Dramatic license

With no script to follow, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt learned to improvise: He co-wrote a comedy inspired by the Bard's notorious lost play, 'Cardenio'

tephen Greenblatt did the strangest thing. He wrote a play.

Not just any play. In a delightfully bold leap of imagination, Greenblatt, Harvard's glam Shakespeare scholar, and his good friend, the distinguished playwright Charles Mee, have concocted a frothy delight inspired by Shakespeare's legendary lost play, "Cardenio," that opens Wednesday at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.

"Cardenio," which was written by Shakespeare and his young collaborator, John Fletcher, was performed at court in London twice in 1613 and then disappeared. Its mythical status has been pure catnip to Shakespeare scholars like Greenblatt ever since. Greenblatt calls it "the Holy Grail" of Shakespeare's theatrical oeuvre.

"Every time you think you get close to this thing, it gets snatched out of reach," says Greenblatt. With the absence of any manuscript, he adds, "Cardenio" is "the only one of Shakespeare's plays for which we have no textual clue."

Rather than try to piece together something approaching the text as Shakespeare may have intended it, Greenblatt and Mee made a different choice - to embed sexual intrigue and other themes from the play in a contemporary romantic comedy set in Italy, where the professor and the playwright dreamed up the production.

"Cardenio" was both a hoot to co-write and a serious venture for Greenblatt.

"This was a way to stay fresh," he explains. The steady demands of Harvard, which he describes as "one of those institutions with heavy footprints," led him to consider how to stay intellectually alive and, more important, widen his vision as he ages.

"This is just what he should be doing at this point in his career," says James Shapiro, Columbia University's Shakespeare luminary.

"It was a marvelous, destabilizing effect on my life," says Greenblatt about the writing experience. "I've been studying plays all my life, and I'm particularly interested in what Shakespeare does. It's not that he invents a play from nothing - he often rips somebody off."

Greenblatt, for the record, is at or near the apex among Shakespeare scholars today. He has taught Shakespeare at Berkeley and Harvard for years. He is also a public intellectual who carries scholarship into the public arena like a sherpa. His recent work, "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" was the rare academic book that became a bestseller.

The man is precise in his language and dress. He arrives for an interview in a well-cut blue blazer, a collarless white shirt in the manner of Iranian diplomats, and gray flannels. His hair is cropped, and he cannot be 64.

The "Cardenio" saga is a humdinger. It begins with Cervantes's "Don Quixote," which was translated into English in 1612, a year before Shakespeare and Fletcher wrote their "Cardenio," which was performed on May 20 and July 9 of 1613 and then went missing.

Scholars agree that Fletcher and Shakespeare had lifted a character named Cardenio and his small story arc from "Don Quixote," in which Cardenio tests the chastity of his wife by asking a friend to seduce her.

In 1653, one Humphrey Moseley registered in London something called "The History of Cardenio" to the Stationer's Register, the record book that allowed publishers to document their right to produce a work. He lists the authors as "Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare."

Greenblatt, among many scholars, believes that Moseley had a Shakespeare manuscript. Adds Shapiro, "No one would go to the expense and labor to do that without the play in hand. Moseley had a manuscript of a play but it was never published."

Then in 1728, a noted and controversial Shakespeare editor named Lewis Theobald produced a play he titled "Double Falsehood, or The Distressed Lovers." He claimed to have three manuscripts of the original "Cardenio" and essentially rewrote the early 17th century play for an 18th century audience. If you believe Theobald, he was writing from the original Shakespeare play.

But.

"Theobald had many enemies," says Greenblatt, "and the majority of opinion until the mid-20th century was that he probably was lying. Then a set of complicated, computer-based studies of Theobald's language was done, and something weird about 'Double Falsehood' emerged. Quite a lot of the language was not Theobald's ordinary language."

Given the debate, the authors chose to triangulate Theobald with "Don Quixote" and Shakespeare to create "Cardenio."

"So this is, 'Here's what the play might have been,' " says Mee. The result: nuggets of Shakespeare mixed with 21st century language and riffs. (There is, for example, a discussion about vibrators.)

