New play added to Shakespeare canon

In 1727 an enterprising lawyer and writer of pantomimes with ambitions to become a leading figure in the theatre staged his greatest coup: a lost original play by William Shakespeare. The London Journal greeted Lewis Theobald’s production ecstatically, exclaiming: “The good old Master of the English Drama is by a kind of Miracle recall’d from his Grave, and given to us once again.” However, for most of the three centuries since its debut, Double Falsehood; or, the Distrest Lovers has been ridiculed as a hoax or just disregarded. Yesterday that changed when The Arden Shakespeare, one of the best regarded scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s plays, published Double Falsehood, endorsing its credentials and making it available in a fully annotated form for the first time in 250 years.