Shakespeare's Lost Play Cardenio and the Literary Canon as Creative Force

In this article, I will reconsider Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio in the context of the ongoing debate about the merits and problems of literary canon formation. I will focus on the remarkable fact that even though very little is known about this play, Cardenio has enjoyed an illustrious afterlife, with interest in the play peaking in the early 2010s in a series of major productions of ‘re-created’ versions of the presumed play by some of the most important Shakespeare companies and a series of academic articles and books by some of the leading scholars of the day. From the vantage point of 2022, I will seek to draw out some of the implications of this curious phenomenon. To my mind, the lost play illustrates how, to borrow from Falstaff, Shakespeare was not only creative himself but the cause that creativity is in others — so much so that his canon, itself the product of the creative adaptation of previous works of art and entertainment, has become a wellspring of inspiration for current-day theatre practitioners and other artists, as well as for scholars who have been pushed to innovate ever new methods of inquiry and analysis to get to the heart of the Shakespearean mystery. My argument will be that this is particularly evident in the case of Cardenio, where the potent combination of a well-defined place in the Shakespeare canon, a known and reputable source in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and the (almost) complete absence of the original text have sparked an explosion of creative activity. This shows that literary canons can, under the right circumstances, be liberating rather than restrictive.