of actual performance. Six were given by amateurs, at Court or elsewhere, and eleven, of which three are Latin and eight English, are University plays. So far as the professional companies are concerned, the repertories which have probably been best preserved, owing to the fact that the poets were in a position to influence publication, are those of the boys, We have thirty-one plays which, certainly or probably, came to the press from the Chapel and Queen's Revels boys, twenty-five from the Paul's boys, and eight from the King's Revels boys. To the Queen's men we may assign eleven plays, to Sussex's three, to Pembroke's five, to Derby's four, to Oxford's one, to Strange's or the Admiral's and Henry's thirty-two, to the Chamberlain's and King's thirty-four, to Worcester's and Anne's sixteen, to Charles's one. Some of these had at earlier dates been played by other companies. Fifteen plays remain, not a very large proportion, which cannot be safely assigned.[1] There are twenty-seven manuscript English plays or fragments of plays or plots of plays, and twenty-one Latin ones, mostly of a university type, which also belong to the period 1586-1616. There are fifty-one plays which were certainly or probably produced before 1616, but were not printed until later, many of them in the Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher folios. And there are some twenty-two others, which exist in late prints, but may be wholly, or more often partially, of early workmanship. The resultant total of three hundred and seven is considerable, but there is reason to suppose that it only represents a comparatively small fraction of the complete crop of these thirty pullulating dramatic years. Of over two hundred and eighty plays recorded by Henslowe as produced or commissioned by the companies for whom he acted as banker between 1592 and 1603, we have only some forty and perhaps revised versions of a few others.[2] Thomas Heywood claimed in 1633 to have had 'an entire hand, or at least a maine finger', in not less than two hundred and twenty plays, and of these we can only identify or even guess at about two score, of which several are certainly lost. That any substantial number of plays got printed, but have failed to reach us, is improbable. From time to time an unknown print, generally of early date, turns up in some bibliographical backwater, but of the seventy-five titles which I have brought together under the head of 'Lost Plays' some
