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Hamilton may be clearly wrong in identifying the Second Maiden’s Tragedy as the lost Cardenio, but there remains an important and lingering question: If the handwriting in the Second Maiden’s Tragedy manuscript does belong to William Shakespeare, what does that mean?

Well, it could mean that this is, in fact, a lost play by Shakespeare. It’s almost too easy to conjure up a hypothetical scenario in which Shakespeare and Fletcher, fresh from their success with Cardenio (assuming they actually wrote it), decided to pluck a different story from the pages of the popular Don Quixote and use it as the B-plot in a new play.

Or perhaps Shakespeare somehow ended up scribing the fair copy for one of the scripts purchased by his company. (And perhaps cleaning it up a bit in the process?) In the modern world it’s perhaps too easy to imagine that a shareholder would hold themselves aloof from such a “common” duty, but theater has always seemed to engender a spirit in which everyone pitches in to make the magic happen.

Another possible explanation would be that Shakespeare asked the company’s scribe to write out the fair copy of his will. (This assumes that Hamilton is wrong in claiming that the will was both written and signed in the same hand, but right in claiming that Shakespeare’s will and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy were.)

Of course, even if Hamilton is wrong about the handwriting entirely, some of his other conclusions may have merit. For example, he hypothesized that the play shows clear stylistic signs of having been a collaboration. W.W. Greg, in the Malone Society Reprint edition of the play, similarly hypothesized the potential for two literary correctors working on the manuscript (although both of those correctors were in hands different from the scribe’s).

Hamilton is also likely right in believing that the play was never performed under the title The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. In Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies, for example, Martin Wiggins argues that even George Buc wasn’t referring to it as such. When he wrote “this second Maydens tragedy” he didn’t mean “this [play called] The Second Maiden’s Tragedy“; he meant “this second [play called] The Maiden’s Tragedy“ (in either case referring to the Beaumont/Fletcher play The Maid’s Tragedy written a few years earlier).

It’s certainly true that the script would have originally possessed a paper cover (now lost) which would have contained its proper title. In light of that, some have simply titled the play as they pleased. In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, for example, Julia Briggs published it as The Lady’s Tragedy (after the unnamed protagonist).

And it is, in fact, Thomas Middleton to whom the play is most commonly ascribed in a scholastic consensus which has, if anything, only strengthened over the course of the past decade in response to Hamilton’s claims.

For myself? Middleton seems like the most plausible candidate. I am occasionally teased by the thought that the play might be Massinger’s lost tragedy The Tyrant, but in this I think it likely I’m being led astray by the same temptation I suspect plagued Hamilton: To recover something precious which has been lost.

After all, Massinger didn’t start writing plays until two years after Buc had approved The Second Maiden’s Tragedy for performance.

Originally posted August 2010.

In a thread on the RPGsite (see post #15), Barbatruc proposes an interesting method for tracking torches and lanterns. He later mentions being inspired by Intwischa’s method for tracking ammo. Talysman drops in a little later (post #26) to mention that he does something similar with wands. (Which, I’ll note, is very similar to Numenera‘s artifact depletion roll.)

For my own reference, I’m going to archive these methods here briefly:

LIGHT SOURCES: In OD&D, set aside a d6 for each lit torch and a d24 for each lit lantern. At the beginning of each turn roll all the dice set aside: Anything that comes up 1 goes out and gets marked off the character sheet. (This results in torches and lanterns having by-the-book durations on average, but introduces an element of uncertainty and variability. More importantly, it simplifies bookkeeping.)

INTWISCHA’S AMMO: The PC has an “ammo die” of a size determined by the amount of ammunition they’re carrying. They roll this die with each attack roll and if it comes up 1, their die type decreases by one size. If they purchase ammunition or find a stash of it during the adventure, they can increase the die size instead.

