Where to Find Lost Plays

Abstract

We are committing a lot of energy and ingenuity to the task of maximizing our knowledge of the lost drama of the English Renaissance. This wholly admirable project, which will extend our understanding of the period’s dramatic culture in significant ways, is grounded in a kind of despair: we accept that these plays have gone for good as literary artefacts that can ever again be read or performed, and so we do what we can as historians to snatch back knowledge of them out of the abyss of oblivion, collating our often scanty direct evidence with contextual material and thereby moving towards a hypothesis about their broad content. But for the most part, a play’s “lostness” is not, by definition, an inherent characteristic or even a necessarily irrecoverable situation. Most lost plays are lost not in that they are not extant, but in that they are not known to be extant — which means, in effect, not listed as extant in the current standard reference work on the subject. The condition of “lostness” has changed over the years as the successive reference works have become more comprehensive, running in apostolic succession from Gerard Langbaine’s An Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) to W. Carew Hazlitt’s A Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays (1892) to Alfred Harbage’s Annals of English Drama (1940) and its revised edition by Samuel Schoenbaum (1964), and perhaps now — though it’s not for me to say — my own British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue (ten volumes, 2012 and ongoing).