Recently Recovered "Lost" Tudor Plays with Some Others

A strange and intriguing artifact of early twentieth-century literary detection, this volume gathers several plays with a remarkable origin story: three previously unknown Tudor manuscripts, reportedly discovered gathering dust in an Irish country house in 1906. Editor John S. Farmer presents these texts, Wealth and Health, Impatient Poverty, and John the Evangelist, as rare surviving fragments of Elizabethan-era drama, recovered just before they were lost forever. The collection also includes Mankind, a morality play that pits Mercy against the forces of temptation in a dialogue as old as storytelling itself: the struggle between virtue and vice, salvation and ruin. Whether these works are genuine Tudor relics or something more complicated remains part of their mystique. What emerges is a window into a lesser-known corner of English dramatic history, where poverty and wealth are personified, and the medieval stage served as both entertainment and instruction. For scholars of early theatre, for collectors of literary mysteries, for anyone drawn to the bones of old stories.