Shakespeare and Lost Plays
by David McInnis
(Cambridge University Press, £29.99)

DESPITE extensive research, relatively little is known about Shakespeare and his work and, consequently, popular scholarship tends to focus on the language and dramaturgy of the Bard’s extant plays.

Fortunately, compared with his contemporaries, many of his plays have survived through fellow actors posthumously collecting 36 of them in the famous First Folio.

Theatre historian David McInnis recognises that rather than being an isolated artist foreseeing his world reputation, this busy working dramatist, feeding the insatiable daily theatre appetite of Elizabethan and early Jacobean audiences, must essentially have responded to the currents of popularity and fashion, as important in the 16th and 17th centuries as they are today.

A specialist in tracing lost plays of the period, McInnis records that as many as 744 are identifiably lost, with hundreds more completely untraceable. This is not owing to their lack of quality but the scarcity of surviving texts and performance records.

McInnis’s literary archaeology sets out to “better understand Shakespeare’s plays by restoring them to their most immediate and pressing context: the lost drama of the day” and in this quest, he draws on that vagary of human perception Rubin’s Vase.

The outline contours of the ambiguous, two-dimensional image mark out identical faces and the eye necessarily sees either the “figure” of the vase or the “ground” of the faces but never both.

Presenting Shakespeare’s plays as the “figure,” McInnis employs forensically examined evidential fragments establishing the nature and dating of lost plays from the repertories of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men — Shakespeare’s company — and their main rival, the Admiral’s Men, as the “ground.”

Naturally the individual play, the figure, is more dominant given the semi-invisible lost plays but McInnis demonstrates that Hamlet might originally have been written more as a play “participating in a Danish matrix,” of “a decade or more of representations of Denmark on London stages,” than as today’s dramatic study of the tragic hero’s psychological turmoil.

Awareness of the commercial influences on Shakespeare leads to questioning modern views of his career path as a progression from early histories, through middle comedy, to later tragedy and a final “reconciliation” period.

These plays, often seen as a professional journey from youthful energy to aged maturity, were more likely to have reflected the changing theatrical temper of the times.

McInnis also examines the likely influences on the choice and nature of the plays of the four different theatre spaces Shakespeare’s company moved to during his career.

Although clearly designed for the academic library, Shakespeare and the Lost Plays is a fascinating work of literary detection. It humanises a remarkable playwright, one among many working in the emerging and competitive theatrical marketplace of his day.