Lost Documents, Absent Documents, Forged Documents

Abstract

To speak of a ‘lost play’ and an ‘extant play’ is ostensibly to posit a simple dichotomy in ontological status, but the reality is more complex and involves a continuum of ‘lostness’. This is in part because, as Tiffany Stern has noted, ‘a play was pieced together out of a collection of odds and ends; it was not a single whole entity’ but something ‘patchy’ – any one of these odds and ends could easily become separated from its group and subsequently lost altogether...