Can’t the Shakespeare scholars look at the three manuscripts and figure it out?
They could if Theobald had made those manuscripts public. He published his own edition of Shakespeare in 1733 but didn’t include Double Falshood — possibly because he wasn’t sure Shakespeare wrote it and didn’t want to have to defend his decision (he had already been targeted in Alexander Pope’s 1928 Dunciad), possibly because he was the real author. One theory is that he gave the manuscripts to Covent Garden and that they burned with the theater in 1808. In any case, we don’t have them. So neither of these plays is Cardenio? That’s a distinct possibility. What The Second Maiden’s Tale has going for it is that it’s an actual Jacobean play, from 1611, and it draws on the Cardenio “subplot,” “El curioso impertinente.” Against that, most scholars think Thomas Middleton wrote it, the main plot of the play bears only a faint resemblance to the Cardenio tale, and the play is neither very good nor very Shakespearean. Double Falshood does retell the Cardenio story, and it’s a better work. But
