Posted on 03/16/2010 12:25:03 AM PDT by nickcarraway
A play which was first discovered nearly 300 years ago has been credited to William Shakespeare.
The work, titled Double Falsehood, was written by the playwright and another dramatist, John Fletcher.
Theatre impresario Lewis Theobald presented the play in the 18th century as an adaptation of a Shakespeare play but it was dismissed as a forgery.
But scholars for British Shakespeare publisher, Arden, now believe the Bard wrote large parts of the play. Researchers think the play is based on a long-lost work called Cardenio, which was itself based on Don Quixote.
"I think Shakespeare's hand can be discerned in Act One, Act Two and probably the first two scenes in Act Three of the play," Professor Brean Hammond told the BBC's World Service.
Professor Hammond of Nottingham University is the editor of the latest Arden Shakespeare collection, which includes Double Falsehood.
"At least half of the plays written in the period were written collaboratively," Hammond told Radio 4's Today programme.
It is already established that Shakespeare wrote two other plays with Fletcher towards the end of his career, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsman.
Professor Hammond believes Double Falsehood was written shortly after the translation of Don Quixote came out in 1612.
The play was performed at least twice in 1613.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
It is not that I hate Shakespeare, I enjoyed Macbeth and Hamlet a lot, and I ejoyed Romeo and Juliet as well. I however do not understand how he is held to be one of the greatest of all time.
It's what a writer does with the story -- how he tells or shows it -- that makes for greatness. The source material for some of Shakespeare's plays was pretty minimal -- certainly in comparison with what Shakespeare created out of it.
I wonder who really wrote your post.
It was just a boring story where very little happened. You could not like any of the characters (which I know was the point) and it seemed like you were reading about someones boring life.
I know what you mean. His most often produced plays are just a string of famous quotations.
You have to READ it to figure out the draw.
;-)
“I really do not see why people are so in love with Shakespeare (if he eve wrote all his plays) Most of his works were based on earlier plays or stoies.”
God made man, but when Michelango PAINTED him...well!
Authors in those days generally did not do all original work. If they did it would have then been disregarded as of no value.
Art was in reworking already known themes and incidents with one’s own insights and techniques.
The theory runs along the lines that it is entirely improbable that someone could have been such a genius as to write what Shakespeare wrote, so, it could not have been Shakespeare, but some other genius. Or, in the alternative, they pose the even more improbable hypothesis, that the only way to to explain the conundrum of one such improbable genius having lived is to posit that there were two such geniuses.
Some genius wrote Shakespeare, and for the sake of convenience we might as well call that author what he called himself, i.e. Shakespeare.
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