Scholars have ruled that a play found in the 18th century was written by William Shakespeare in partnership with another dramatist, John Fletcher.

The play called Double Falsehood had previously been dismissed as a forgery but will now be added to the Shakespeare canon.

There are still questions, however, about how much of the play was penned by the Bard and how much by the relatively obscure Fletcher.

Professor Brean Hammond from Nottingham University is one of the world’s leading scholars on Shakespeare and says the authors took turns writing the play.

“I think Shakespeare is probably responsible for very large parts of the first act, the second act and at least half of act three,” he said.

“At that point I think we see another hand taking over and it’s Fletcher.”

The work will be published under the title Double Falsehood even though it is based on the Shakespeare play the History of Cardenio.

Dr Huw Griffiths, a lecturer in early modern literature at Sydney University, says Double Falsehood should be treated as an adaptation.

“We don’t have Cardenio which is the play that it is supposed to be based on, and so really what you’re getting published is the 18th-century adaptation,” he said.

“[It is] carefully kind of annotated in such a way to make readers aware of what elements may or may not be by Shakespeare and/or Fletcher and what elements are clear adaptations.

“So in the absence of proof that it is a fake, to a certain extent we have to kind of think about what elements are Shakespeare and what elements aren’t.”

Debate not over

But Dr Griffiths says the debate about the authenticity of the work is far from over.

“Hopefully we will see performances of it and people other than academics can make their own judgment about whether or not they see elements of Shakespeare in it,” he said.

Dr Griffiths says the original manuscript of Double Falsehood was likely further compromised when it was found early in the 18th century.

“A guy called Tibbald or Lewis Theobald claimed that he had found a manuscript of it and staged it as Double Falsehood,” he said.

“But like a lot of 18th-century Shakespeare adaptations he probably changed it an awful lot, so the only text that we have is a kind of 18th-century adaptation of a supposedly lost Shakespeare play.

“Nevertheless, it is still kind of significant in that it gives us access to something like a Shakespeare play that a lot of people won’t have seen before or read before.”

Professor David Carnegie, an expert of theatre at the University of Wellington, staged the world premiere of Cardenio.

“Basically it is a double love story – two young couples,” he said.

“Things go very badly wrong when a prince betrays his closest male friend and steals his mistress as well as betraying his own mistress.

“Basically everybody goes up into the mountains and goes mad or utterly distraught from love and finally things reach a romantic ending at the finish.”

Professor Carnegie agrees with the Guardian newspaper’s assessment that the ending is terrible to modern ears.

“There is of course a feminist debate about a woman marrying her rapist, and from that point of view it is terrible to modern ears,” he said.

“But if you accept the romantic conventions of the time, then the women actually end up getting what they want, we think.”

Others out there?

Double Falsehood might not be the last lost work according to Professor Evelyn Tribble, the former president of the Australia New Zealand Shakespeare Association.

“In the entire field of renaissance drama, there are far more plays mentioned than we have,” she said.

“What we do know though is that Shakespeare’s people, who were very closely associated with Shakespeare, collected his works.

“These would have been men that acted with him for years. They probably would have done their best to track down anything that was certainly written solely by Shakespeare.

“[But] in fact, they didn’t include a couple of things that were written that seemed to be co-written so much.

“It is not impossible that something more could be found.”