Quixote on the English Stage: A New Glimpse of The History of Cardenio?

Abstract

On October 29, 1630, the diplomat and parliamentarian Sir Thomas Roe wrote to Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen. He had been a member of Elizabeth’s household probably since her coming into England after her father’s accession, and had continued to be a correspondent and ally after her marriage and departure from England in 1613. On this occasion he wrote concerning the recent plague season:

[A]nother general calamitye, we have had no playes this six moneths, & that makes our grate men see the goodness of them…: for if our heads had beene filled with the loves of Piramies & Thisbe, or the various fortunes of Don Quixotte, we should never have cared, who had made peace or war but on the stage. But now every foole is enquiring what the French doe in Italy, & what they breake in Germany.¹

This piece of correspondence has been available in easily accessible sources, but has not been previously noted in relation to the nexus of evidence that begins to define the shape of the lost King’s Men play, The History of Cardenio. In talking about the absence of plays (the theaters were prohibited from opening because of plague) and giving examples of staged narratives that would fill up the mental space “every foole” now devotes to political speculation, Roe refers here quite clearly to a play that includes Don Quixote, not to the novel, and he refers to the character and his “fortunes,” rather than to the title of the play, for a title cannot have “fortunes.”²