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by William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Gregory Doran and Antonio Alamo
Set in the heat and dust of Andalusia in seventeenth-century Spain, Cardenio is the story of a friendship betrayed, with all the elements of a thriller: disguise, dishonour and deceit. A woman is seduced, a bride is forced to the altar, and a man runs mad among the mountains of the Sierra Morena. Based on an episode in Don Quixote, the play known as Cardenio by Shakespeare and Fletcher had disappeared but it formed the basis of an 18th-century piece, The Double Falsehood, by Lewis Theobald. Through a masterful act of literary archeology, excising Theobald's additions, returning to the original source material and inserting passages from contemporary Spanish plays on the same theme, RSC Associate Director Gregory Doran has produced a text that is as close to the original as we are likely to see. It is the equivalent of restoring a painting by a master which has been damaged and overpainted by others. Cardenio re-opened the much-loved Swan Theatre in Stratford on Shakespeare's birthday, 23 April in their 50th anniversary year, 2011.