by Giovanni Greco
It has been said that Cervantes and Shakespeare met. The only certainty is that in the 18th century the London playwright Lewis Theobald staged the comedy Double Falsehood presenting it as the adaptation of Cardenius, a play relating an episode of Don Quixote and attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher. The two authors supposedly wrote and staged the play soon after the publication of the first English translation of Cervantes’ masterpiece. A suggestion strong enough to trigger a reflection on various aspects of translation and theatre.