Collection of shakespeare plays5/13/2023 Unpredictable and arbitrary causes including fire and vandalism, for example, are responsible for the loss of a large number of play-texts. Unfortunately for us, the great variety of causes of loss means that the surviving drama is, statistically speaking, atypical precisely because of its survival these plays constitute the distinct minority of the total dramatic output for the period. Plays become lost for a variety of reasons and appeals to ‘quality’ as the basis of non-preservation are not genuine explanations: without comparative data, ‘quality’ is unmeasurable. But what can be done with all this new knowledge? The advent of the Lost Plays Databasein 2009 and the publication of instalments of Martin Wiggins’ multivolume Catalogueof British drama (since 2012) have been instrumental in making this information available. Surviving plays constitute the distinct minority of the total dramatic output for the period. Recent estimates suggest that for the period of 1567 to 1642, while only 543 plays from the London commercial theatres have survived, as many as 744 plays are identifiably lost, with hundreds more completely untraceable. Our understanding of Shakespeare benefits from appreciation of the plays that he was responding to and influencing in the repertories of the London-based companies, but most of the play-texts from those repertories have been lost.
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