Much of the blame attaches to Ptolemy III (247-222 BC), who ordered the systematic cataloguing of all 200,000 scrolls in the Library of Alexandria. As one biographer speculates, a treasure-trove of Flaubertiana might lie beneath the concrete dockland development of Rouen.AESCHYLUS: THE LOST PLAYSAeschylus wrote more than 80 plays. Or - who knows? - there might be notes or drafts relating to La Spirale - the large, fantastical, metaphysical, loudmouth novel about madness that he first contemplated in the 1850s but, as far as we know, never wrote.But the box remains buried - and is unlikely to resurface. According to the critic William Gifford, they were "fit only for the brothel and would have damned Lord Byron to everlasting infamy". Since it appears to have been printed, more than 1,000 copies may have existed.
The quarto of Titus Andronicus was only discovered in the 1910s, so the chance of Love's Labour's Won yet being found is not impossible.LORD BYRON: MEMOIRSThe fact that Lord Byron's Memoirs were burned by his publisher, executor and biographer has not deprived them of an afterlife. This led to the supposition that the mysterious Love's Labour's Won was an alternative title for The Taming of the Shrew; and, one could argue, Petruchio wins his love in that play. The chance discovery, in 1953, of a scrap from a bookseller's list mentions both work, and precludes them being the same text. The suggestion has nevertheless persisted that Love's Labour's Won was an alternative title for another play by Shakespeare. But the other possibility is that Love's Labour's Won isLove's Labour's Won.
From Savonarola to the Ayatollah Khomeini, religions have expressed themselves through book-burning. The odyssey of two bikers reflected the collapse of the idealism of the 1960s.VANISHING POINT (1971)Part art film, this is one man's existential high-speed drive across the stunning scenery of America's West, chased by the law and guided by a blind disc jockey. It is, in part, a social commentary on the changing mood of America, to a rock soundtrack.BADLANDS (1973)It is based on the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1958. For comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's Labour's Lost, his Love's Labour's Won, his Midsummer Night's Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2., Richard the 3., Henry the 4., King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet." The only plays written before 1597 which Meres omits are the trilogy on Henry VI and The Taming of the Shrew.