The Wasp: A Trial Flight

Abstract

Who or what is The Wasp? To this day the play remains a mystery. Nobody has seen it acted since the closing of the theatres during the English Civil War. Never has it appeared in print. Eminent scholars of the drama have remained in total ignorance of its contents. Anonymous, undated, The Wasp survives in a single manuscript on which only the barest comments, and even these of doubtful accuracy, have ever been published. To be able to introduce it in this company is a rare privilege, for occasions are few and topics are scarce on which a speaker nowadays may feel so confident that he is better informed than his hearers. What is more remarkable is that such an introduction should be needed, since indeed the most obscure fact about this play is its continuing obscurity. In an age when the least scrap of information bearing on drama of the Elizabethan age comes up for minute scrutiny, it might be supposed that The Wasp was either quite insignificant or quite fabulously arcane. Actually it is a play of uncommon interest and merit; the whereabouts of the manuscript have been known for a full hundred years; and a transcript has been available for the last forty. In this strange case it seems right to preface my account of the play with a brief sketch of the kind of attention, and inattention, it has so far received, if only by way of a cautionary tale for hopeful young research students.