Yet only a fraction of the total number of plays performed in England at this time managed to find their way into print, and the view the surviving playbooks offer of the theatrical life of the age is therefore inevitably partial. There were numerous difficulties and disincentives – practical, legal, commercial – which enterprising publishers wishing to move into the theatrical market were obliged to face. The publication of play texts was frowned on by ecclesiastical authorities in England, who strictly regulated its procedures, and had licence to ban and to burn works which they deemed offensive. Playbooks furthermore did not rank highly with serious collectors: Sir Thomas Bodley notoriously instructed his librarian Thomas James to ignore such ‘flim-flam’ items when purchasing books for his great new depository in Oxford. The theatrical companies themselves were in two minds about the benefits of releasing for publication the scripts upon which their livelihood depended. Nor, for that matter, were the companies always reliable curators of these precious commodities. In the 1630s the dramatist Thomas Heywood complained that many of his own plays, ‘by shifting and changing of companies, have been negligently lost; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors, who think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in print’. From time to time, authors and their companies – fearing reprisals from the authorities over works of a seemingly slanderous or libellous nature – must deliberately have destroyed play scripts which they knew might land them in legal or political trouble. Such, almost certainly, was the fate of the now vanished play by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, whose performance prompted the closure by the Privy Council in 1597 of all of the London playhouses, and an order – happily, never acted upon – for their permanent destruction.

Ben Jonson, by George Vertue (1684-1786) after Gerard van Honthorst (1590-1656) via Wikimedia Commons

Recent technological developments, in a further historical twist, have sharpened and assisted scholarly interest in the ‘lost’ plays of Shakespeare’s England. The creation of vast new electronic databases such as Google Books and Early English Books Online, along with digitised daily records of theatre managers Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, and the office-books of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, has made possible rapid and widespread searching of the theatrical archives, the matching of key phrases and titles, and the discovery of often illuminating details about these elusive works. The online Lost Plays Database, a remarkable resource devised and directed by Melbourne academic David McInnis and his American collaborator, Roslyn L. Knutson, has brought together in a constantly renewable and extensible medium all that is currently known about these vanished texts.

Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, edited by McInnis and a British collaborator, Matthew Steggle, further testifies to the growing interest in this once neglected field of theatrical history. According to the editors’ most up-to-date estimates, about three thousand plays were probably written and staged in the commercial theatre between 1567 and the closure of the theatres in England in 1642. Of these, a mere 543 are extant today. Of the nearly two and a half thousand plays from this period that may be called ‘lost’, 744 have now been identified by title, mainly through some passing and not infrequently ambiguous or inscrutable reference.

These figures, as the editors admit, are open to several kinds of possible adjustment and interpretation. Play titles, for a start, pose a major difficulty, given the freedom with which alternative titles were used for plays in the period – Twelfth Night, Or, What You Will; Epicene, Or The Silent Woman – and the casualness with which the company’s repertoire is often identified in the existing records. Is Love’s Labour’s Won, a distinct and still undiscovered comedy, or the (subsequently abandoned) subtitle of a familiar existing work – Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps, as some have suspected? Faced with such questions, scholars tend to divide into two opposed camps, popularly known – following a famous distinction first proposed by Charles Darwin in relation to evolutionary theory – as Clumpers and Splitters. The Clumpers (or Lumpers, as they are sometimes called) see similar titles as referring essentially to the same work, often in different phases of development. The Splitters, on the other hand, believe such titles refer to distinct works, which may nevertheless often be grouped around a common theme. Roslyn Knutson, leading the charge for the Splitters in the present volume, laments the tendency of scholars to invent ‘Ur-texts’ (or early variants) of well-known plays, and suggests that the presence of similar-sounding titles points rather to the preferences of individual companies, which tended to develop identifiable repertoires linked to popular topics. Plays about King Arthur were favoured by the Admiral’s Men in the 1590s, as were plays about Brute and early Britain, as Paul Whitfield White and Misha Teramura show in separate chapters of the present book. Plays on biblical themes were hot favourites at the Fortune Theatre in the next decade, as Andrew Gurr points out; and so too, as Christopher Matusiak somewhat surprisingly reveals, were plays about friars: who were not a common sight on the streets of London at that time, having been systematically eliminated from England by Henrician agents in the 1530s.

‘Is Love’s Labour’s Won, a distinct and still undiscovered comedy, or the (subsequently abandoned) subtitle of a familiar existing work – Much Ado About Nothing ...?’

While such forays may often seem individually to represent quite small and insignificant discoveries, the collective effort to identify the lost plays of early modern England is beginning significantly to reshape our view of the theatrical landscape in the age of Shakespeare, forcing a necessary revision of earlier assessments of popular taste, repertory behaviour, and dramatic composition. The essays presented in this volume also reflect two major recent adjustments of scholarly approach to drama more generally within the period. Apart from a single and necessarily somewhat speculative chapter on the work of Thomas Watson – claimed here to be ‘the most important playwright in English none of whose plays survive’ – the contributors focus not on the achievement of individual authors but on questions of company identity and collective (and largely anonymous) composition. Secondly, in a world in which fragmentary evidence – cover sheets, plot outlines, diary entries, random pages – tends always to be of central significance, they pose new and at times fundamental questions about the basic nature of a text, and the various senses in which certain plays might be reckoned to be either ‘lost’ or ‘found’.

And are there still, in whatever sense of these terms, many ‘lost’ plays out there, just waiting to be found? Well, yes, there may well be a few, say William Proctor Williams and Martin Wiggins, two contributors who’ve enjoyed some success in turning up hitherto unknown works, provided you know where to look, and know what you are looking at, and have oodles of patience. In the archives of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, a much scribbled-over wrapping page represents what has long been considered the sole remaining trace of the elusive and infamous Isle of Dogs. Perhaps, suggests Williams, a script of the play is still lurking somewhere within the Castle archives. Perhaps indeed it is. But these archives are two kilometres in extent. Any aspiring scholar wishing to track down this intriguing item should ideally be very young and very fit and very full of optimism.