Abstract
The history of print and printing suggests that we should not reduce the history of texts to the history of books : forms, posters, leaflets and catalogs are all non-book texts likely to preserve traces of the existence of lost works. The loss of theatrical texts was the rule in Shakespeare's time. His Cardenio, one of these " works without text ", inspired by Don Quixote, is attested by two documents from the 17th century. In 1653, the play was attributed to a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher (familiar with the work of Cervantes). From the eighteenth century onwards, a publisher represented a work by Christoph Theobald as if it were Shakespeare's lost Cardenio. Shortly afterwards, the myth of the lost but resurrected play was born, to the extent that many performances, particularly in the 1990s, claim to be resurrections of Cardenio. This situation can be explained by : 1. reattribution phenomena from other works ; 2. rewritings based on existing works by Shakespeare ; 3. mixing of plays with elements taken from Cervantes ; 4. philological elimination of Theobaldian elements from Theobald's play in order to recover Shakespeare's supposed " primitive layer ".
