In the eighty-four years from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to the closing of the theatres we know the names of 200 writers who contributed to the stage, and there were beside many anonymous pieces. All told, there were produced over 1500 plays; and if we count masques and pageants, and court and university plays, and other quasi-dramatic species the number does not fall much short of 2000. Less than half of these are now extant. It is not probable that any important play of Shakespeare’s is lost, although no collection of his plays was made until 1623, seven years after his death. Meanwhile about half of them had come out singly in small quartos, surreptitiously issued and very incorrectly printed. We probably have all, or nearly all, of Beaumont and Fletcher’s fifty-three plays. And Ben Jonson collected his own works carefully and saw them through the press. But Thomas Heywood wrote, either alone or in collaboration, upwards of 220, and of these only twenty-four remain. Dekker is credited with seventy-six and Rowley with fifty-five, comparatively few of which are now known to exist. One reason why such a large proportion of the Elizabethan plays is missing, is that the theatre companies which owned the stage copies were unwilling to have them printed and thereby made accessible to readers and liable to be pirated by other companies. Manuscript plays were a valuable asset, and were likely to remain in manuscript until they were destroyed or disappeared. There are still many unpublished plays of that period. Thus the manuscript of one of Heywood’s missing plays was discovered and printed as late as 1885. A curious feature of the old drama was the practice of collaboration. A capital instance of this was the long partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher. But often three, or sometimes four dramatists collaborated in a single piece. It is difficult, often impossible, to assign the different parts of the play to the respective authors and much critical ingenuity has been spent upon the problem, often with very inconclusive results. To increase the difficulty of assigning a certain authorship, many old plays were worked over into new versions. It is surmised that Shakespeare himself collaborated with Fletcher in “Henry VIII,” as well as in “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” a tragi-comedy which is not included in the Shakespeare folio; that in “Henry VI” he simply revamped old chronicle-history plays; that “Hamlet” was founded on a lost original by Kyd; that “Titus Andronicus” and possibly “Richard III” owe a great deal to Marlowe; and that the underplot of “The Taming of the Shrew” and a number of scenes in “Timon of Athens” were composed, not by Shakespeare but by some unknown collaborator. In short we are to look upon the Elizabethan theatre as a great factory and school of dramatic art, producing at its most active period, the last ten years of the queen’s reign, say, from 1593–1603, some forty or fifty new plays every year: masters and scholars working