title: Cardenio or the Second Maiden's Tragedy
author: William Shakespeare
description: What's this--a new Shakespeare play? After a manner of speaking, yes, says autograph expert Charles Hamilton, who last year broke his claim that an untitled, anonymous manuscript in the British Museum Library is the handiwork of the bard of Avon--literally, for the handwriting in the manuscript is Shakespeare's. The play, says Hamilton, is the lost <i>Cardenio</i> and is known among scholars as <i>The Second Maiden's Tragedy</i>, a title that links it to <i>The Maid's Tragedy</i> by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, the latter of whom cowrote <i>Henry VIII</i> and <i>The Two Noble Kinsmen</i>, two late plays already in the Shakespearean canon. More than half the present volume consists of Hamilton's argument for accepting this play as a lost Shakespeare-Fletcher collaboration. Though Hamilton's exposition is well written and absorbing, particularly for fans of literary detection, the play's the thing that'll catch most readers. Written almost entirely in blank verse, it intertwines two plots borrowed from Cervantes' <i>Don Quixote</i>. One's a court tragedy in which a tyrant overthrows a king in order to claim his lady love and, when she chooses death in preference to him, proceeds to woo her corpse; the other's seamy domestic fare in which a husband tries to prove his wife's faithlessness by getting his best friend to seduce her. At the ends of both plots, nearly everyone's dead. More lurid than the late Shakespeare we prize--<i>The Tempest</i> and <i>The Winter's Tale</i>--the play is briskly paced, thoroughly comprehensible, worthy of staging, albeit its grand guignol aspects encourage an over-the-top, theater-of-cruelty approach rather than the romantic realism of most productions of Shakespeare. It's lesser Shakespeare, to be sure, but deep-dyed Shakespeareans will want to read it. Nay, they must. <i>Ray Olson</i>
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  The Second Maiden's Tragedy
  
  
    
    
  Act I  
    
  [Act II  
    
  ](The%20Second%20Maiden%27s%20Tragedy_split_001.html#filepos36818)[Act III  
    
  ](The%20Second%20Maiden%27s%20Tragedy_split_001.html#filepos66329)[Act IV  
    
  ](The%20Second%20Maiden%27s%20Tragedy_split_002.html#filepos83025)[Act V
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  # The Second Maiden's Tragedy
  
  
  ### Thomas Middleton
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Dramatis Personae in order of appearance:
  
  
  The TYRANT, the usurping king
  
  
  GOVIANUS, the deposed king
  
  
  MEMPHONIUS }
  
  
  SOPHONIRUS } nobles
  
  
  HELVETIUS }
  
  
  FIRST and SECOND NOBLES
  
  
  The LADY, daughter to Helvetius, afterwards her spirit
  
  
  VOTARIUS, friend to Anselmus
  
  
  ANSELMUS, brother to Govianus
  
  
  The WIFE to Anselmus
  
  
  LEONELLA, her waiting-woman
  
  
  BELLARIUS, lover to Leonella
  
  
  A GUARD
  
  
  SERVANT to Govianus
  
  
  FIRST and SECOND FELLOWS
  
  
  FOUR SOLDIERS
  
  
  PAGE to Govianus
  
  
  TWO SERVANT