30
NOTES AND QUERIES.
[12 S. V. FEB., 1919.
- DOUBLE FALSEHOOD ' :
SHAKESPEARE, FLETCHER, AND THEOBALD.
THOSE most competent to settle the Shake- spearian canon accord it a minimum of 36 plays and a maximum of 39, the ones sometimes included and sometimes excluded being * Titus Andronicus,' ' Edward III.,' and ' The Two Noble Kinsmen.' Can it be that those less conservative critics who have adopted the higher number should add yet another play to their list ?
That was the interesting question which met me when an American scholar, Mr. Gamaliel Bradford, jun., sent me some two or three yea,rs ago a copy of an article he had written for an American literary magazine (Modern Language Notes) on the authorship of ' Double Falsehood,' in which he sought to prove the participation of Fletcher, and hinted at that of Shakespeare. He asked me, as one who had ventured into print more than once in endeavours to settle vexed questions regarding the author- ship both of plays attributed to Fletcher and of plays ascribed to Shakespeare, to give him my opinion upon the play he had been studying. This, unfortunately, I was unable to do, because in the whole of Australia there was not, so far as I could ascertain, a copy of ' Double Falsehood.' This lack has now been remedied, a copy of the play having been obtained by the Melbourne Public Library, and this I have lost no time in subjecting to an examination, the result of which I give here.
First, however, let us consider whether there is any reason whatever to connect the play with Shakespeare. Elizabethans may be interested in the proving or dis- proving of the presence of Fletcher ; but the general reader will wish to know the value of the external evidence that connects the name of Shakespeare with this play, which has been so generally assumed to be the work of the eighteenth-century Theobald.
It was, indeed, between 111 and 112 years after Shakespeare's death when 'Double Falshood ; or, The Distrest Lovers,' was given to the stage and to the press, with an attribution to Shakespeare as the original author, and an assertion that it had been
" now revised and adapted to the stage by
Mr. Theobald." As was natural in the
circumstances, the play was roundly de-
nounced as a forgery ; and Theobald did
not lessen the doubt expressed regarding it
when, on certain lines being picked out for
praise, he claimed tho?e lines as his own.
It has also to be remarked that Theobald's
action in regard to another play was such
as to warrant one in questioning his scrupu-
lousness. In 1716 had been produced as
his a play, ' The Perfidious Brother,' which
he was accused of having stolen from a man
named Mestayer. According to Theobald,
Mestayer had given him the plot and
something designed to be a play, and he
had so entirely recast it in fitting it for the
stage that he had felt justified in regarding
it as his own. Mestayer, however, sub-
sequently published the play in (so he
asserted) the form in which it had been
originally written. According to Prof.
| Lounsbury, it was unactable as it stood,
- but was certainly the groundwork of
I Theobald's play, which ought to have been
- announced as based upon it. It is, how-
ever, in Theobald's favour that even his enemies (and he had many) seemed to think there was nothing in the charge brought against him in this matter. In any case, there is a difference between claiming for oneself what is in its essence the work of another man and giving to another credit for work that is one's own. The theory that Theobald forged 'Double Falsehood ' is not to be accepted without very good reason. There is, however, another possibility that must be taken into account the possibility that, finding an old Elizabethan play, he may have com- mitted a double falsehood of his own by pretending that one of the manuscripts bore the name of Shakespeare, and by asserting that the play in its original form had never found its way to the stage.
Theobald met the doubts raised as to a play by Shakespeare " being stifled and lost to the world for above a century " thus : He possessed, he said, three copies : one ob- tained from a " noble person " (who had acquainted Theobald with " a tradition " that it had been written in the time of Shakespeare's retirement from the stage and given by him to a natural daughter), one purchased " at* a good rate," and one '* in the handwriting of Mr. Downes, the famous old prompter." He had been "credibly
