Cardenio

The History of Cardenio, often referred to as merely Cardenio, is a lost play, known to have been performed by the King's Men, a London theatre company, in 1613. The play is attributed to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher in a Stationers' Register entry of 1653. The content of the play is not known, but it was likely to have been based on an episode in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote involving the character Cardenio, a young man who has been driven mad and lives in the Sierra Morena. Thomas Shelton's translation of the First Part of Don Quixote was published in 1612, and would thus have been available to the presumed authors of the play.

Two existing plays have been put forward as being related to the lost play. Also, a song, "Woods, Rocks and Mountains", set to music by Robert Johnson, has been linked to it.

Although there are records of the play having been performed, there is no information about its authorship earlier than a 1653 entry in the Stationers' Register. The entry was made by Humphrey Moseley, a bookseller and publisher, who was thereby asserting his right to publish the work. Moseley is not necessarily to be trusted on the question of authorship, as he is known to have falsely used Shakespeare's name in other such entries. It may be that he was using Shakespeare's name to increase interest in the play. However, some modern scholarship accepts Moseley's attribution, placing the lost work in the same category of collaboration between Fletcher and Shakespeare as The Two Noble Kinsmen. Fletcher based several of his later plays on works by Cervantes, so his involvement is plausible.

After a few adventures together, Don Quixote and Sancho discover a bag full of gold coins along with some papers, which include a sonnet describing the poet's romantic troubles. Don Quixote and Sancho search for the person to whom the gold and the papers belong. They find him; it is Cardenio, a strange bare-footed character who leaps about from rock to rock like a mountain goat and whose clothes are in shreds. Cardenio, who lives in the hollow formed in a cork tree, rants and rages in anger regarding one Don Fernando.

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