Ithaca College

On Tuesday, March 29th, at 5:30 in Business 103, Chris Matusiak -- assistant professor of early modern literature in the department of English -- will give a public lecture entitled, "Reconstructing the Lost Plays of Shakespeare's Time." The lecture is free and open to the public, and it is sponsored by the English honor society and the English department.

In 1623, when Shakespeare’s fellow actors collected thirty-six of the dramatist’s plays in the First Folio, they very fortunately preserved eighteen texts that would otherwise be lost to us, including the masterpieces Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and The Tempest.  Not so lucky was a putative early version of Hamlet, a comedy called Love's Labors Won, and an enigmatic tragicomedy known as Cardenio. What ever happened to these lost plays by Shakespeare?  And what of the hundreds of other titles by contemporaries that once fueled a thriving repertory theater in early modern London, but whose scripts are now also missing? This presentation outlines the emerging critical engagement in Shakespeare studies with these lacunae, examining both the kinds of knowledge lost plays can yield about the commercial and cultural preoccupations of the early stage and the methodological challenges we face trying to reconstruct these fugitive texts.