What, if anything, can we say about the Renaissance drama that does not survive? And how much of it is there? One could start by considering a special case, that of the early modern commercial theatres. It has been estimated that, in the lifetime of the commercial playhouses, roughly 1567 to 1642, around 3,000 different plays must have been written and staged in them: and that of these, a minority survive, among them, obviously, the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe and the rest. The latest and most authoritative count puts the number of surviving plays at 543. But among the remainder are many identifiable "lost plays", typically preserved in the form of a title in Philip Henslowe's Diary, or Sir Henry Herbert's Office-Book, or a similar source. The number of identifiable "lost plays" in this category has long been underestimated by scholars. In the twentieth century, for instance, E. K. Chambers noted only 74 lost play-titles in The Elizabethan Stage, to which G. E. Bentley added approximately another 268 in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 1 Alfred Harbage listed around 500 lost commercial-theatre plays in this date range in his Annals of English Drama, a figure endorsed by other scholars including Andrew Gurr. But the latest count of plays in this category suggests that there are now no fewer than 744 identifiable "lost plays" from the commercial theatre in this period. All three of these numbers-3,000 overall, 543 extant, 744 identifiable as lost-elide numerous problems of definition. The first number is, in point of fact, difficult to even approximate, since the available evidence (such as Henslowe and Herbert) is partial and ambiguous, and since it must then be extrapolated across a period which saw rapid and enormous fluctuations in the theatrical environment. The overall estimate offered here, that of Andrew Gurr, is broadly in line with
