Abstract
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.
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Notes
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Hilton Kelliher, “A Hitherto Unrecognized Cavalier Dramatist: James Compton, Third Earl of Northampton,” The British Library Journal 6 (1980): 158–87.
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© 2014 William Proctor Williams
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Williams, W.P. (2014). What’s a Lost Play?: Toward a Taxonomy of Lost Plays. In: McInnis, D., Steggle, M. (eds) Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403971_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403971_2
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