People who write books nowadays about this subject [the history of literature], great and small, generally handle it in a most regrettable way. They treat us like children: they serve up cabbage that has been reboiled a thousand times about authors whose works surviveâbut not a word about those whose works have perished. Yet if we are not acquainted with the latter, it is impossible to understand anything about the nature, origin, development or maturity of ideas, in other words, their History, still less the praiseworthy qualities and merits of the surviving authors.âDaniel Wyttenbach, Bibliotheca Critica (1808)1
As early modernists with an interest in the literary culture of Shakespeareâs time, we work in a field that contains many significant losses: of texts, of contextual information, and of other forms of cultural activity. No account of early modern literary culture is complete without acknowledgment of these lacunae, and although lost drama has become a topic of increasing interest in Shakespeare studies, it is important to recognize that loss is not restricted to playtexts alone. In this collection of essays, we strive to produce a meaningful alternative to the âreboiledâ cabbage approach to literary history and attempt to deal with lostness in a plurality of forms. It has now been a decade since we created the Lost Plays Database to raise the profile of lost drama and stimulate new work in this fascinating but ephemeral area of inquiry, and we therefore consider it timely to take stock of the developments in how scholars have been coping with loss, both in our own field and in cognate fields. In what follows, we reflect on how our colleagues who work on the Classics have dealt with loss; we provide a brief overview of the exciting developments we have witnessed in the study of early modern drama; and we explain how we hope the present volume will push the scholarly conversation in new directions. We aim to develop further models and techniques for thinking about lost plays, public and private, from London and beyond; but also of other kinds of lost early modern works, and even lost persons associated with literary and theatrical circles.
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We may be at least partially reinventing the wheel in our attempts to cope with loss. Working with substantial lacunae in the canon has long been a daily reality for students of classical literature. How have these scholars addressed the challenge and whatâallowing for the significantly different contextâmight we learn from their experiences?
In the early nineteenth century, when Wyttenbach was lamenting the reboiled cabbage of literary history, his advocacy of attending to lost and fragmentary plays still represented a minority position among classicists. In 1761, for example, when Johann August Ernesti edited the complete works of Callimachusâmost of whose writings survive only in fragments, if at allâhe complained that (in Rudolf Kasselâs recent summary) he would âalways prefer to nourish his spirit with the content and style of works that have been preserved in full, rather than with the mouldy stench of recondite glosses.â Although he admitted âthat one ought not to ignore this stuff (ista) completely,â because there may be philological benefits, he âhad no desire to tire himself out with the drudgery involved.â2 By contrast, Matthew Wright, in his recent study of lost Greek tragedy from the end of the classical period, has argued that âcareful study of the lost works can lead to a reappraisal of the whole genre,â noting that Greek tragedy âpossessed much more breadth and variety than we can appreciate if we only ever look at the tiny number of plays that survive.â3 Wright argues that âit is safest to avoid making any sort of qualitative judgementâ given the âinsufficient material on which to base a judgement,â but insists nonetheless that âa complete and representative history of classical tragedy must incorporate these so-called minor playwrights, and that it must attempt to take them seriously, treating the fragments of their work without prejudices or preconceptions.â4
What changed for the classicists, that they could move from Ernestiâs position to that of Wyttenbach and sustain it through to the current scholarship of Wright and others? Rudolf Kassel largely attributes the legitimization of the work of the nineteenth-century âfragmentologistsâ5 to Friedrich August Wolf, who argued in Kleine Schriften (1869) that âWe need, as far as possible, to repair the gaps in the course of <literary> history caused by these great losses, and to restore the framework of this superb body of literature by bringing together the various references to lost works.â6 Elsewhere Wolf likened his project to the reconstruction of at least âa ground plan of a building that has fallen into ruins after the loss of so many works.â7 As Kassel argues, such an âall-embracing view of classical studies ⊠meant that no collector of fragments would ever again need to spend time justifying his activity.â8 An important implication of Wolfâs work, then, was a shift away from aesthetics and unity to a recognition of the instrumental value of gathering as many building blocks as could be had, so as to reconstruct a âframeworkâ or âground planâ to support the surviving literature appropriately.
