Shakespeare’s lost plays?

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William Shakespeare, the famous English playwright, wrote 36 plays that have survived to this day. Many pundits consider Shakespeare’s play to be the best of all theatre, and performances of his plays are staples of the live theater community. Yet experts believe Shakespeare’s canon is incomplete, with at least two texts that have not survived from Shakespeare’s time. The lost plays, as they are commonly called, are a subject of great interest to both the theater community and historians.

Love’s Labor’s Won is the most frequently cited of the lost plays, as textual accounts from the time suggest it existed. In a 1598 book by English author Francis Meres, he lists several of the plays including Love’s Labor’s Won. Experts believed for many years that the title was an alternate name for the Taming of the Shrew, which had been left off Meres’ list. In 1953, a record of a 1603 collection of Shakespeare’s plays was discovered which includes both Taming of the Shrew and Love’s Labor’s Won.

The plot of the first of the lost plays is purely speculative, but many critics believe that it is a sequel to Love’s Labor’s Lost. The symmetry of the titles is obviously noticeable. Experts also cite the text of the first comedy, which apparently ends in the middle of the story, as a difficult task is set for the heroes. Other experts remain unconvinced, suggesting that the play is an alternate name for another play, perhaps All’s Well That Ends Well or Much Ado About Nothing.

The Story of Cardenio, the second of the lost plays, has a complicated history. It is believed to be based on Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which Cardenio is a main character. The play is known to have been performed in 1613 by a London theater company called The King’s Men. In 1653, a bookseller named Henry Moseley attributed the work to Shakespeare and a second author, John Fletcher. Moseley is regarded by pundits as unreliable, however, as he often attributed plays to Shakespeare that were not his.

In 1727, an English author named Lewis Theobald published an edited text which he claimed to have taken from three manuscripts of an unknown work by Shakespeare. Retitled Double Falsehood, the play is considered by some pundits to be Cardenio, as it contains the character’s episode. Experts are divided on this matter, and the truth about Cardenio may be lost to history.

The Two Noble Kinsman is now generally accepted as a Shakespearean play, but for many years it has been the subject of debate as to authorship and whether the existing text was original. The play could be called one of the lost plays, as it was not included in the first folio or any collection of plays in Shakespeare’s day and was not published until 1634, twenty years after Shakespeare’s death. It has since been considered among the apocrypha, but is now believed by experts to be authentically Shakespeare.
The Shakespeare Apocrypha is a set of 11 works that are believed to have been written by Shakespeare, but are not accepted into the typical canon. These games are not considered lost games, as the text exists. Instead, the confusion pertains to the authorship of the plays, as no clear record states who wrote them. Many of Shakespeare’s apocrypha are believed to be collaborations between Shakespeare and other writers.

Shakespeare’s lost plays are a romantic subject among scholars hoping to find rare and priceless manuscripts. The discovery of the texts would further complete the historical picture of Shakespeare, a notoriously dark figure. Many experts believe the Cardenio and Love’s Labor’s Won manuscripts will never be found, but that doesn’t interrupt scholarly debate or interest in the tantalizing lost plays.

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