Cardenio: A Lost Play Known From Two 1613 Court Payments

What do the 1613 court accounts record?

The royal accounts record £6 13s 4d paid to Shakespeare's company, on a warrant of 9 July 1613, for Cardenna. According to the entry, the play was presented “before the Duke of Savoyes Embassadour on the viijth daye of June, 1613.” The money went to John Heminges, a member of the company by Chambers's account, “for himself and the rest of his fellowes his Majesties servauntes and Players.”

An earlier entry, under a warrant dated at Whitehall on 20 May 1613, pays Heminges for “sixe severall playes.” The fourth is “Cardenno,” listed between “the Alcumist” and “The Hotspur.” The entry gives no dates, only that all six were “played within the tyme of this Accompte.” It pays forty pounds, and twenty more “by waye of his Majesties rewarde.”

A separate entry under a warrant of the same date pays Heminges for fourteen plays presented before the Lady Elizabeth and the Prince Palatine, among them The Tempest and The Winters Tale. The six-play entry that names Cardenno does not say who was in the audience.

Both entries come from what Chambers labels the Chamber Account, and both are read here as he printed them in 1930. He notes that he took his court payments from his own earlier book, The Elizabethan Stage. Two entries in one series, read through one printed copy, count here as one source, so neither date is marked as a fix.

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The two warrants are dated 50 days apart. The May entry pays £40 for six plays. That works out to £6 13s 4d a play, exactly the sum the July entry pays for Cardenna alone.

By dead reckoning, the May entry puts one showing of Cardenno no later than 20 May 1613, the date of its warrant. How much earlier is not in the entry. Chambers himself dated that showing to the winter of 1612–13, and the second to 8 June 1613.

Download the table (CSV, cardenio-records.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Chamber Account entries of 1613, as printed in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Stationers' Register entry of 1653, as printed in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Lewis Theobald, Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers (London, 1728), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain

What does each record prove?

Cardenio is a paper survivor: no copy of the play is known, but other documents that name it keep its title and its dates. Here those documents are two payments and a register entry, and each one proves less than the story usually built on it.

The payments show that a play by that name was presented by the King's players in 1613. They name no author and preserve no lines. The 1653 entry names authors but no performance. Double Falshood names Shakespeare and has a full text, but no character in it is called Cardenio.

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Download the table (CSV, cardenio-proof-matrix.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Chamber Account entries of 1613, as printed in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Stationers' Register entry of 1653, as printed in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Lewis Theobald, Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers (London, 1728), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain

The kind of record matters. Love's Labour's Won lives on as a title in a 1598 book list that credits it to Shakespeare. Cardenio lives on as an item in an account book, which records a performance and a fee but no writer. The Pinakes, in the entry on the Library of Alexandria, is known from yet another kind: a later writer's note of its title and size.

Who was Cardenio?

The 1613 entries do not say what the play was about. The name points to Don Quixote. Chambers judged that the source was “probably” the story of Cardenio and Lucinda in Thomas Shelton's English translation of 1612.

The museum's description of Hayman's painting calls Cardenio lovelorn, driven into the mountains by grief over Lucinda, and William Hogarth etched the same character as “the unfortunate Knight of the Rock.”

By dead reckoning, the dates allow Chambers's reading, since Shelton's translation came out in 1612 by Chambers's dating and both warrants fall in 1613. The timing fits. Nothing in the 1613 entries, though, ties the play to that particular story.

Who wrote Cardenio?

The payments name no writer. The first record on file that does is an entry Humphrey Moseley made on 9 September 1653, 40 years after the warrants. Chambers lists it among “the lost plays which he registered” that day: “The History of Cardennio, by Mr. Fletcher. & Shakespeare.” In the same list, Chambers prints a second entry crediting Henry the First and Henry the Second to “Shakespeare, & Dauenport,” and he notes that Robert Davenport's History of Henry the First had been licensed for performance by the King's men on 10 April 1624.

Moseley had written the epistle to the first Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, according to Chambers. Chambers put little weight on Moseley's credits to Shakespeare. Of other titles that Moseley entered as Shakespeare's, he wrote that “obviously no reliance can be placed on Moseley.” Then he set Cardenio apart as “another matter” and turned to the court record.

Even so, Chambers did not accept Shakespeare's share. Weighing the case alongside Theobald's later play, he wrote that “it does not follow that Shakespeare had anything to do with the play,” and that he could not “share Oliphant's confidence in Moseley on this point.”

By dead reckoning, every link on file between the court play and a writer runs through Moseley's one entry. Without it, the records would show a play, a company and two fees, and no author at all.

What did Theobald's Double Falshood claim?

On 5 December 1727, a royal licence let Lewis Theobald print a play, and it repeats his petition: he had “Purchased the Manuscript Copy of an Original Play of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.” The play was Double Falshood (Chambers spells it Double Falsehood). It was staged at Drury Lane on 13 December 1727, according to Chambers, and printed in 1728 as “Written Originally by W. SHAKESPEARE.”

In his preface, Theobald says he had three copies. One was “of above Sixty Years Standing, in the Handwriting of Mr. Downes, the famous Old Prompter.” From the noble person who gave him one copy he had a “Tradition” that Shakespeare wrote the play for “a Natural Daughter of his.” He answered critics who saw Fletcher's style by calling the point “far from deserving any Answer.”

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Download the table (CSV, cardenio-theobald-copies.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Lewis Theobald, Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers (London, 1728), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain

The preface takes up a complaint that the tale was “built upon a Novel in Don Quixot” and does not dispute it, answering only that the novel “was publish'd in the Year 1611.” Yet the cast list has a Julio and a Leonora. Nobody on it is named Cardenio. Chambers read the play as the Cardenio and Lucinda story “with altered names.”

Illustration

Theobald was no stranger to Shakespeare's text. According to Chambers, he had already adapted Richard II in 1719 and published Shakespeare Restored in 1726, and his own edition of the plays followed in 1734. In that edition he still asserted Shakespeare's authorship of Double Falshood, Chambers notes, yet he never published the unadapted text.

Chambers weighed the case in 1930. Theobald could hardly have known of the court record, he thought, which “to some extent” supports his story. But nobody else appears to have seen the manuscripts, and Theobald's sale catalogue of 23 October 1744 lists nothing like them. Chambers judged a fabrication less likely than “an old play of some sort” with a stage tradition behind it.

Studies before 1930 that Chambers lists, among them E. H. C. Oliphant's, leaned on balance toward giving Shakespeare at least a share, by his reading. In the play itself Chambers saw traces “that may well be Fletcher's.” He did not follow them on Shakespeare. The question was still open when he wrote.