Beyond the Missing Cardenio: Anglo-Spanish Relations in Early Modern Drama

This essay uses the lost Shakespeare play Cardenio and its eighteenth-century redaction, Double Falshood to think through the problem of Spanish sources in early modern English drama. I argue that the search for Shakespeare's hand in the texts has occluded the significance of the contemporary Spanish source, Don Quijote, and, moreover, that the field systematically overlooks the translatio from Spanish prose to English drama. I offer a reading of Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife as an example of how we might recover the ideological vectors between the two corpora.