the 1700s, with Theobald written across the top…

Marked for Death by R.O.Thorp (Faber & Faber) Out Now

A dead body and a missing Shakespeare play lead to a faculty of suspects in this modern murder mystery. Scientist Finn Blanchard is trying not to think about murder. The university administrator Nina Hussar may have fallen to her death down stairs she’d used for years, but the only mystery Finn wants to investigate is whether there’s a shark in the local lake. But when a professor’s sudden death unearths cryptic clues to a missing Shakespeare play, Finn is forced to admit his research isn't the fishiest part of university life. After all, as his detective ex-boyfriend says, there’s nothing more suspicious than a fall down some stairs. And if Finn can’t figure out who the killer is soon, the next blood in the water might be his own . . 

R O Thorp can be found on Instagram @r.o.thorp