Lost Plays in Shakespeare's England

D. McInnis, M. Steggle, D. McInnis, M. Steggle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137403964
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137403971
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Lost Plays in Shakespeare's England examines assumptions about what a lost play is and how it can be talked about; how lost plays can be reconstructed, particularly when they use narratives already familiar to playgoers; and how lost plays can force us to reassess extant plays, particularly through ideas of repertory studies.

Part I

What is a Lost Play?

1

What’s a Lost Play?: Toward a Taxonomy of Lost Plays

William Proctor Williams

When W. W. Greg chose the Greek letter theta (θ), the letter ancient Greeks used on their ballots when voting for a sentence of death, as the prefix for the numbers of the lost plays in his Bibliography of the English Printed Drama,¹ he perhaps established our general attitude toward lost plays. Just as there are no degrees of being dead, we have tended to think that there are no degrees of being lost. Of course, when we consider this more closely we know that is not actually true for lost plays, but it may go some way to explain why they have been insufficiently investigated. If we have thought that “The City” and “The False Friend”, both plays for the existence of which there is but the slightest of evidence, are on the same footing as “Keep the Widow Waking” or “The Orphans Tragedy”, both plays for which there is considerable existential evidence, then I believe we have set ourselves a difficult, or perhaps impossible, task.

It has been estimated that between 1570 and 1642 possibly as many as 3000 plays were written for the professional theater in England.² And if we assume that for those 3000 plays the playwright(s) produced, eventually, a draft which then underwent some further revision so that another draft needed to be produced, clean enough for the Master of the Revels and others to read and understand; and from that came what was known as the Approved Book (those manuscripts with the Master of the Revels’ authority to play inscribed somewhere on them) which may have been the same as the previous draft but could have been yet a further draft; and from that came yet another document we have come to call the Promptbook; and from that or those almost certainly came further partial or whole manuscripts of the play; and all that adds up to four or five documents of various kinds just to get to performance with no notion of what will be required to get to print; then that will yield something in the neighbourhood of 13,000 dramatic manuscripts existing at various times during these 72 years. About 800 plays have survived in print,³ and between eighteen,⁴ twenty-one,⁵ and about 125⁶ survive in some sort of manuscript (the difference in the numbers has to do with how dramatic manuscript is defined), but less than half a dozen of these manuscripts are in any way connected to a printed edition, and, finally, no example of printer’s copy survives for any of these plays.⁷

Where have they all gone? After the closing of the theaters in 1642 and the disbanding of the various entities for which the manuscripts, and particularly the approved books, were at one time their raw materials, neglect would gnaw away at these manuscripts. Further, after the theaters were legally closed, many were demolished: the Globe on April 15, 1644 and the Fortune in 1649. However, of the Globe there had been an earlier loss in 1613 when the first Globe playhouse burned down, though it is not clear what was lost, and the Fortune had an earlier loss in 1621 when the playhouse burned and in the words of John Chamberlain, “all their apparell and play-bookes lost”.⁸ Certainly when the structures which had housed at the very least the working manuscripts of hundreds of plays were closed, demolished, or turned to entirely different uses, it seems more than likely that the play manuscripts would have perished. The English Civil War and the attendant pillaging of the houses of people of importance, including their libraries, by combatants from both sides would also have caused the loss, almost certainly permanent loss, of some dramatic manuscripts. And, since dramatic activity was so heavily centered on London, the Great Fire of 1666 must have taken a toll. This is the physical situation and it is a daunting one. Simple mathematics tells us that there could be one or two thousand lost plays and perhaps ten thousand lost manuscripts, and it is not possible to know just how many documents there really are, or just how “lost” many of these are.

Although the usual and expected locations for dramatic manuscripts no longer exist and ceased to exist in violent and destructive manners, there may still be places where they might exist, and it is in an effort to survey and track likely sources that a number of research tools come into play. It is not really possible or useful to rank these sources in any way and they are merely presented by type. An ongoing comprehensive investigation of lost plays is the Lost Plays Database (LPD).⁹ In its own words it, “is a wiki-style forum for scholars to share information about lost plays in England, 1570–1642. Its purpose is to add lost plays to scholarly discussions of early modern theatrical activity.” However, “unlike many public wikis, the Lost Plays Database is not open to public editing: for quality control, potential contributors must apply to the editors for contributing privileges.” It has that very great advantage of many things digital in that it is ever in a state of being updated and is therefore, potentially, more useful in searching for lost plays than the two printed sources I am going to move on to. Greg gave 187 play titles the θ kiss, but that was because he found evidence that they had once been, or there was once an intention that there be, a printed edition of the play. His bibliography was, of course, “of the printed drama.” In his British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue,¹⁰ Martin Wiggins casts lost plays into darkness since their titles are printed in white on a black rectangle. However, Wiggins’ very comprehensive catalogue is an attempt to record all the information available about all plays, living or dead, from this period. When completed, Wiggins, as I fear this multi-volume catalogue will be known, will be, along with Greg and the LPD, one of the three secondary sources where searches for lost plays will begin.

