Not so whiffy today

Mutterings continued.

We had some nice rain overnight and today - not enough, but. A few more showers are forecast for tomorrow and then it fines up to around 23c for the next few days.

Had two walks across the Zoo today; once in the morning to attend a meeting with the boss to go through our contribution to the Annual Report and again at lunch time. We huddled around the heater in the cafe as it was a might chilly.

There's been some cool stuff in the post over the last couple of days. Yesterday it was the Callan DVD I'd ordered and today it was the goodies from the RSC (program for Much Ado with the Lovely Tamsin Greig, a Complete Works pencil case and box of coloured pencils and the script for Sejanus:His Fall by Ben Johnson.

The RSC is presenting the complete works over the next 12 months, including a play I'd never heard of but has obviously been declared part of the canon - it's called Cardenio and is his second last play, coming between Two Noble Gentlemen and Henry VIII. From The Shakespeare Apocrypha, "More properly a lost play than an apocryphal one, Cardenio was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1653, as being by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Contemporary documents indicate that there was such a play, and it existed around the time when Shakespeare was writing, and indeed collaborating with Fletcher.

In the 18th century, Theobald claimed to have revised and adapted the play as Double Falsehood; this was initially regarded quite sceptically, but is now being looked on more favourably following recent analysis and research, beginning with Stefan Kukowski in 1991. Certainty is not possible, but it looks likely that Theobald had at least something in which both Shakespeare and Fletcher had had a hand when he began work on 'adapting' it into Double Falsehood.

Charles Hamilton claimed in 1994 that another play, The Second Maiden's Tragedy, was the lost Cardenio. This is thought by most to be by Thomas Middleton, and the fact that it is entered separately in Stationers' Register at the same time as Cardenio argues against the identification.

Attribution to Shakespeare: Entry in Stationers' Register and contemporary accounts.
Modern edition: None
Public Access Online edition: None
Trivia: Cardenio is a character in Don Quixote; the author of which, Cervantes, died on the same date as Shakespeare."

Interestingly, they're not doing Edward III, which recently added to the canon; they have done productions in 1999 and 2002.