What play of Shakespeares has been lost and not published?

Answer 1

There was no collected edition of the Shakespeare's plays during Shakespeare's lifetime.

The first collected works of Shakespeare was the First Folio [1623] put together by Shakespeare's colleagues Hemmings and Condell some seven years after William died.

There are clear indications in the arrangement and printing of the First Folio that at least one play (Cymbeline) was included at the last minute - this suggests that Hemmings and Condell probably had access to only some of the plays, and got hold of Cymbeline only after the main printing plan was already decided.

There was a Second Folio in 1632, and a Third in 1664. The Third Folio included six new plays - five of them are almost certainly not by Shakespeare, but Pericles very probably is.

Given that the publishing history is so untidy, there is every chance that there are still some plays by Shakespeare that never got into any of the Folios. In recent years scholars have decided that Two Noble Kinsman is at least partly by Shakespeare.

Shakespeare seems never to have been very interested in publishing his plays - he wrote them for performance, not for reading. There are possibly 3. The main one is Cardenio, but there is also reference to "love's labours wonne" which could be a sequel to 'love's labours lost'. Lastly there is a 'ur-hamlet' a version of hamlet that was around at least a decade before shakespeare wrote the hamlet we know today. This may be written by Shakespeare, or another playwright of the time

Answer 2

Some of Shakespeare's plays, like Cardenio, have been lost, and cannot be performed because we do not have a copy of the script.

Of the plays we have, they all get performed occasionally. Theatre Festivals and companies dedicated to performance of Shakespeare usually try to put on all of the plays, even the most obscure ones. However, certain plays get performed much less than others: King John, Henry VIII, Pericles, Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, All's Well that Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida. You almost never see these ones on stage. You might think Shakespeare's King Lear is performed most infrequently seeing as the main character is an 80 odd year old man. Fortunately this poses less of a problem than it may seem since, a) you don't have to be an 80-year old man to play the role, and b) there are more competent elderly actors around than you might think.

Answer 3

It is thought that there might have been a sequel to "Love's Labour's Lost" called "Love's Labour's Won", but it was lost and never published. Other lost play ideas are "Double Falsehood" and "The History of Cardenio".

Answer 4

All of the Shakespeare plays we know of have been published over and over and over again. Probably the least published is The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was never included in the Folio of his plays and has only recently been accepted as genuine by most scholars.

Had Shakespeare's plays not been published, we would not know anything about them apart from the name, and the occasional details of plot set out in people's diaries after seeing the plays.

Answer 5

No complete plays, but there has been some speculation that part of the unfinished play Sir Thomas More, which exists in manuscript, was written in Shakespeare's hand. There is no real way of proving this one way or the other.

Answer 6

There is alot of Shakespeare performed all over the world because they are much loved plays, such as Romeo and Juliet.