Greenblatt believes that computer analysis supports the theory that Theobald was not a fraud, but is by no means proof. Still, he believes that buried within "Double Falsehood" is some of Shakespeare's "Cardenio."

Then in 1770, a newspaper article places a "Cardenio" manuscript in the library of Covent Garden, London's theatrical mecca. But the place burned down in 1808, only burnishing the Cardenio legend. (It was later rebuilt.)

Enter Greenblatt and Mee, who in 1999 met at a conference at Bellagio, the sublime spot on Lake Como in northern Italy where thinkers and writers get to think and write - one of life's great gigs. They became fast friends.

Greenblatt was in the first group in 2002 to win a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. "You don't apply for it, you just get it," like a MacArthur grant," he says, and it is, in his words, "gigantic money" - reportedly more than a million dollars.

"But," he adds, "you can't use it to fix your house like a MacArthur."

He first asked Mee to write a play, for which he would be handsomely compensated. Mee said no, but suggested they write a play together. Done deal. "The whole conversation took about 14 seconds," recalls Mee, who has lived in Brooklyn for 15 years.

"Mee and I," as Greenblatt jokes, holed up in an Umbrian farmhouse in 2004 amid the isolated beauty between Arezzo and Assisi to write. They'd play with ideas over coffee each morning and then take the rest of the day off. After a couple of weeks, recalls Mee, he had a 20-page outline. By 2005, they had a basic script in hand.

Their confection tells the story of a young couple in the present who arrive at - you guessed it - an Umbrian farmhouse to be married. The parents of the groom, both actors, arrive with a lost Shakespeare play titled "Cardenio" as a wedding present - based largely on "Double Falsehood" - snippets of which are staged within the larger play.

In the meantime, the groom falls in love with another woman and the bride falls in love with the best man.

"Do they live happily ever after?" asks Greenblatt. "We don't know. Shakespeare always left that unanswered." And that's exactly what Greenblatt and Mee do.

How much Shakespeare is in their play? "A lot and nothing," says Greenblatt. "There is nothing directly quoted from him, but there are a lot of Shakespeare's devices."

He and Mee used what Greenblatt calls "a Shakespearean tool kit for comedy" to invest the play with the feel of the author. This includes the play within a play (a classic Shakespeare conceit), a refuge for the characters away from a city, and what Greenblatt calls "a peculiar way to make couples mirror each other."

"The question was, 'How can we make this have some of the urgency of Shakespeare?' " he says. "We tried to put in it a current of pleasure and music and love, and also a sense of moral and erotic urgency."

Back home, Mee and Greenblatt continued to send revised versions back and forth. Somehow, there was zero conflict in this creative process. (Both want to write another together.)

The writers also took wonderful liberties with the script. Greenblatt gave characters the names of people he knows, and the pair even put into the play the recipes of the cook who actually served them during their Umbrian idyll.

They also follow the structure favored by Shakespeare where a play begins as a stable situation is about to descend into chaos. Greenblatt notes that most plays begin with stability, only to be upended when instability is injected later in the story.

"He had been telling this story long before he read Cervantes," says Greenblatt. "In 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' there are two men who are very close, and a woman. They come apart over her. Think of 'Jules et Jim.' "

"Cardenio" may be staged in New York. But the play has already traveled. Greenblatt contacted 20 theaters around the world about staging their own versions in their own languages imbued with their own cultural norms. They would work off of translations of "Double Falsehood" and his and Mee's "Cardenio."

"I told them to use the materials as we did to write your own play tied to your own theatrical culture," says Greenblatt. Mee is a perfect pick here because he champions the adaptation of his works, several of which have been produced at the ART

Versions of "Cardenio" have been performed so far in Yokohama and Calcutta with more to come in Madrid and Zagreb. Each production is wildly different. The play in Yokohama was called "Motorcycle Don Quixote" and took place in a grimy garage. The one in Calcutta, "Jaha Chai," involved arranged marriages, Greenblatt says.

"This is just what I wanted," he adds.

Back to Cambridge. Will "Cardenio" slay them at the ART when it opens officially Wednesday night?

"Si vede," he answers in Italian. "We"ll see."

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.