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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

This article concerns a lost play whose title is partially preserved in 'List D' of British Library: Cotton MS. Tiberius E.X. Connecting together existing scholarly work on other plays on the list, and combining this with evidence from the computer database EEBO-TCP, the essay proposes a new complete title for the play; discusses its possible sources in Spanish history; and addresses anew questions of its date, company provenance, and even authorship. The Play-list British Library: Cotton MS. Tiberius E.X. is a manuscript of Sir George Buc's History of Richard III. The History is written on the recto of each sheet and, on some of the verso sides, there are various cancelled pieces of writing Fig. 1. The manuscript fragment (f 247). © British Library Board (Cotton MS. Tiberius. E.X.). 'If Mr. Marcham has read the manuscript rightly, I cannot identify the play', comments Chambers of the fourth item on the list. Similarly, G.E. Bentley raises the possibility of palaeographical error, calling it '[t]his mutilated title-whatever it may have been in its perfect form, the last three letters are doubtful'. 4 Although neither Chambers nor Bentley explicitly says so, the reason for their doubt is partly because the letters are difficult, but partly too because it seems impossible to think of any plausible play title that might start with these letters. As a result of its enigmatic partial title, the fourth play on the list has remained firmly unknown, and is referred to, when referred to at all, as Henry the Una. In recent years, Benjamin Griffin has described the record as 'impossible to interpret confidently'. 5 Since Bentley, there have been two significant, and hitherto unconnected, advances in scholarship relating to this list. The first was made by Tucker Orbison, who in 1971 published a record showing that in 1619 William Rowley's company, the Prince's Men, performed at the Middle Temple a comedy, which seems to have involved extensive musical interludes, called The Bridegroom and the Madman. Orbison plausibly identified The Bridegroom and the Madman with the second title on List D. 6 As well as giving a faint flavour of that lost play, Orbison's record seems decisively to establish its company provenance. The second, independent advance is in the form of the Taylor/ Lavagnino Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, whose various contributing editors make several piecemeal adjustments to received wisdom about Wit at Several Weapons, The Old Law, and A Fair Quarrel, affecting issues including authorship, date, and company provenance. The combined effect of the changes made by the edition is to give a much more focussed sense of the homogeneity of the plays in the first section of List D. 7 The following table, then, shows the current best guesses as to title, authorship, company provenance, and date for the plays in the first section of List D. For the three plays with Middleton associations, these dates, author attributions, and company attributions are taken from the 2007 Collected Works; for The Bridegroom and the Ma...

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