How 'The Lost Shakespeare Play' came to be written...

Dave Stinton explains the history of how his play came to be

It’s based on a true story from a couple centuries ago. I’ve been writing it, on and off, for about seven and a half years.

In summer of 2001, I went to the Stratford Festival of Canada. It was a relaxing week in an agonizingly quaint little Canadian town, with absolutely nothing on my schedule except a handful of plays.

I was very early to a matinee one day. So early that the theatre hadn’t opened yet. It was starting to drizzle, so I ducked into a used bookstore a block away.

There was a stack of dusty paperbacks just inside the door. On the top of this stack was a book that must have been about great hoaxes in history, or something like that. I picked it up and opened it to a random page and found a couple of paragraphs about William-Henry Ireland, a teenager who, in the 1790s, forged a series of Shakespearean documents.

He started off small (signatures, letters) and eventually worked his way up to a complete play, supposedly buried for 200 years. As suspicions arose, he even managed to forge evidence to support the play’s validity.

I thought, well, this should be my next play.

It wasn’t. Several other plays and playlets have been conceived, written, and performed since then. But The Lost Shakespeare Play has always been sitting there in the back of my brain, rearing up and making me feel guilty whenever something reminds me how long it’s been since I did any serious work on it.
Along the way, it has had an unstaged reading and a semi-staged reading, each with its own stack of notes and reactions from their respective audience members. Somewhere in a closet, I still have all the forms that viewers filled out, telling me what they liked and didn’t, what was clear and wasn’t. But the sad fact is, I don’t work well without a deadline.

My friend Abbie has been getting her Masters in Performing Arts Management, and she got the okay to produce my play as her thesis, which was excellent news. Further excellent news was my other brilliant friend Jen was available and willing to direct. Jen and I have collaborated together on a bunch of things, and I particularly love when she directs stuff that I’ve written. (One of the plays that had its entire lifespan during the writing of LSP is Let There Be Light, which Jen and I wrote together and she directed. It was one of my favorite writing experiences, and it went to the damn New York International Fringe Festival in 2004.)