Shakespeare at Otterton Mill?
News of the staging of a ‘lost’ Shakespeare play is always guaranteed to bring in audiences keen to judge whether it matches work by England’s best-loved playwright. Cardenio, performed on Saturday 20 June by TACT, a brand new, Cambridge University-based theatre company in the courtyard of Otterton Mill, just a few miles from Budleigh, is now so well-known as a lost Shakespeare play that there are even popular novels about it: last year saw the publication of Jean Rae Baxter's Looking for Cardenio and Jennifer Lee Carrell's The Shakespeare Secret. Cardenio’s plot revolves around four lovers: Henriquez, libertine; Violante, abandoned; Julio, betrayed; Leonora, pursued. “Love has never been so complicated,” say the production team. The original re-working of the play by Bernard Richards is perhaps as close as we will ever get to the truth about this ‘lost’ Shakespeare work. Its origins are, as they say, shrouded in mystery. It seems to have been performed at Court in 1612, but no...