For thirty summers the Harrisburg Shakespeare Festival (now Company) has performed in Harrisburg’s Reservoir Park. On a hill several blocks to the east of Pennsylvania’s capitol building and of the Susquehanna River, the park is an idyllic setting for Shakespeare’s plays, especially his comedies. A notable experiment occurred in 1999, when the troupe produced The Taming of the Shrew as an homage to such 1950s black-and-white television comedies as The Honeymooners. The actors wore pale makeup and costumes of black and white and grey, and the sets matched those monochrome shades.

This clever presentation comes to mind when reading the Royal Shakespeare Company’s text of Cardenio. Historians are at heart stage directors, setting scenes and arraying characters before an audience, that is, their readers. When it comes to Shakespeare, even Edward Gibbon, writing his memoirs around 1790, confessed to “idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman.”

Cardenio is said to be a lost play by William Shakespeare. In 1613, the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting company, received payment for something called Cardenno; later in the same account book it appears as Cardenna. In 1653 Humphrey Moseley entered with the Stationers’ Register in London a list of plays, including The History of Cardenio, noting its authors as John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. However, it was never printed.

In 1727, Lewis Theobald, a London attorney, claimed to have adapted Cardenio for the then modern stage, and he called his adaptation Double Falsehood. Theobald said he worked from the original manuscript of the play, but if it ever existed, it has not survived.

From the first, people doubted Theobald’s claim. While some suggested he had cobbled together a pastiche of Shakespearean words and phrases to pay tribute to the Bard, others accused him of outright fraud and forgery. After all, in addition to being a lawyer, Theobald edited works by Fletcher and by Shakespeare and thus knew their writings forward and back. Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have debated the question, some saying they have discerned within Theobald’s lines traces of verbiage that must have originated with Fletcher and Shakespeare.

In 2010, Brean Hammond edited Double Falsehood for the Arden Shakespeare series, arguing that it stands as a faithful version of Cardenio. In 2011, the Royal Shakespeare Company produced their interpretation of the play. The RSC issued a paperback to go along with a production they billed as “Cardenio: Shakespeare’s ‘Lost Play’ Re-imagined.” They set it in Shakespearean times, and from the two trailers available online, it looks like it was an excellent rendition. If it proves to be Theobald’s fabrication, it would be the best Shakespeare play that Shakespeare never wrote.

The plot comes from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. In 1612, Thomas Shelton published an English translation of Don Quixote, and believers in the Shakespearean authorship of Cardenio say he must have seen a copy of it. What Shakespeare would have read in Shelton’s translation was a tale about Cardenio, a wholesome, even naïve, young Andalusian nobleman, whose love for Luscinda, a beautiful young noblewoman, is thwarted by his erstwhile friend, Fernando. Although Fernando is secretly married to the daughter of a wealthy farmer, he seeks to marry Luscinda. Cardenio, sent on an errand by Fernando, learns of the planned wedding and hurries home hoping to prevent it.

Much the same plot drove a successful silent film of 1924, Harold Lloyd’s Girl Shy. Throughout the 1920s, along with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd was the leading star of silent comedies. These days, even people who have never heard his name have seen the famous image from his film from 1923, Safety Last!, where he is hanging for dear life from the hands of a large outdoor clock.

A native of a small town in southeastern Nebraska, Lloyd grew up in San Diego, California. In those years around 1900, a formative influence on him was a series of anthologies compiled for students, McGuffey’s Readers. According to William Cahn’s Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy (1964), from studying those books, what impressed young Harold was the importance of “self-reliance, determination, dependability, thrift, and the triumph of justice over all obstacles.” To personify those virtues, Lloyd developed a bespectacled character who seemed to be everyone’s clean-cut and earnest young man next door.

Here I leave it to others to track down the extent of Lloyd’s knowledge of Cervantes. In Girl Shy, Lloyd’s character, also named Harold, is an introverted tailor who deals with a stammer. He secretly adores Mary Buckingham, a wealthy young lady, and he hopes to impress her by publishing a best-selling book. His book is an idealistic guide for wooing women, and to Harold’s dismay, the publisher accepts it as a satiric novel. Meanwhile, Mary becomes betrothed to Ronald DeVore, a wealthy young man, and Harold discovers that Ronald is already married. After a breakneck race across town, Harold arrives in time to stop the bigamous wedding.

The town that Harold races across is Los Angeles, California, and its hills and oaks and palms are analogous to those features in Cardenio’s Spain. Film historian John Bengtson has documented in his book, Silent Visions (2011), the locations Lloyd used for Girl Shy. Although the movie is now in the public domain and available online, musing over Bengtson’s book will help a director who wants to set Cardenio in the world of a 1920s silent film.

Needless to say, such a production would not be silent, but it could echo the Harrisburg Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew with monochrome sets and costumes. Cardenio himself could wear Lloyd’s trademark horn-rim glasses and boater hat; Luscinda could have her hair done in elegant 1920s finger waves.

Still, doubts linger; maybe Cardenio never existed. In the Winter, 2011, issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, Tiffany Stern quoted in full the 1613 account entry mentioning Cardenio. The players got paid for presenting “sixe severall playes viz one playe called a badd beginnge makes a good endinge, One other called ye Capteyne, One other the Alcumist, One other Cardenno, One other The Hotspurr: And Benidicte and Betteris.”

She astutely noted that the word “Cardenno” occurs just as titles of plays switch to names of characters in plays. What scholars seem not to have considered is that the registry from 1653 could be unrelated, and that “Cardenno/Cardenna” could simply come from a clerk, who could not spell “Beatrice,” mishearing and mangling “Cordelia.” If so, what the King’s Men got paid for was none other than King Lear.