Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare

How should we read a text that does not exist, or present a play the manuscript of which is lost and the identity of whose author cannot be established for certain? Such is the enigma posed by Cardenio – a play performed in England for the first time in 1612 or 1613 and attributed forty years later to Shakespeare (and Fletcher). Its plot is that of a ‘novella’ inserted into Don Quixote, a work that circulated throughout the major countries of Europe, where it was translated and adapted for the t