Lost Plays from Early Modern England: Voyage Drama, A Case Study

McInnis, David

doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00817.x

Cited by 17 publications

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“…Travel plays steeped in recent history, including The Battle of Alcazar, Captain Thomas Stukeley, and The Travels of the Three English Brothers appear unusual now, but were once complemented by "The New World's Tragedy" (1595), "The Conquest of the West Indies" (1601), "A Tragedy of the Plantation of Virginia" (1623) and a play about Amboyna (1625). 5 Caution, and a healthy scepticism, is required though. In turning our attention to lost plays, it would not be prudent to insist on a hierarchy of values that cannot be substantiated: it may not be the case that the "best" survived and the "worst" perished.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Day, John -continued "The Maiden's Holiday" 3 "The Spanish Moor's Tragedy" 79 The Travels of the Three English Brothers 3 "Tom Strowd,part three" 121 Dekker,Thomas 108,111,135,141,180,200,129 10,11,116 Edward I 5,63,173 Edward II 258 Edward III 264 "elite" plays 2 Elizabeth I 128,141,149,150,154,156,158,171,187,238,260 26,27 First Folio (Shakespeare) 3,25,55,56,66,79,167,237,238,F. G. 4,32,35,40,49,121 Flecknoe,Richard Love's Dominion 79 Fletcher,John 87,91 "Cardenio" 4,5,6,36,72,81,91,256,266 Copyrighted matrial -978-1-137-40396-4…”

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confidence: 99%

“…"lumping" 4,5,40,41,43,80,[84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100]or Christopher 1,38,88,180,187,188,199,200,202,203, 215 Dido, Queen of Carthage 133 Doctor Faustus 10,57,58,74,209,214,215,235 Edward II 258 The Jew of Malta 44,164,168,176,178,189,209,212, 219 "The Maiden's Holiday" 3 The Massacre at Paris 166,168,170,178,181,189,209,219 Tamburlaine 7,38,63,131,…”

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Introduction: Nothing Will Come of Nothing? Or, What can we Learn from Plays that Don’t Exist?

McInnis¹,

Steggle²

2014

Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England

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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

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