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Revelatory work of literary detection
Research into the lost plays of the Shakespearean period provides new insights into the Bard and his work, says GORDON PARSONS
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Shakespeare and Lost Plays
by David McInnis
(Cambridge University Press, £29.99)
DESPITE extensive research, relatively little is known about Shakespeare and his work and, consequently, popular scholarship tends to focus on the language and dramaturgy of the Bard’s extant plays.
Fortunately, compared with his contemporaries, many of his plays have survived through fellow actors posthumously collecting 36 of them in the famous First Folio.
Theatre historian David McInnis recognises that rather than being an isolated artist foreseeing his world reputation, this busy working dramatist, feeding the insatiable daily theatre appetite of Elizabethan and early Jacobean audiences, must essentially have responded to the currents of popularity and fashion, as important in the 16th and 17th centuries as they are today.
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