Court records from 1613 show the King’s Men were paid to perform a play called Cardenio, and a 1653 Stationers’ Register entry credits it to Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare. The words themselves have vanished. This episode treats the play as a literary cold case, examining why the unreliable publisher Humphrey Moseley’s claim is taken seriously, John Fletcher’s proven collaborations with Shakespeare and his taste for Cervantes, and the tight timeline created by Thomas Shelton’s 1612 English translation of Don Quixote.

The conversation retells the Cardenio episode from the Sierra Morena, with Lucinda’s hidden dagger at the altar and the reunion at a country inn, then turns to Lewis Theobald’s 1727 Double Falsehood, the three manuscripts he never produced, the missing Quixote subplot, and the stylometric analysis that finds Fletcher’s fingerprints but only a faint Shakespeare signal. It also covers Michael Wood’s clues, the Arden Shakespeare edition of 2010, Gary Taylor’s attempted unadaptation, and Charles Hamilton’s rejected claim that the grisly Second Maiden’s Tragedy is the missing play.

• The 1613 court payments and the 1653 copyright entry that anchor the play’s existence
• Why Fletcher’s Cervantes obsession makes the collaboration plausible
• Double Falsehood: neoclassical smoothing that may have edited Shakespeare out
• Stylometry, feminine endings and compound words as digital forensics for authorship
• The Second Maiden’s Tragedy theory and the productions that sold it under Shakespeare’s name