ALTERNATIVE AMMO: Have your PCs buy ammo in lots equal to the die size of the system you’re using. (d20 in 3.5, for example.) When you roll a 1 on your attack roll, mark off one lot of ammo. (Trail of Cthulhu uses a similar mechanic in pulp mode, but when you roll the 1 you’re actually clicking on an empty cylinder and automatically miss. I’m ditching the “critical failure” aspect of the mechanic and just using it to track ammo.)

WANDS: Roll percentile dice. On a roll of 1 or 2, the wand has run out of charges. (Note: This system doesn’t work if you want the PCs to have some method of determining exactly how many charges are left in a wand.)

What I’m seeing here is a cluster of techniques that I think can be trivially generalized to cover any form of consumable that are likely to be carried in large quantities for frequent use. I suspect it’s particularly useful if you can incorporate it into a general resolution mechanic (instead of rolling a separate die on every single check).

Go to Part 1

THE MISSING FLETCHER

Because the 1653 entry in the Stationer’s Register assigns The History of Cardenio to both Fletcher and Shakespeare, Hamilton is forced to acknowledge Fletcher’s involvement in the play. But one rather gets the feeling that he’d rather not be bothered by it.

For example, the entire foundation of his argument rests on two principles: First, that he has identified the handwriting in the manuscript as belonging to Shakespeare. Second, that the script constitutes a rough draft in which the names of the characters had been replaced or removed (prior to the original names being restored).

But if the entire rough draft were written by Shakespeare, what happened to Fletcher’s contribution? Hamilton wants to assign the entirety of the sub-plot to Fletcher (the bit that was actually based on Don Quixote), but if Fletcher wrote it, why is it (according to Hamilton) in Shakespeare’s handwriting? If Shakespeare wrote half the play and Fletcher wrote the other half, then we would expect to find the original manuscript written in two different hands. (For example, the manuscript for Sir Thomas More shows how scenes written by multiple authors would be stitched together into a single, cohesive manuscript before, presumably, being copied out by a scribe.)

IN CONCLUSION

These constitute the major flaws in Hamilton’s argument. But Hamilton’s scholarship is also frequently incoherent in its specific details, as well. And many of these inconsistencies seem to be driven from his need to reach for the conclusion he desires.

For example, when Hamilton feels a need to explain why The Second Maiden’s Tragedy would so drastically deviate from the “source material” of the Cardenio story he starts by trying to expose the “serious flaws of Cervantes as a writer” and, thus, discredit the quality of Cervantes’ original tale. To that end, he writes:

Now, when a distraught maid, armed with a bare bodkin in her bodice, confronts the villain of the piece, the laws of drama require that she use the bodkin, either to stab herself or the villain, or to have the weapon wrested from her in a suspenseful struggle. To permit her to faint is a cheap trick. It is the same shabby device used by otherwise reputable writers of the last century (Thomas Hardy, for example) who, in a concession to Victorian prudery, would “draw the curtain of charity” over any scene that promised to be delectably prurient. (pg. 192)

But just three pages later, this “shabby device” and “cheap trick” has becomes a tour de force on the part of Shakespeare:

The dramatists deftly solved the problem and at the same time astonished and horrified their audience. Cardenio, with naked sword pointed at his beloved’s bosom, rushes at her, but the murderous task is too much for him and he falls in a dead faint at Luscinda’s feet. (pg. 195)

I suspect that a large part of Hamilton’s over-zealousness is born in his hero-worship of Shakespeare. In his Preface to the Play, for example, Hamilton writes:

I urge you to read at least scenes two, three, and four of Act IV, in which the necrophilic Tyrant steals the body of The Lady and the theft is disclosed to her lover, Govianus. Judge for yourself whether the chilling beauty of these nocturnal scenes in the cathedral does not evoke the magic touch of the Wizard of Stratford.

Hamilton’s love for the “Wizard of Stratford” is clear. But this is not scholarship. This is blind faith coupled to undying adulation.

Go to Part 6

Originally posted August 2010.