The latest New Yorker reports the discovery of a long-lost manuscript by Beethoven. It's not a new piece, but an arrangement for piano, four hands, of the composer’s “Grosse Fuge,” or “Great Fugue,” -- which is one of the most exciting and challenging pieces of music in the known universe. The manuscript was sold at Sotheby's in December to an unnamed buyer for $1.95 million. I know the Grosse Fuge very well in the form of a string quartet; I would love to hear the four-hand piano version sometime soon.
The Beethoven discovery renews my hope that some day another long-lost item will re-emerge -- the Shakespeare play that's been missing for just about four hundred years.
In 1598, Francis Meres compiled a list of the plays of Shakespeare that were known to him: he mentioned, among a dozen others, Shakespeare's "Loue Labors lost, [and] his Loues labours wonne." No one gave much credence to Meres, who was thought to have hallucinated the second play, until 1953, when a book by Thomas Gataker called Certaine Sermons (1637) was rebound and two sheets of paper covered with Elizabethan handwriting were discovered in the backing. The papers were part of the ledger of an otherwise unknown stationer in Exeter and listed the books that were in his stock in August, 1603. Among them: "marchant of vennis," "taming of a shrew," "loves labor lost" and "loves labor won." So Meres was right all along; Shakespeare had in truth written a play called Love's Labor's Won. And it had been published. But the play must have soon disappeared because the diligent compilers of the great 1623 Folio either didn't know of it or couldn't locate a copy.
It's possible that the play has vanished into oblivion, but it's also possible that a copy lies in a closet, drawer or vault. The Beethoven fugue was found by a librarian who was cleaning a cabinet at the Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania -- how the manuscript found its way to that location is anyone's guess. The Thomas Malory manuscript -- one of the most important literary discoveries of the last century -- was lying unidentified in plain sight on top of a safe in Winchester Cathedral. So it's not at all impossible that a quarto of Love's Labor's Won still lurks somewhere, waiting.
There are some other Shakespeare items of interest (and no doubt of monetary value) that might also resurface. There's the missing quarto zero (Q0) of The First Part of King Henry the Fourth (only a few pages of which are known, and then only because they were accidentally bound into a copy of a later quarto); there's Cardenio (co-authored with John Fletcher), which was probably Shakespeare's last effort; there might also be a fuller manuscript version of Macbeth (the Folio play seems to have been deliberately shortened for provincial performance). Also of interest: the anonymous Hamlet that was written a decade or so before Shakespeare's, and which the playwright used as the basis of his revision. Only a single line of the earlier play has survived: the ghost is known to have cried, as shrilly as a street-seller of oysters, "Hamlet, revenge."
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