Only a fraction of the world’s stories have survived. What might we be missing?
preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains.
The study also addressed the question of how representative the surviving stories and manuscripts are. Medieval Irish and Icelandic narrative fiction seems to have survived far better than the English equivalents. One reason might be that the practice of copying texts by hand persisted for much longer in Iceland and Ireland than in England, meaning that any given medieval tale is preserved in more manuscript copies – and so protected, to some extent, against the inevitable loss. The causes of loss were manifold, from fires and other disasters, to the decay or recycling of material on which texts were written, to censorship, incompetence and corruption. Throughout history, the most destructive of these forces was probably fire – and not just in the western world. Michael Friedrich, a sinologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, notes that the imperial library of China’s Han dynasty was largely destroyed by fire in the first century AD, during a period of internal strife. When a later dynasty tried to send another imperial library by canal to its new capital, most of the ships sank.The largest repositories of books have always tended to form in centres of power, sometimes lending that power legitimacy, which makes them obvious targets during political upheaval, or just collateral damage when regimes change. As Italian literary historian Luciano Canfora wrote in the 1980s, in The Vanished Library, the upshot is that “what has come down to us is derived not from the great centres but from ‘marginal’ locations, such as convents, and from scattered private copies”. There’s yet another problem: the sheer volume of texts. When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that have survived but are yet to be studied has been estimated at around 10m, though Friedrich says he has seen estimates as high as 30m. There simply aren’t enough scholars with the right expertise, including the necessary language skills, to do the work. It’s tempting to think that after the advent of movable-type printing, which happened in Europe in the 15th century , literary erosion might have slowed down, simply because churning out copies became easier. But David McInnis at the University of Melbourne says that’s not necessarily true. For one thing, accidents continued to happen, as when rioters vandalised London’s Cockpit theatre in 1617, starting a fire in which all the theatre’s playbooks were burned. For another, not everything that made it to the stage made it to the page. When plays were printed, it tended to be done cheaply with a single print run of around 500 copies, and these copies were often read to pieces – literally. As a result, McInnis says, we are probably missing the first edition of Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost, since the earliest known edition is described as a revision. All that’s left of another play we know the great man wrote, Love’s Labour’s Won, is its title. McInnis estimates that the 543 plays that survive from 1576, when the first public theatres opened in London, to 1642, when the Puritans closed them, represent a fraction of all those produced. Another 744 that certainly existed have been lost, and hundreds more were probably written to fill the repertory calendar, of which no trace remains. Some plays were translated into German and performed on the continent by travelling English players, including works by Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. At least one play written for the English theatre, whose author is unknown, only survives in German – The Comedy of Queen Esther and Haughty Haman – and there may be others. Unfortunately, we can’t console ourselves that the plays that do survive were necessarily the best, or at least the most popular. McInnis crunched the numbers based on the meticulous book-keeping of one London impresario in the 1590s,, and drew the following conclusion: “Lost plays performed at least as well as, and usually better than, the plays that have survived. They are definitively not inferior, they were good money-makers, and they have been lost for a variety of reasons that aren’t attributable to quality.”The problem is that our criteria for judging literary talent have been shaped by the texts that have come down to us. Daniel Sawyer of Oxford University says there were certainly first-rate medieval writers in English whose works haven’t survived, but questions whether we would be equipped to judge those works, should any surface now. For English-speakers, Sawyer says, one writer casts a gigantic shadow over the rest: Shakespeare. Not only has he left his fingerprints all over our language, but he is the reference to which all other writers are compared. Yet in his lifetime Shakespeare was responding to a rich and varied literary ecosystem. His contemporaries also recognised other greats – including a poet named Thomas Watson whose lauded plays have almost all been lost . Who knows how we would judge Shakespeare – whom one contemporary described as “Watson’s heir” – had the full spectrum of English literature from his time, or the eras before and after him, survived. Who might the giants of world literature be, if we knew just what those 30m Indian manuscripts contained, or if the millions of others that were burned or mouldered away had survived. Greatness may sometimes be less a property of great minds than an accident of history.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
'Australia's greatest sporting family': Indigenous boxing legend receives long overdue recognitionRaised at Burnt Bridge Mission, Dunghutti man Dave Sands rose from humble beginnings to become a boxing legend in the 1940s and 50s. Decades later his family is striving to keep his story alive.
Read more »
AGL Energy counts numbers ahead of demerger voteIt’s a big weekend for AGL Energy, with proxy reports due to land in coming days.
Read more »
Ironic speeding ticket breaks Kiwi star's heart'That could have put Scott Dixon in that stratosphere of IndyCar drivers.' 😥 9WWOS StanSportAU
Read more »
I am queer and proud – even though I am now married to a man | Kerry HudsonI have had long-term relationships with women and am still amazed not to be jeered at from cars when I kiss my husband, writes Kerry Hudson
Read more »
The businesses making office time a perkBusinesses are flipping the dial on remote work, adopting office-first policies to recruit workers sick of working from home and keen to forge connections.
Read more »
I am queer and proud – even though I am now married to a man | Kerry HudsonI have had long-term relationships with women and am still amazed not to be jeered at from cars when I kiss my husband, writes Kerry Hudson
Read more »