The lost plays of early modern England form a large and tantalizing group, greatly outnumbering those that are still extant. From a probable total of more than three thousand plays thought to have been written and performed in London between 1560 and 1642, a mere five hundred or so survive today in printed form (Gurr, 1996, 26; cf. Sibley, 1933; Sisson, 1936; Lost Play Database, www.lostplays.org). Jonson’s work is unlikely to reflect a similar ratio of survival to loss, however, for he methodically published what he judged to be the best of his plays. These included some which had not fared well on the public stage, such as Catiline and The New Inn, and others such as Sejanus, that had not merely failed to please but had brought him into sharp conflict with the authorities. Yet Jonson’s attitude to dramatic publication was more cautious and selective than this casual picture might suggest. He also excluded from the canon of his published work a number of plays which are known today chiefly by their titles – The Isle of Dogs; Hot Anger Soon Cold; Page of Plymouth; Robert II, King of Scots; Richard Crookback; along with the pastoral, The May-lord (see below, 1.101, 1.110, 1.230, 1.231, 5.343–5) – or through some more generalized reference. Though Francis Meres in 1598 named Jonson as being among ‘our best for tragedy’ (Palladis Tamia, Smith, 1904, 2. 319), for example, no tragedies written by Jonson during the 1590s are known to have survived. Twenty years later, having published many of his plays in quarto editions and in the 1616 folio of his collected works, Jonson could still report to William Drummond ‘That the half of his comedies were not in print’ (Informations, 306). His still unpublished comedies at this date included Bartholomew Fair and The Devil Is an Ass – both eventually to appear after Jonson’s death in the 1640 folio – together with others probably commissioned by Philip Henslowe in the 1590s, such as Hot Anger Soon Cold and other works whose titles have not survived.

Many of these early plays Jonson may simply have judged unworthy of publication. Most would have been put together at some speed in collaboration with other writers from Henslowe’s team – for whose collective talents, as Jonson’s later remarks to Drummond make clear, he held no high opinion. His personal contribution to such pieces must sometimes, moreover, have been slight. In 1598 Henslowe laconically noted ‘A tragedy of Benjamin’s plot’ on which George Chapman was currently engaged (Life Records, 17). This was evidently a scenario that Jonson had supplied, and that Chapman was now commissioned to work up into a full-length play. Perhaps it is identical with the sketch that Jonson had showed to the Lord Admiral’s Men and for which he had received twenty shillings from Henslowe on 3 December 1597, promising to deliver the final product by Christmas (Life Records, 12). The tragedy, if it was ever completed, has vanished entirely, along with much of Chapman’s and Jonson’s other early work. Jonson might have found it difficult, furthermore, at times to recover the manuscripts of his plays, especially those of which he was not sole author. These works were technically the property of the theatrical company for which they had been written, and might therefore have been withheld or mislaid by the company after performance, or deliberately appropriated by one or other of its members. Years later Thomas Heywood was to complain that many of his own plays, ‘by shifting and change of companies, have been negligently lost; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors, who think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in print’ (The English Traveller, 1631, ‘To the Reader’, in Heywood, 1874, 4.5). Accident, mischance, and the negligence of the author himself accounted for other losses. The fire that destroyed part of Jonson’s library in 1623 took off (so he claimed) many works-in-progress, including some that he had evidently found it difficult to complete: ‘parcels of a play, / Fitter to see the fire-light than the day, / Adulterate moneys, such as might not go’ (‘An Execration upon Vulcan’, Und. 43.43–5). Other losses might have been less accidental. In the case of The Isle of Dogs, the most notorious and fully documented of Jonson’s missing plays, there is a strong probability that the manuscript had not been ‘lost’ at all, but deliberately destroyed by its authors on account of the extreme dangers it posed both to themselves and to the company for which they worked.