A surprising number of lost books have found their way into flames—sometimes courtesy of the authors themselves.
6. The History of Cardenio // William Shakespeare and John Fletcher
Approximately 543 English plays performed in commercial playhouses during the Renaissance have survived. That may seem like a large number, but according to David McInnis, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne, “as many as 744 plays are identifiably lost, with hundreds more completely untraceable.” One of the most famous lost plays is William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The History of Cardenio, which was performed in 1613 and entered into The Stationers’ Register, a record that listed publishing rights, in 1653. It’s assumed that it was based on part of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which features a character called Cardenio.
In 1727, editor and Shakespeare imitator Lewis Theobald staged a play called Double Falsehood, which was based on three untitled manuscripts Theobald claimed were the lost Cardenio. The next year, he published an edition of the play—but at some point, the manuscripts vanished and were ultimately never verified. While some academics have taken Theobald’s play at face value, others are skeptical of its authenticity. As Oxford University professor Tiffany Stern told the BBC, “If you look for Shakespeare in the work of a famous imitator, you will find Shakespeare whether he’s there or not.”
Paleographer Charles Hamilton suggested that a play known as The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (1611) may actually be Cardenio, but his claim gained little support; most commonly, that play is attributed to poet and playwright Thomas Middleton. Another Shakespeare play which has been lost to time is Love’s Labour’s Won, a possible sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost.