Shakespeare's Plays - Lost Plays

Lost Plays

• Love's Labour's Won – a late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a bookseller's list both list this title among Shakespeare's recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternative title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All's Well That Ends Well.
• Cardenio – the original of a late play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It is believed to have re-worked a tale in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falshood does re-work the Cardenio story, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Double Falshood includes fragments of Shakespeare's lost play.