Reconstructing lost plays

Humanities > School of Language and Literature > Department for Literary Studies > Writing Centre

Plays have been lost since antiquity. The purpose of the project is to reconstruct them in the English language from available evidence.

Antiquity

A Lost Plays Database exits in regard to Greek and Roman plays of antiquity at http://lostgreekplays.com/.

Greek

Most Greek plays of antiquity written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides , and Aristophanes have been lost, but the stories may be obtained at least in part through books of Greek mythology, notably The Greek Myths (1955), a compendium assembled by Robert Graves.

Medieval

Renaissance

English

A database of lost English plays exists at http://www.lostplays.org/index.php/Main_Page. One example of a lost play is The History of Cardenio by John Fletcher (playwright) and William Shakespeare, reconstructed by Gary Taylor (scholar)

Another example of a lost English Renaissance play that may be reconstructed is Keep the Widow Waking by John Webster and others.

Keep the Widow Waking

A description of the lost play is given at this Internet site:

http://www.lostplays.org/index.php/Late_Murder_in_White_Chapel,_or_Keep_the_Widow_Waking#.E2.80.9CTragic.E2.80.9D_plot:_The_murder_of_Joan_Tindall_by_her_son.2C_Nathaniel_Tindall

From that text, we attempt to reconstruct the entire play.

See

Keep the Widow Waking

Baroque

18th century

19th century

20th century

21st century

Foreign

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of History_of_Western_Theatre:_Greeks_to_Elizabethans.

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of History_of_Western_Theatre:_17th_Century_to_Now.