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The Lost Plays

Two titles with real documentary footprints and no surviving text — plus the near-misses that almost joined them.

Shakespeare’s surviving canon is 37–39 plays, depending on how you count the collaborations. But the record holds two more titles with genuine documentary traces and no text: one almost certainly a lost Shakespeare–Fletcher collaboration, one a mystery that may not be lost at all.

Cardenio — the genuinely lost play

In the 1612–13 court season, the King’s Men performed a play the accounts call “Cardenno” (20 May 1613 payment) and “Cardenna” (8 June 1613, before the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador). Forty years later, on 9 September 1653, the bookseller Humphrey Moseley entered in the Stationers’ Register “The History of Cardenio, by Mr Fletcher & Shakespeare” — asserting his right to print it. He never did. No manuscript has ever surfaced.

The attribution is plausible but not certain. The name comes from Cervantes: Cardenio is the lovesick young nobleman of Don Quixote, and Thomas Shelton’s English translation of Part One had appeared in 1612 — the phrase “The History of Cardenio” occurs in Shelton’s translation, suggesting the play dramatized those episodes. Fletcher, the King’s Men’s house playwright after Shakespeare’s retirement, adapted Cervantes repeatedly in later years, so his involvement fits; placing the lost work alongside the known Shakespeare–Fletcher collaborations (Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen) is reasonable — but Moseley is known to have attached Shakespeare’s name to plays spuriously, so the entry alone does not settle authorship.

The one candidate survival: in December 1727, the editor Lewis Theobald premiered Double Falsehood at Drury Lane, claiming it was adapted from a lost Shakespeare manuscript (he even obtained a royal licence for it). The play uses the Cardenio story. But Theobald never produced the manuscript he claimed to own, and Double Falsehood’s language shows little that is distinctively Shakespearean. Most scholars treat it as, at best, a distant echo — a play about the lost play, not the lost play itself.

Love’s Labour’s Won — lost, or hiding in plain sight?

The only evidence is a list. In Palladis Tamia (1598), Francis Meres catalogued Shakespeare’s comedies: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Love’s Labour’s Won, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice. Five of those survive. “Love’s Labour’s Won” does not appear under that title anywhere else — not in the Stationers’ Register, not in the First Folio (1623).

Three explanations compete, and none has won:

  1. It is a lost play — possibly a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, whose ending famously defers the marriages for a year (“Jack hath not Jill”).
  2. It is an alternative title for a surviving play — Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and All’s Well That Ends Well have all been proposed.
  3. Meres was working from hearsay or a working title, and the play reached print under another name.

The honest answer is that we do not know. What we do know is that Heminges and Condell, compiling the Folio, either missed it, lost it, or already had it under a different title.

The near-misses

Source notes

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