More than 500 texts of early modern English plays survive. The titles of another 700 pieces are known, and another 1,000 examples have been entirely lost. Because so many of the period’s plays can no longer be accessed, our understanding of early modern English theater may be somewhat skewed. Matthew Steggle and others have created a digital database to collect references to these lost plays and reconstruct anything that can be known about them. In Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England, Steggle offers the fruits of some of those reconstructions. This engaging book examines ten plays for which only titles have survived and offers a tentative description of potential authorship, genre, subject, and circumstance, giving us some understanding of what these lost plays might have staged. Steggle’s book offers many satisfying possibilities, even if these remain speculative.

This book is not a digital-humanities manifesto. Making only a modest contribution to that field, Steggle instead highlights the digital tools most early modern scholars frequently use, such as Early English Books Online (a database that members of the RSA can currently use by virtue of their membership fees). Steggle acknowledges the limits of EEBO, Wikipedia, LION, Google Books, and EEBO-TCP, while making explicit their use, often effaced in early modern scholarship or used uncritically. In essence, Steggle shows exactly how he used these fundamental tools to undertake “prosthetic reading” (22) in combination with traditional scholarly resources and hunches to construct an outline of the plays that might have gone under these titles.

Steggle reaches remarkable conclusions about the plays in this study. The most exciting identification is Steggle’s discussion of a play Philip Henslowe refered to in his diary in 1602 by the name of “Albere Galles,” written by Thomas Heywood and Wentworth Smith and performed by Worcester’s Men. F. G. Fleay once influentially asserted that this title must refer to the extant anonymous play Nobody and Somebody. Steggle, however, uses EEBO-TCP to uncover the possibility that “Albere Galles” may be Henslowe’s record of the unfamiliar name “Alba Regalis,” the Latin name for a Hungarian town, Székesfehérvár. Making this connection, Steggle then follows up with more traditional scholarship: Székesfehérvár had recently been dramatically liberated from Turkish control, so a topical play would be quite appropriate. In addition, Frederic Gershow, a foreigner visiting London, saw a play in 1602 on the subject of the liberation of “Stuhl-Weissenburg,” the German name of Alba Regalis. Steggle connects these dots and speculates on a genre of “siege plays,” such as the extant A Larum for London (1600/02), to disaggregate Henslowe’s lost play from the extant Nobody and Somebody, to give a better sense of the kinds of plays Worcester’s Men performed, and to remind us that Henslowe was a practical and sharp businessman whose transcription of the name of the play as “Albere Galles” is much closer to what his playwrights meant than has been supposed. Perhaps other lost titles in Henslowe’s diary can be similarly reconstructed, instead of making huge leaps to something as far afield as Nobody and Somebody.

Steggle makes other similarly revelatory guesses from the application of traditional scholarly expertise to extant titles and the use of basic digital tools. Richard the Confessor, for instance, is probably not Henslowe’s careless error for a monarch’s name, but instead refers to a sainted Anglo-Norman bishop, Richard of Chichester, allowing Steggle to place this saint’s play within a brief vogue for “regional medieval” plays (57). Steggle uses Wikipedia to show that Glapthorne’s lost Duchess of Fernandina could refer to the dramatic life of only one woman, since the ducal title was relatively new, and probably has affinities with Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, as it participates in Caroline interest in the Medici. Similarly compelling identifications occur in each of Steggle’s ten case studies.

Steggle surrounds these intriguing titles with a great deal of evidence. Most of his conclusions depend on traditional scholarship: knowledge of theatrical records, of playing companies’ repertories, of the powerful force of genre and imitation, of the fancifully instinctual identifications proffered by the Victorians. Steggle’s digital hunches set up the use of these more traditional methods. If there is a danger to this book, it is that future scholars may look back to it with the same mixture of pity and admiration Steggle has for Fleay’s sometimes-fanciful conclusions about the subjects of plays whose titles are all that remain. But Steggle, at least, acknowledges such a likelihood, hedging each case study with an appropriate amount of skepticism. Perhaps we should question the satisfaction to be found in each ascription Steggle makes, but for the moment at least, we can take pleasure in the satisfying click as the pieces of the puzzle Steggle has brought together fall into place.