#lost plays

The ascertainable facts about the Sophoclean Phaedra are few. Less is known about it than about the lost Hippolytus, but at least the evidence in this case is less confusing. There are twenty book-fragments, all of them gnomic or lexicographic. These include several quotable maxims on the themes of erotic love and its irresistible nature (F684), the contrast between just and unjust types of pleasure (F677), the right way to deal with shame (F679-80) and the difference between good and bad wives (F682). Any of these sentiments could relate to Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus, while F678 – ‘he spat out the proposal’ – no doubt comes from a description of Hippolytus’ reaction to this love (whether or not Phaedra actively tried to seduce him). There are just three fragments which suggest any differences between Sophocles’ version and Euripides’ version. These are F680, which implies that Zeus, not Aphrodite, is responsible for Phaedra’s love-sickness, and F686-7, part of a description, by Theseus, of his journey to the Underworld with Peirithous. As many have observed, Theseus’ words are particularly significant, because they might seem to justify or mitigate Phaedra’s behaviour. If Phaedra believed that her absent husband was in fact dead, she would not have deemed an affair with her stepson to be adulterous.

He actually did. 

We know for a fact that there are missing plays because there are records of the plays having been published or performed. A guy called Francis Meres published a book called Palladis Tamia in 1598 which includes a list of the plays Shakespeare had written up to that point, the list contains a reference to a certain Love’s Labours Won, which is mentioned again in a book register belonging to the stationer Christopher Hunt in 1603. Some scholars suggest this is a sequel to Love’s Labours Lost, others think it might be the alternative title of an existing play. The RSC went with this second suggestion and performed Much Ado About Nothing under the title of Love’s Labours Won in 2014 as a companion play to Love’s Labour’s Lost.

The other lost play called Cardenio, performed by the King’s Men in 1613 (from surviving performance records). A record that claims its authors were Shakespeare and Fletcher survives in a Stationer’s Register from 1653. Of course, this can’t necessarily be trusted because of Shakespeare’s name-value and the lateness of the entry, but the idea that it was written by Fletcher and Shakespeare coheres with the other known performance date and details we have of the play. It’s been speculated that this play would have been about the lover Cardenio from Cervante’s Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in translation in England in 1612. There’s a play by Lewis Theobald called Double Falsehood that claims to be a version of Cardenio, supposedly based on manuscripts of the play. It’s completely possible that this is indeed true, and that Theobald re-wrote the play just like other Shakespeare plays were re-written in the restoration, but if it is true, then the manuscripts he based his version off has been lost. Many scholars recognise the claim behind Theobald’s work, and the Arden Shakespeare published Double Falsehood as part of their collection of Shakespeare’s works. More recently, Gary Taylor has written a version od Cardenio which attempts to imaginatively reconstruct what Shakespeare’s Cardenio would have been like. It’s being premiered in the UK right now.

In other lost plays, there’s also some speculation about the earlier Hamlet, generally referred to as Ur-Hamlet, which almost certainly existed and which some scholars attribute to Shakespeare. The more popular theory is that it was written by Thomas Kyd. 

A tragedy that was thematically close to Sophocles’ Ajax, though the relationship between the two plays is unknown…Teucer was in some sense a sequel to Ajax, dealing with the aftermath of Ajax’s death and the fraught relationship between Ajax’s father Telamon and his surviving son Teucer. The play centred on Teucer’s homecoming to Salamis and on Telamon’s rejection of Teucer for failing to save Ajax’s life, an eventuality predicted by Teucer in Ajax. Apart from F577, in which we glimpse Telamon lamenting his son’s death, the fragments tell us nothing. But additional information is provided by Aristotle, who cites Teucer twice in his Rhetoric. Aristotle reveals that the play included a debate (or agôn) between Odysseus and Teucer, in which Odysseus used Teucer’s family connections in order to claim that Teucer was on the side of the Trojans; Teucer maintained that he was not a traitor, for if he had been, he would have denounced the spies. Aristotle also notes that the play contained an example of the technique whereby an opponent’s argument is refuted by quoting his own words against him (though no precise details are supplied).

Matthew Wright, The Lost plays of Greek Tragedy (Volume 2), Page 116-117

1) it seems Sophocles switched up Odysseus’s characterization from his Ajax from Teucer’s advocate to being the leading voice that calls for his banishment (it’s safe to assume actually that Odysseus is supposed to be the one that convinces Telamon to send his son into exile)

We have a few surviving lines as well as the hypothesis, which itself is what makes it so intriguing as it reads like this:

‘Peirithous went with Theseus to Hades to get Persephone as his wife. He was duly punished for this impiety by being bound to a rock by snakes. Theseus, thinking it shameful to abandon his friend, willingly chose to stay in Hades with him, but on his mission to abduct Cerberus, Heracles released both men, by the grace of the gods of the underworld.'

(Source: Theseus, Tragedy, and the Athenian Empire by Sophie Mills)

So essentially the idea that the play presents is that initially, only Pirithous was bounded to the underworld and Theseus actually had the chance to escape, and yet he didn’t. Instead, he willingly chooses to stay behind and be tortured along with his friend. An idea that I don’t think is found anywhere else

The story definitely has very not so subtle message about the importance of friendship, especially when Heracles arrives on the scene and compliments his loyalty to his friend as being “worthy of Athens and of the Athenian hero.”

On the flip side Pirithous gets most of the blame for the attempted abduction, especially since Theseus gets exonerated, with Heracles asking him what excuse he has for the ruin he brought on himself. Based off the surviving fragments we have, Pirithous brings up how his own father Zeus abducted his mother Dia who was married to Ixion. Which is an interesting parallel and interesting justification on Pirithous part

The last noteworthy thing to me is how the hypothesis’s says that by the grace of the underworld gods (Hades and Persephone I presume) both Theseus AND Pirithous were released by Heracles. This idea is mentioned by Diodorus in his 1st AD chronicle though only in passing. It’s interesting to see how old it is actually.

Here’s a link to Alessandro Boschi’s analysis of the play if you would like to read more about it: