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| Hearsay: |
The WSJ looks at great works of literature we have somehow misplaced. I suspect my novel is in there somewhere. I’ve been looking for it for 10 years. It’s like the car keys or the phone. Always in the room I’m not.
While it may seem inconceivable to us that the smallest scraps of Shakespeare’s genius would fail to be preserved like holy relics, oblivion was not an uncommon ending for plays of the early 17th century. Shakespeare’s “Pericles” exists only in a lousy quarto, which is so badly transcribed scholars assume it was done by someone jotting down the script from memory after having seen the show (the early modern equivalent of the grainy pirated videos you can buy on the subway). Like most dramatists of the period, Shakespeare didn’t care about his plays after their performances, made no effort to publish them and received no money from their publication.
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April 20th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Actually I’ve lain awake night thinking about what is going to be lost when the next great change in platform comes, or the earth receives a big electromagnetic pulse from the sun and a lot of electronic media gets scrambled.
So much is on the web now, and might be lost.
Maybe we ought to print out or blogs etc every once in a while: paper is a much more stable media than ons and offs in a digital format.
What’re you doing to make sure Bookninja survives, George?
Mary
April 20th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Great post George – I love the mystery in what we do not know.
April 20th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
The possibility of uncovering great lost works from the years gone by has been popular ground for fiction writers for years. Of course I’m drawing a blank right now on some of the books I’ve read on the subject (to quote Bart Simpson, “Damn TV, its ruined my…umm…what were we talking about again?) but suffice to say there are some great books out there on the subject of finding hidden literary treasures.
April 21st, 2009 at 8:15 am
I seem to remember having heard about some excavation work that was being done near Herculaneum a few years ago, at a villa of some eminent personage that had been encased in volcanic ash, and how upon excavation, they had discovered a very large number scrolls (in heavy degrees of decay), that the University of Naples was doing a barrage of tests on (or in getting the opportunity to run tests), but don’t remember having heard about any of their findings. Certainly an exciting notion, the potential of unearthing lost works.