The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.347  Tuesday, 28 July 2015

 

From:        Hardy Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         July 27, 2015 at 2:47:35 PM EDT

Subject:    TLS - 'Losing the plot'

 

[Editor’s Note: I have been catching up on TLS and discovered a number of Shakespeare –related articles. I will provide excepts here; and if anyone wishes the entire article and does not have access to TLS, please contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. -Hardy]

 

Love offstage

TIFFANY STERN

 

David McInnis and Matthew Steggle, editors

LOST PLAYS IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND

312pp. Palgrave MacMillan. £60.

978 1 137 40396 4

 

17 June 2015

 

Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England begins by asking what we can say about plays that do not survive. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is “a lot”, as this bold and ambitious collection of essays goes on to prove. Over its thirteen chapters, the book explores a selection of the 744 named commercial theatre plays from this period that have disappeared. Most are known only by title, recorded in the so-called “Diary” of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, or in preserved records from the “Office Book” of the Master of the Revels, Henry Herbert (itself a lost document). Some, however, like the backstage “plots” that provide scene-by-scene entrances for actors, give poignant indications of what the narrative may have been; a fragmented example of one of these, 2 Fortune’s Tennis, is analysed by David McInnes. Other lost plays do not even have names. Michael J. Hirrel details a series of testimonies to the influence of the 1580s playwright Thomas Watson, whose entire dramatic oeuvre has disappeared; Martin Wiggins provides snippets from unknown plays preserved in John Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit (1655). As Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England repeatedly makes clear, there are degrees of being lost.

 

How did so many plays vanish? Some were destroyed together with the theatres that housed them during the English Civil War; some went up in flames in the Great Fire of London. Others disappeared in the eighteenth century. Famously, though perhaps fictitiously, John Warburton’s cook Betsy “burned, or put under pie bottoms” all but three of his extensive collection of early modern play manuscripts. Many texts are lost because they existed in small numbers and were never published. But as Wiggins points out, published plays can disappear, too. Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won, printed in a run of, presumably, the usual 1,000 copies, is also lost.

 

One aim of Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England is to show how much can be learned about plays that no longer exist: their narratives can be gleaned from sources; genre and subject are often preserved in the title. Christi Spain-Savage focuses on “Gillian of Brentford”, a woman – and perhaps a witch – whose deathbed bequest of a fart to each of her neighbours is likely to have been staged in the lost Friar Fox and Gillian of Brentford. When Falstaff dresses (in the quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor) as “Gillian of Brainford”, what aspects of that lost play might he be responding to?

 

Another aim of the collection is to show what can be done with the limited information that does survive. Andrew Gurr lists lost religious plays of the 1590s, asking if they were designed to offset Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; Christopher Matusiak suggests that the stage friars that filled lost plays will have been in dialogue with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Lawrence Manley analyses the possible content of the lost plays of a single company, Lord Strange’s Men, suggesting they may have inspired the concentration on religion, heterodoxy and magic that became part of the “Elizabethan mental archive”. Elegant accounts of groups of lost plays – on Britain’s mythical pre-history (Misha Teramura) and the Arthurian cycle (Paul Whitfield White) – suggest that sequences of linked plays may have reflected and commented on early modern government as well as literature.

 

[ . . . ]

 

 

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