Missing Episode/Theatre

• Many Gilbert and Sullivan fans have never heard of their first collaboration, Thespis. The reason is that Sullivan's music is lost except for two songs: "Little Maid of Arcadee" (published as sheet music) and "Climbing Over Rocky Mountain" (reused in The Pirates of Penzance). Since Gilbert's libretto survived, there have been multiple efforts to "reconstruct" Thespis with "Sullivan-style" music.
• References to a play co-written by William Shakespeare titled "Cardenio", which is generally accepted to have been completely lost. There are records of another show, called "Love's Labours Won", but it is unknown if this is a lost play, or simply an alternate title for a show that was later renamed.
  • It was thought to be an alternate title for Taming of the Shrew, until a fragment turned up that listed them as separate plays. The "lost play" theory is now considered the more likely.
    • It was destroyed after witches tried to use it to release their sisters from their prison.
• Countless ancient Greek plays have been lost to the historical ether. To put this in perspective:
  • Aeschylus, regarded as the father of dramatic tragedy, is known to have written seventy plays; today, we possess only seven. Among the lost plays are the second and third plays in the Prometheia trilogy, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, of which only fragments survive.
  • Sophocles, the second great Greek tragedian, is credited with 120 plays, but only seven have survived in their entirety. Fragments of a previously lost play of his, The Progeny, were discovered in 2005. The play is part of the Oedipus cycle, and is apparently about the Seven Against Thebes.
  • The third great Greek tragedian, Euripides, fares only slightly better, with eighteen or nineteen (at least one play's authorship is debated) of over ninety plays surviving. Notably, he is the only Greek tragedian represented by a complete surviving "satyr play" (a burlesque tragicomedy performed in the middle or at the end of a group of tragic plays), The Cyclops.
  • Aristophanes, the greatest of the Greek comedians, has eleven surviving plays out of around forty.
  • And these four have the best preserved bodies of work of all ancient Greek dramatists; most of their contemporaries are not even represented by a single surviving play (the vast majority were lost after the fall of the Roman Empire).

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