Kasselâs survey of nineteenth-century fragmentology and its rise to legitimacy, published in 1991, has now been extended by David Harvey, who examines the study of Greek fragments from the nineteenth century onwards.9 His survey implicitly offers a number of precepts relevant to the study of lost early modern texts. Harvey notes that Friedrich Gottlieb Welckerâs three-volume consideration of the contexts of dramatic fragments (1839â1841),10 though at times highly conjectural in its reconstructions, received praise for its transparent handling of sources and disclosure of assumptions, which permitted readers to check Welckerâs conclusions.11 By contrast, August Nauckâs rebuke (in 1856) of reconstructionists who took too much liberty with their fragmentary sources potentially remains salient today in early modern circles: âThose who profess the ingenious art of dreaming up whatever they want should look elsewhere for interpreters of their dreams.â12 Whereas Wolf had earlier rallied to establish âa ground plan of a buildingâ by attending to lost texts, Nauck cautioned against reconstructed plots of lost plays from unreliable evidence, likening it âto the construction of buildings without a firm foundation, which will soon collapse.â13 Nauckâs project of editing the tragic fragments of the Greek stage proved Herculean in its own right, especially the preparation of a second, revised edition of the Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta; he admitted in 1889 that âthe work that I have undertaken is of a kind that cannot be successfully carried out by one single person, nor even within a single century by a cooperative effort.â14
Attention to fragments has altered the perception of classical authorsâ literary outputs in important ways: prior to the discovery of papyrus pieces beneath the tomb of Sheikh Ali-Gamman in Egypt in 1928, it had not been clear why Aeschylus had been praised in his own day for his satyr plays (a genre which was not represented in his pre-1928 corpus). In fact, the only prior witness to the genre was Euripidesâ Cyclops, but the 1928 excavations yielded fragments of more than half a dozen plays by Aeschylus (three of which were satyr plays), and around seventy more examples of satyr plays by other playwrights, thus radically transforming scholarsâ perceptions of the classical output in that mode of writing.15 Similar correctives to the perceived prevalence or absence of genres or types of plays in the early modern canon have begun to emerge, but there is doubtless scope for many more revisions of received narratives.16
The reliability of fragments as historical documentary evidence varies (of course) depending on whether they originate in early drafts of the lost text, in subsequent adaptations, or in excerpts produced for other purposes. The example of the preserved fragments of Sappho is instructive in this regard. Recent estimates suggest that Greek scholars in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BC edited nine or ten papyrus scrolls of Sapphoâs poetry, amounting to approximately 10,000 lines, of which only 650 lines have survived.17 These surviving fragments are to be found in a diverse array of sources ranging from lines quoted in a treatise on literary composition (fr. 1) to a song incised on a third-century-BC potsherd (fr. 2) and a fifth-century lexicon of rare words (fr. 117A). Some fragments (e.g., fr. 5) have been âsubstantially improvedâ by the discovery at Oxyrhynchos, Egypt of papyrus fragments in a rubbish mound in the early twentieth century.18 New fragments have come to light within existing university collections, at Cologne University in 2004 and in the Green Collection at Oklahoma City (2011), further enriching our knowledge of Sapphoâs poetry. Some fragments (e.g., fr. 34) are notable for being known primarily from sources which are at a remove of several centuries from Sapphoâs own time, such as the Byzantine scholar Eusthatios, in his twelfth-century commentary on the Iliad. (Suddenly Restoration knowledge of Elizabethan plays seems very immediate and reliable.) Other sources, though equally distanced in time from Sappho, retain the aura of antiquarian authority: the Greek author Plutarch (frs. 31 and 55), philosopher Aristotle (fr. 137), geographer Strabo (fr. 35) and physician Galen (fr. 50) knew and commented on fragments of her work. But as Sapphoâs most recent editors, Diane J. Rayor and AndrĂ© Lardinois, note: âlike modern scholars, [ancient scholars] hated not to be able to give an answer and therefore deduced unknown details from better known ones. One should therefore always assess how likely it is that the ancient scholars could have known certain facts.â19 A preservation bias (see Matthew Steggleâs chapter in this volume) is detec...