Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers. A play, As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane. Written Originally by W. Shakespeare; And now Revised and Adapted to the Stage By Mr. Theobald, the Author of Shakespeare Restor’d. The second edition

8vo. ff. [3] (blank), pp. [16], 64, ff. [3] (blank). Signatures: A-E⁸. Includes head- and tailpieces and initials.

A play by the minor playwright, poet, and critic Lewis Theobald, whose contributions to editorial theory, especially relating to Shakespeare, are rightly celebrated. This collection has two versions of the play Theobald claimed to have ‘revised and adapted to the stage’ from a manuscript version ‘written originally by W. Shakespeare.’ The present is the ‘second edition’ or issue, which contains the original sheets of the first (same year), with the preliminaries reset, in order to enlarge the preface – including an announcement of Theobald’s intended edition of Shakespeare, which appeared only in 1733. The preliminaries also included a response to ‘doubts’ expressed by readers and playgoers, since Theobald was widely suspected both of having composed the entire text and of inventing the manuscript story and the circumstantial attribution. The second version is an imperfect copy of the first issue (also 1728), with the original preface. While long suspected as a forgery by Lewis Theobald, and as such establishing the climate for forgery-hunting in the 18th century, ‘Double Falsehood’ is now largely regarded as an honest misattribution. The Arden Shakespeare edition edited by Brean Hammond (London, 2010, p. 96) considers this play to be "a further redaction of an adaptation made in the Restoration of a collaborative play called 'The History of Cardenio' by Shakespeare and Fletcher." See also ESTC, T34858; The New Cambridge bibliography of English literature. Cambridge, 1969-1977, II, col. 801.

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