They're known as the sniffer dogs of Shakespeare's plays - unstoppable academics who refuse to admit that the Bard's famous lost plays are really, truly gone forever.
You've never heard of Shakespeare's historical romance Cardenio?
That's hardly surprising, since it was performed just twice, in 1613, and then failed to crack the first authoritative text of the playwright's works published in 1623. But four centuries of absence haven't been enough to discourage Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University in England, who yesterday claimed that he had turned up the missing play.
According to Prof. Hammond, his rediscovered Cardenio was not so much lost as lurking in plain sight - buried within a popular 18th-century play called Double Falsehood or The Distressed Lovers that was written by an abrasive editor of Shakespeare's works named Lewis Theobald.
For 10 years, Prof. Hammond has been studying the language, style and structure of Theobald's play, staged as an "improved" version of the original.
He's now certain that Theobald's part in authorship has been overstated at the Bard's expense.
"I am convinced this is Shakespeare," he said. "If you ask how many plays he wrote, the answer used to be 37. Now it's 38. The canon has been increased."
Cardenio's stock is definitely rising. It will be published next week in Prof. Hammond's new edition for the definitive Arden Shakespeare series, taking its place alongside such easily authenticated crowd-pleasers as Hamlet, and other plays that have had a rockier road to canonical acceptability such as Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles.
But hold on a second. Yesterday Lewis Theobald, today Will Shakespeare - is it really that easy?
Even Prof. Hammond, while convinced that he's done some good Will hunting, becomes more tentative when he's pressed on identifying exactly how much of Theobald is Shakespeare in disguise.
"This is a play where Shakespeare's hand can be discovered in the first half," he said yesterday, noting that Shakespeare had a younger collaborator named John Fletcher who finished off the play before Theobald moved in more than a century later.
To connoisseurs of dramatic greatness, that doesn't sound a lot more affirming than his more scholarly assertion that Double Falsehood is "a genuine Shakespearean relic with Bardic provenance."
So what's a dedicated Shakespeare fan to make of it all?
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A brief history
Nothing about Shakespeare's work is cut-and-dried, at least by modern standards of authorship. The playwright didn't bother about publishing his plays, and even in his lifetime they were reworked by actors or crafted with collaborators.
Cardenio took its highly elaborate story of star-crossed lovers from Cervantes's Don Quixote, which had just been translated into English in 1612. A year later, Shakespeare and Fletcher's play is recorded as having been performed at the royal court. But then it disappears - except for beguiling references among copyrighted titles listed in publishers' catalogues. In 1727, Theobald stages Double Falsehood, which he calls "a production of Shakespeare" based on three manuscripts of a Shakespeare-Fletcher play. Names have been changed, and bawdiness has been bowdlerized for prim 18th-century tastes, but the plot bears a close resemblance to the Cardenio story in Don Quixote - separated pairs of lovers with a Shakespearean propensity for disguises and misadventures are reunited against all the odds.
The play's a hit, but Theobald's influential enemy Alexander Pope (whose scholarly work Theobald had previously derided) condemns the published version. "Pope had a lot of clout," said Prof. Hammond. "So when he rubbished Double Falsehood, it became easy to dismiss Theobald's claim that the play was Shakespearean as a hoax."
(Re)discovery
Double Falsehood/Cardenio languished in obscurity until the 20th century. But then, modern scholars who studied the working conditions of early 17th-century theatre began to appreciate how much of Shakespeare's work was the product of collaboration with men like Fletcher.