The primary sources are extensive though incomplete. They are well known to those at work in the field but there are some new or newish versions and wrinkles available and those starting out may not know them well, so I will attempt a semi-detailed enumeration of them. It would be ideal, of course, if the records of the Master of the Revels were complete for the period of English Renaissance drama, but they are not. The current best studies are Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I which contains extracts from the Revels accounts edited by Peter Cunningham.¹¹ The first two Masters in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were Edmond Tyllney and Sir George Buc,¹² but the records of their times in office are but fragmentary. However, W. R. Streitberger’s Edmond Tyllney, Master of the Revels and Censor of Plays: A Descriptive Index to his Diplomatic Manual on Europe goes some way to make up for and explain this particular loss.¹³ The most complete set of Master’s records, no matter how transmitted to us, are to be found in N. W. Bawcutt’s splendid The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73.¹⁴

For at least one pair of theatrical people we have a very extensive record, Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, one theater owner and one star actor. Henslowe’s Diary, which had been known of and used as far back as Malone at the end of the eighteenth century, received its first full scholarly edition more than a century ago with W. W. Greg’s two-volume edition in 1904–08 (text in 1904 and commentary in 1908)¹⁵ with a volume of supplementary documents in 1907,¹⁶ but an even better scholarly edition was produced by R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert in 1960 with a second edition with corrections and additions by Foakes in 2002.¹⁷ However, this has all been vastly aided and supplemented by the digitization of the Henslowe and Alleyn documents (including the Diary) at Dulwich College (founded by Alleyn in what is now south London and the home of the documents almost since their creation), a project directed by Grace Ioppolo.¹⁸ Alas, these are the only records of a theater owner and a theater.

Some plays were intended for publication but never made it, so far as we can tell; these are Greg’s θ plays, though there may be more than he realized. The consultation of the records of the Stationers’ Company really does consist of a good deal more than simply noting the entry date as found in the Short-Title Catalogue (STC, for books 1475–1640; Donald Wing’s STC [Wing] 1641–1700, does not provide this information) or ESTC (English Short-Title Catalogue, an electronic only combination of STC, Wing and the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue now available free from the British Library¹⁹). Aside from the information one might find by reading the entire entry in the printed A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D.²⁰ and A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London; from 1640–1708 A.D.,²¹ there are vast amounts of information to be found, and some of it may be about lost plays, in the extensive records of the Stationers’ Company. Robin Myers’ The Stationer’s Company Archive: An Account of the Records 1554–1984 provides an excellent survey of what survives²² and all of it is available in a microfilm series, Records of the Worshipful Company of Stationers edited by Myers,²³ on 115 reels and the Stationers’ Company website lists those institutions which hold the set.²⁴ Some of the records have been either transcribed and edited or indexed and here is a list of them:

The Loan Book of the Stationers’ Company with a List of Transactions, 1592–1692. ed. W. Craig Ferguson. London: Bibliographical Society, 1989.

Warwickshire Apprentices in the Stationers’ Company of London, 1563–1700. ed. Paul Morgan. Leeds: Dugdale Society, 1978.

Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1605–1640. ed. D. F. McKenzie. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1961.

Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1641–1700. ed. D. F. McKenzie. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1974.

Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1576 to 1602: From Register B. ed. W. W. Greg and E. Boswell. London: Bibliographical Society, 1930.

Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602 to 1640. ed. William A. Jackson. London: Bibliographical Society, 1957.

A Companion to Arber: Being a Calendar of Documents in Edward Arber’s “Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640” With Text and Calendar of Supplementary Documents. ed. W. W. Greg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries (1557–1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London. comp. Hyder E. Rollins. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1924.

Index to the Stationers’ Register, 1640–1708: Being an Index to a Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640–1708. ed. William Proctor Williams. La Jolla, Calif.: L. McGilvery, 1980.²⁵

The reason for this rather extended survey of sources is to indicate where the searcher after lost plays should begin, but of course there may be documents of which we are not now aware, and there are numerous references to plays in letters, diaries, the public records, and quite unusual places. However, if we could develop a taxonomy for lost plays so that we could easily see which plays are likely to have ever existed, which ones are likely to still exist, and which ones may be the result of impaired hearing, seeing, or thinking, we might be in a position to concentrate more efforts on our search for lost plays.

I realize that any attempt at such a classification will meet with some resistance and that the notion of getting a group, even a small group, of colleagues to agree on such a classification is slim, yet I will persist and perhaps out of darkness will come light, or a least a glimmer. Here we go.

Class 0: also known as the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• A Note on Conventions
• Introduction: Nothing Will Come of Nothing? Or, What can we Learn from Plays that Don’t Exist?
• Part I What is a Lost Play?
• Part II Working with Lost Plays
• Part III Moving Forward
• Select Bibliography
• Index