succeeded in so utterly obliterating the character of the man that he is known by those who do not work with Shakespeare only as a dunce, as a dusty, pedantic, and dull witted scribe. In this, "The Dunciad" affected Theobald's reputation for posterity much as Dryden's "Mac Flecknoe" affected Thomas Shadwell's. Double Falshood In 1727, Theobald produced a play Double Falshood; or The Distrest Lovers, which he claimed to have based on a lost play by Shakespeare. Pope attacked it as a fraud, but admitted in private that he believed Theobald to have worked from, at the least, a genuine period work. Modern scholarship continues to be divided on the question of whether Theobald was truthful in his claim. Double Falshood may be based on the lost Cardenio, by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, which Theobald may have had access to in a surviving manuscript, which he revised for the tastes of the early eighteenth century. However, Theobald's claims about the origins of the play are not consistent and have not been uniformly accepted by critics. Selected plays The Persian Princess (1708) The Perfidious Brother (1716) Harlequin Sorcerer (1725) Apollo and Daphne (1726) Double Falsehood (1727) The Rape of Proserpine (1727) Orestes (1731) The Fatal Secret (1733) See also Shakespeare's editors Notes References Taylor, Gary (1989). Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. London: Hogarth Press. . External links 1688 births 1730s 1744 deaths English book editors Early editions of Shakespeare Shakespearean scholars 18th-century English non-fiction writers 18th-century English male writers 18th-century British dramatists and playwrights