Release Date: 2008-09-15
Original Link: http://presszoom.com/story_145874.html
Source: American Shakespeare Center
The American Shakespeare Center has announced today that it will present a staged reading of William Shakespeare's lost play The History of Cardenio on Sunday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Va.
(PressZoom.com) - Staunton, Va. - September 16, 2008 - The American Shakespeare Center has announced today that it will present a staged reading of William Shakespeare's lost play The History of Cardenio on Sunday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Va.
Gary Taylor, noted scholar of English Renaissance drama, has re-created the version of Cardenio that will be presented at the Blackfriars. Through painstaking archival research and detailed linguistic analysis, Taylor has aimed to get as close to the original text as possible.
"We are pleased that Gary Taylor, the scholar who revolutionized the way we edit Shakespeare's plays, has reconstructed Shakespeare's lost play about Don Quixote," said Ralph Alan Cohen, director of mission of the American Shakespeare Center.
The original text for Cardenio, which Shakespeare co-wrote with John Fletcher and named for a character from Cervantes's Don Quixote, tells a cross-generational story about old and young love, betrayal and frustration, loss and recovery. The play was performed at the court of King James I and possibly at the original Blackfriars in London. Sometime in the decades after it first appeared in 1612, the text disappeared, leading to a three-century-long search that made Cardenio the Holy Grail of English literary study.
"The lost play was written by two very successful playwrights who knew what they were doing," said Taylor, "and it was performed at court not once but twice - so, this should be a wonderful piece of theatre."
Taylor is professor of English at Florida State University and General Editor of the Oxford editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works (1986, 2005) and of the Collected Works of "our other Shakespeare," Thomas Middleton (2008). Taylor is also the author of numerous books on literature and literary theory, including studies of Shakespeare's collaborator Fletcher.
Taylor's text will be read on stage at the Blackfriars by the resident Equity acting troupe of the American Shakespeare Center.
"A piece of reconstructing the play," said Taylor, "would be to try it out at a theatre like the Blackfriars and with actors who are used to working with Shakespeare in such conditions."
The lost play has been at the center of at least two literary mystery novels in the last decade and has also inspired a new play, based loosely on Cervantes, by playwright Charles Mee and scholar Stephen Greenblatt staged in May and June of this year.
In contrast to that new play -- the story of a modern wedding party in Umbria interrupted by a performance of a play based on the Cardenio story -- Taylor's re-creation of Shakespeare's original Cardenio starts from the famous adaptation of the play put out in the eighteenth century by playwright Lewis Theobald.
"When I'm in the process of undoing the damage that Theobald did in adapting the play." Taylor said. "I have to use the language of Shakespeare's time to undo the language of the eighteenth century."
The performance at the Blackfriars will be Taylor's chance to test his text in a kind of laboratory setting, taking advantage of the Blackfriars stage and the experience of its actors and audiences with Renaissance staging practices.
"Because this is an experiment, it's really up to the people who come and watch this and listen to it," said Taylor. "They're our focus group and our sample that tells us whether this is going to work for much larger international audiences."
The Cardenio presentation is the first in the ASC's 2008/09 series of Bring 'Em Back Alive staged readings intended to introduce today's audiences to Renaissance English plays that have been performed seldom if ever in the modern era. Other readings in the series are all written by unknown Renaissance playwrights: Look About You on November 9, The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey or Caesar's Revenge on March 15 and Edward III (possibly by Shakespeare) on April 19. All of these staged readings will be presented at the Blackfriars Playhouse, open to the public and free of charge.
About the American Shakespeare Center
The American Shakespeare Center, located in Staunton, Va., recovers the joys and accessibility of Shakespeare's theatre, language, and humanity by exploring the English Renaissance stage and its practices through performance and education. The ASC's Blackfriars Playhouse, the world's only re-creation of Shakespeare's indoor theatre, is open year-round for productions of classic plays, which have been hailed by The Washington Post as "shamelessly entertaining" and by The Boston Globe as "phenomenal, bursting with energy." Founded in 1988 as Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, the organization became the American Shakespeare Center in 2005 and can be found online at http://www.ASCstaunton.com.