Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. Mercator, writing to an English scientist named John Dee in 1577, cribbed word for word from Itinerarium’s description of the North Pole: “In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool, into which there empty these four indrawing Seas which divide the North. Unfortunately, Itinerarium also went missing-but not before Gerard Mercator, one of the most prestigious cartographers of the 16th century, read it. In 1364, another Franciscan described the contents of Inventio Fortunata to Flemish author Jacob Cnoyen, who, in turn, published a summary in his own book, Itinerarium. What followed next was a game of telephone that stretched across centuries. He described the geography of the Arctic, including what he presumed was the North Pole, in a book called Inventio Fortunata, or “The Discovery of the Fortunate Islands.” He gave King Edward III a copy of his travelogue around 1360, and some say an additional five copies floated around Europe before the book was lost. In the 14th century, a Franciscan monk from Oxford, whose name is unknown, traveled the North Atlantic. “If ‘Cardenio’ existed, it would redefine the concept of comparative literature.”

“Never mind that we would have an entirely new play by Shakespeare to watch, the work would be a direct link between the founder of the modern novel and the greatest playwright of all time, a connection between the Spanish and British literary traditions at their sources, and a meeting of the grandest expressions of competing colonial powers,” mused novelist Stephen Marche in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. (A translation of Don Quixote was published in 1612 and would have been available to Shakespeare.)

But the play itself is nowhere to be found.Īnd what a shame! From the title, scholars infer that the plot had something to do with a scene in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote involving a character named Cardenio. There is evidence that Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, performed the play for King James I in May 1613-and that Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his collaborator for Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, wrote it. The “Book in Seven Parts,” for example, likely told readers about the cities that would be divided among the Israelites.Ĭardenio has been called the Holy Grail of Shakespeare enthusiasts. Some of the quotations mentioning the lost books provide clues to their content. Similarly, the First and Second Book of Kings and the First and Second Book of Chronicles names a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel” and a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah.” There are over 20 titles for which the text is missing. The Book of Numbers, for instance, mentions the “Book of the Battles of Yahweh,” for which no copy survives. We only know that they existed because they are referenced by name in other books of the Bible. But other books are lost in the true sense of the word. Sometimes the term is used to describe ancient Jewish and Christian writings that were tossed out of the biblical canon. Missing from these pages of scripture are what have become known as the “lost books” of the Bible. There are 24 books in the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh-and depending upon the denomination, between 66 and 84 more books in Christian Bibles, divided between the Old and New Testaments. In his On the Art of Poetry, he wrote, “ was the first to indicate the forms that comedy was to assume, for his Margites bears the same relationship to comedies as his Iliad and Odyssey bear to our tragedies.” It is unfortunate that no copy of Margites exists because Aristotle held it in high acclaim. “The gods taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill he failed in every craft” (from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics). “He knew many things, but all badly” (from Plato’s Alcibiades). But a few surviving lines, woven into other works, describe the poem’s foolish hero, Margites. Little is known about the plot of the comedic epic poem-Homer’s first work-written around 700 B.C. Before the Iliad and the Odyssey, there was the Margites.

Ancient works lost to time