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. Thus, sculptors like Michelangelo were challenged with transforming a block of marble into a human ideal without “sullying” the surface with unnecessary beautification, such as paint.Before the Iliad and the Odyssey, there was the Margites. Suddenly, colorless statues were upheld to be the standard of classical art which all visionary artists should be trying to achieve. This revelation of ancient aesthetics-which were so dramatically different from the lingering Gothic style of the Middle Ages-was one of the triggers for the Italian Renaissance. However, since these sculptures appeared otherwise intact and well-preserved, it was assumed they were meant to be white marble. When Italians found these classical treasures buried underground in the 14th century, the fragile pigments had long since fallen away. 130-100 BCE (Photo: Wikimedia Commons )Despite these facts, the misconception of their “unblemished” appearance lives on-due in large part to their rediscovery 600 years ago, and the impact it had afterward. Alexandros of Antioch, “Venus de Milo,” c.
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