Elizabethan Drama History

Last night, I re-read a paper on Shakespeare's lost play, Cardenio - and belatedly understood its significance. From my library, my immediate reference point for potted synopses of Shakespeare's plays is Liz Evers' To Be Or Not To Be... - supplemented by my own notes that give a chronology and lookup. To summarise: there are 36 First Folio plays, but 42 known in all.  The six not included in the 1623 First Folio are: Edward III (between 1591 and 1594, attribution accepted in 1990s) Love's Labours Won (between 1594 - 1595 - lost) Sir Thomas More (between 1601 - 1606 - mostly lost) Pericles (between 1606 - 1608) Two Noble Kinsmen (between 1610 - 1616) Cardenio (between 1612 - 1616 - mostly lost) Cardenio the play is accepted as being based on a tale in Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, translated to English 1612).  I only have a Motteux translation, which has this story at book III chapter X:  the Adventure of the Sierra Morena continued . Cardenio doesn't sur...

  The Isle Of Dogs by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe is  the  most successfully anathematised Elizabethan play: no copies remained and the writers and actors swore off it, theatres were all closed down temporarily and almost destroyed.  To supplement the Wikipedia entry on this lost play is the entry in the Cambridge Edition Of The Works Of Ben Jonson Online. It adds much detail, although not significantly more revealing. Philip Rowe's podcast The History Of European Theatre seems to have additional details on his 1 May 2023 episode. The temptation would be to interpolate - I suspect I would. I'd hoped Shakespeare And Lost Plays by David McInnis would have more to say about The Isle Of Dogs than he did. A tantalisingly intriguing episode in history. https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/works/dogs/facing/#