‘If this is Shakespeare, then I’m Virginia Woolf’

Abstract

A review of the bilingual edition of the play Double Falsehood, or, The Distressed Lovers, prepared by ‘Book Centre Rudomino’. The play is supplied with three presentations: a translator’s introduction by Andrey Korchevsky, a foreword by the most renowned scholar of this highly mysterious play, Brean Hammond (he edited the play for the Arden series in 2010), and an afterword by Dmitry Ivanov, a Russian scholar of the period and translation. Is there much left of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Double Falsehood, and what exactly is it? Can one single out the earliest language stratum stemming from Cardenio? Stylistic and metric similarities aside, can one indeed recognize Shakespeare and Fletcher on the higher level of the whole work: its plot, composition, mise en scfnes, images and ideas? Does Double Falsehood preserve traces of the original composition and plotline of Cardenio? The paper is published on the eve of this extensively commented edition of Double Falsehood becoming available to Russian reading audiences and theatre practitioners.