Wedding crashers

Modernity collides with Elizabethan sensibilities in 'Cardenio,' a play at the ART based on a lost Shakespeare work

May 16, 2008|Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE - A play written by a leading Shakespeare scholar and a noted playwright, and said to be inspired by a lost work of Shakespeare himself, is bound to attract a lot of excitement in academic and theatrical circles alike. And so it is with "Cardenio," which opened Wednesday at the American Repertory Theatre. Hugely anticipated, it is also, I am very sorry to say, hugely disappointing.

"Cardenio" the original is an interesting little mystery in its own right: Recorded as a play by Shakespeare and his occasional collaborator John Fletcher that was performed twice in 1613, it then vanished; no script was ever published among Shakespeare's works. One Lewis Theobald then produced, in 1728, a play he called "Double Falsehood," which he claimed was based on the original manuscript of "Cardenio." But he never brought forth this manuscript, instead allegedly storing it in a Covent Garden library that later burned down, and so "Cardenio" has remained nothing more than a title and the hint of a plot, drawn from an episode in Cervantes's "Don Quixote."

All this intrigue and cross-pollination appealed strongly to Stephen Greenblatt, the Harvard Shakespearean, and Charles Mee, the playwright, whose work in different ways has explored creativity, appropriation, and cultural influences on individual works of art. So when the two men had a chance to work together, a reimagining of "Cardenio" seemed like a natural: a chance to explore not only ideas about Shakespeare and playmaking, but also the invention of a "Shakespearean" play as it might have been written if Shakespeare had lived at the turn of the 21st century instead of the 17th.

So far, so good. The two men, buoyed by a large grant Greenblatt had received, retreated to a rented farmhouse in Umbria to develop their play - Italy being not only the setting of some of Shakespeare's most delectable romantic comedies, but also the idyllic site where Mee and Greenblatt had first crossed paths, on overlapping residencies at the academic retreat Bellagio.

By all indications, they had a lovely time in Umbria: the wine, the food, the song, the light, the art, the hills! We know this because their "Cardenio" is set in a lovely version of their rented farmhouse, complete with aforesaid wine, food, song, etc., and because their characters (using the term loosely) wax rhapsodic in assorted ways over all these beauties. But, being good modern thinkers, the playwrights mock their Italianate raptures even as they're indulging in them, just as they playfully belittle the impossibility and foolishness of re-creating a Shakespeare play even as they persist in doing it.