I can’t remember ever stumbling across this before, but sometimes it’s hard to remember after all these years.
Today while following some random Google rabbit hole to Love’s Labour’s Won, I found The Lost Plays Database.
I’m a little disappointed that Shakespeare’s only got two entries – Cardenio and the aforementioned LLW. But! That’s because the folks running this site are sticklers for detail, and they’ve also got a category for “Attributed to W. Shakespeare”, which is not the same thing. In the attributed category we have several entries, none of which I think I’ve ever seen before, including a Henry I and Henry II.
I’m not much of a fan of the lost plays, I figure if I can’t read or see them, they can’t do much for me. But I thought maybe some of you might like to cruise around. Check out the dramatists’ page — Shakespeare gets just two categories out of somewhere north of a hundred and fifty!
Have fun going down this newly discovered rabbit hole!
I have a keyword alert on Reddit for references to Shakespeare across all subreddits because you never know where he’s going to turn up. (I don’t want to tell you how many personal ads I see 🙁 ). This time /r/WritingPrompts is the winner:
It is the year 1636. A young William Shakespeare finds a secret compartment in his house. He opens it up, and finds a massive collection of written plays and poems.
Anybody else troubled by something in that premise? It’s probably an honest mistake, or the person who came up with it doesn’t think it’s relevant, but let’s just play it through because it’s bugging me. And because I haven’t put up much new content recently.
Shakespeare died in 1616. So we’ve got a young William Shakespeare 20 years after he died.
What did you expect from a Shakespeare Geek?
The most logical interpretation here, albeit the most conservative, is that William is, in fact, one of Judith and Thomas Quiney’s boys. They had three children – Shakespeare Quiney, who died young, but Richard and Thomas both lived until 1639. So maybe we pretend that one of them finds Shakespeare’s documents and does something underhanded with them because their dad and their granddad had a falling out shortly before ol’ Will died. This story totally makes sense to me – one of the grandsons basically seeks vengeance on his famous family’s name by burying all the original evidence connecting William as the true author of the stories. Of course, the First Folio would have come out in 1623 and I don’t think the conspiracy theories about authorship had really had time to cook yet, but who knows. Maybe they just decided to hide them in case they were worth money some day, and then forgot where they hid them. I could make it work.
But let’s say that’s not true and we’re talking about a “real” Shakespeare who lived a literal lifetime after his actual self. That means that somebody else wrote the plays, thirty years previously? During the reign of Elizabeth and/or James, both of whom are no longer around? Will audiences still care? The Puritans are about to close the theatres in less than a decade, so if he’s going to get started putting on thirty eight plays he’s got to crank them out at a rate of more than four per year. Better hurry!
Maybe our question poser mistyped and meant 1536, which would be closer to Shakespeare’s actual lifespan. But now we’re in a world where there’s no Queen Elizabeth or James I at all, so do we still get the plays that are directly tied to their reigns? Where are Marlowe, Middleton and the others during all of this to help the mysterious author collaborate, are they also unstuck in time?
I’m so confused. I think I’ll mark that post and come back to it to see what kind of stories people come up with.
EDIT : I couldn’t help myself, I wrote to the original poster and asked if he did that on purpose. He “messed up 1616 as his birthdate.”
“Just wondering,” he said. “I’m a Bruins fan, and everybody knows I’m a Bruins fan, but there eventually came a time when I had to tell people, stop buying me Bruins stuff, I’ve already got just about everything. My wife’s the same way, she likes sharks, people know she likes sharks, but it’s like, enough already, stop buying me shark things.”
“I see it differently,” I replied. “I call it decorating my life. I don’t even necessarily use this stuff or read these books. But wherever I go, people who don’t know me can see, Shakespeare. And they ask me about it. And there’s a connection there that might not otherwise have been made. I’m putting more Shakespeare out into the world, through that person. Everybody wins.”
If you want more of something that you love in the universe, decorate your life with it.
I saw a post on Reddit today that asked, “What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word Shakespeare?”
“Ooooo,” I thought, “This one’s right up my alley.” I start mentally forming my response. I click. I am disappointed to see everybody’s answer says nothing but “Romeo and Juliet” or “Hamlet” or something “Othello” or “Dream”. I’m also disappointed to see that the post was put up 13 hours ago, so there’s no point in responding, as nobody will ever see it. I only see it because I’ve got a search filter on Shakespeare posts. I decide not to post.
Good thing, too, because before archiving the post out of my news reader I realize that the question was actually, “What is the first PLAY you think of when you hear the word Shakespeare?” So they were all right, and I would have looked like an idiot. 🙂
So then I’ll ask and answer my own question here, because I can do that. What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word Shakespeare?
I’m grasping for the word I want but I can’t find it. Hopefully somebody will grok what I’m saying and deliver me my word. But for now I’m going to say it like this : Eleven. As in, “These go up to eleven.” I’m not just talking about what Shakespeare the man accomplished, although that alone makes a worthy life goal (Shakespeare wrote Richard III and Romeo and Juliet by the time he was thirty, what have you done, and are children studying it four hundred years later?) I’m talking about the depth and intensity of what he put up on stage. We’ll all feel at one time or another love, and hate, and ambition and grief and the whole host of human emotions. And when we do there’s always some Shakespeare we can point to and say, “Yes. That. That is what this feels like.”
When I first heard about the Hogarth Series that would product “modern novelizations” of Shakespeare’s work I thought, “Eh. So what. If you rewrite Shakespeare it’s not Shakespeare, it’s yours, and it’s just like any other novel.” As such I’ve avoided them all to date.
I decided to change that because we’ve got a book club at work and I wanted an excuse to read something of at least passing interest to me. When multiple people told me that Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest, was the best one to come out so far, was hooked. If I’m going to give the series I try I might as well start with my favorite play.
So glad I did! I’m just about halfway finished with it but I’m very excited to get out a review (and, who we kidding, it gives me another post for Shakspeare Day).
Felix, our director, is in the middle of what’s to be his masterpiece, a production of The Tempest. He likes this play so much he even named his daughter Miranda. Unlike Shakespeare’s story, however, both Felix’s wife and daughter have passed away before the story takes off. But the next part plays out like you’d expect — control of the group is usurped by Tony and Sal, and Felix is “banished” from the theatre scene until he gets a job teaching Shakespeare to prisoners. He even uses the pseudonym “Mr. Duke”, an amusing callback to Prospero as Duke of Milan.
The plot is following along close enough to the original that you have some idea what’s going to happen. Tony and Sal are going to end up in the prison where Mr. Duke will make his triumphant return. I just have no idea what’s going to happen other than that. Our Prospero has no Miranda. This one seems to be all about revenge. What would Prospero have been like if everything else had gone the same, except Miranda had not survived? I think we might have seen the full scope and scale of his power.
While retelling The Tempest this book is also a lesson in The Tempest as Felix walks his prisoners through the finer points of the play. He makes them re-envision Ariel as something other than just “a fairy”. He asks them to find all the “prisons” in the play (apparently there are nine?) and they discuss what form each prison takes, who is imprisoned, and who has captured them. I’m learning lots of new things. I hope she gets back to the question of “is the island by itself magic” because I’ve often wondered about that myself.
I don’t want to spoil much more of the book so I’ll stop here. Suffice to say I’m loving it, and when I’m done with this one I’m going to dig into Jo Nesbo’s new Macbeth next. Definitely recommended.
