The stamp of Shakespeare's on it

Here are some lines by William Shakespeare:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Are the following lines Shakespeare, too? That is the question.

I do not see that fervour in the maid

Which youth and love should kindle. She consents,

As 'twere, to feed without an appetite;

Tells me she is content and plays the coy one,

Like those that subtly make their words their ward,

Keeping address at distance.

The first set of lines is from The Merchant of Venice.

The second is from The Double Falsehood, a play by Lewis Theobald published in 1728. Theobald claimed he based the play on old manuscripts by Shakespeare.

Scholars have known about this claim for centuries. Many have discounted Theobald, who, to be kind, was less than Shakespearean. Some just figure it's all a hoax, a forgery.

Well, move over, Hamlet. An edition of Double Falsehood was published yesterday in England as part of the eminent Arden Shakespeare series. The U.S. edition will appear on May 17. Brean Hammond, professor of English at the University of Nottingham in England, showed Arden his decade of literary detective work - and the publisher was persuaded.

We're not talking about proof. Just about being convinced there's a chance. And both Hammond and the Arden folks say, guardedly, that they are. "There could be Shakespeare here," says Richard Proudfoot, general editor of the Arden series.

So, we may have not exactly a "new Shakespeare play," but a play that turns out to have a lot of Shakespeare - "fossil verses," Hammond calls them - in it.

Contacted at his office, Hammond said that "if you put a gun to my head, I'd say there's a 95 percent chance that there is Shakespeare here." True to the nature of academe, not everyone agrees. Paul Bertram, professor emeritus at Rutgers, says, "I'd say the chance is one in a million - and that's the highest I'll go." James Shapiro, professor of English at Columbia University, says he believes "there's a good chance there's something here."

Like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber, let's choose to see one in a million as a real chance. If so, how could this have happened? Double Falsehood is based on a story from Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, involving a noble named Cardenio.

An English translation appeared in 1612. Payrolls from London theaters showed actors were paid in 1613 for performing in a play titled Cardenio, by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, with whom he collaborated at the end of his career. No manuscript of Cardenio survives - it's the most famous Shakespeare play no one's ever seen.

If there was a play, there must have been a manuscript, and 125 years later, it may have fallen into Theobald's hands.

To read Double Falsehood, so goes the claim, is to see Cardenio through the smeary lens of Theobald's editing and reshaping.

When Hammond reread Double Falsehood, he realized that much that's now in prose wasn't in prose at all - it was iambic pentameter smooshed into prose. (Iambic pentameter, as perhaps you learned in high school, is the verse form Shakespeare used in much of his playwriting.)

The second-verse passage above is in iambic pentameter - but in Theobald's text it was prose. "I tried to recast as many poetic passages as I could discover back into the original verse, and I found it quite easy, really," says Hammond. Fletcher/Shakespeare fossil verses?

Hammond amassed outside evidence, such as the 1613 payrolls, and evidence from within the play. It's fairly easy to differentiate between Theobald's circa-1728 English and 1613-era English.

And between Fletcher and Shakespeare. Since the 1950s, scholars have used quantitative and computerized methods to distinguish one author's work from another's. Thanks to Bertram and others, we have a fairly strong sense of where and how Fletcher differs from Shakespeare style and language.

Hammond doesn't buy the Theobald-as-forger idea. Theobald-as-editor, yes. "Theobald added some things and cut other things out," he says, "including things that no longer suited the taste of the times. He wasn't as careful as we might be in preserving the 'authentic' Shakespeare." Shakespeare - that is, Shakespeare the cultural product - hadn't been established quite yet. Yet for all his mucking about, Theobald may have left a fair amount of Jacobean-era work pretty much as he found it.

Stephen Smith, associate professor of English at La Salle University, says that "this is a great reminder of how recent our notions of copyright and intellectual property rights are. For all we know, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were sitting around swapping lines and scenes in some Southwark tavern."

Shapiro, author of the forthcoming Contested Will, about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, says, "We can't see him any more as the solitary author of Shakespeare in Love, sitting all alone, writing in his garret, Genius at Work. It doesn't fit the facts."

The facts are that Will Shakespeare was a team player. In his earliest plays, some parts clearly are by a neophyte and others by a more assured hand - possibly Christopher Marlowe, another of the best poets and playwrights in English. Macbeth has bits by someone else, and two last plays, Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, have, as mentioned, Fletcher's help. Fifteen years Shakespeare's junior, he may have taken on the bones and tendons of the play, while the senior writer took the big set speeches.

Like his fellow pros, Shakespeare helped tidy up or add to older plays. That was part of the life. Think of Hollywood, and how many writers mess with a script before the first shot. A manuscript of a play titled Sir Thomas More of 1591-93 contains lines in handwriting very like Shakespeare's - plus, it sounds like him. He's only one of at least five writers in there scribbling.

Shakespeare did a lot of work we don't have, don't know we have, or will never have. Some so-far-anonymous plays, notably Edward III from around 1596, ring with a voice that sounds very familiar. Smith says "many scholars believe Shakespeare had a big hand in that one - that's a candidate that has withstood the test." Sir Thomas More and Edward III now appear in some collected Shakespeares.

Wonder whether Double Falsehood will ever see the stage? Wonder no further. "We're going to get a chance to see it," says Hammond. Unconfirmed news reports say that the Royal Shakespeare Company is planning a 2011 production. "They'll be including some Spanish material, too, which is brilliant: Cervantes meets Shakespeare."

Carmen Khan, president of the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre, says her troupe probably won't be putting on Double Falsehood soon. "I'm definitely interested in reading it," she says. "We might do a staged reading for aficionados who come to our seminars. The supremacy, craft and excitement of Shakespeare's writing, as in Macbeth, which we're doing now, is what matters to me."

And everyone else. There's no hope, 282 years after the fact, of cinching the argument, but the fascination remains: detective hunt, fossil verses, traces of a voice across the ages. And it's fun to imagine. As Shakespeare himself wrote: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."