It would be well enough if we could indeed know what song the sirens sung. It would perhaps be better still if we could know more about the scores of Elizabethan plays of which nothing remains but the bare mention of them in Henslowe's Diary. Titles survive, the names of authors, and even perhaps the sum of Henslowe's share of the takings day by day. But the flesh and blood of many a great play has been buried beyond recovery, and Henslowe only serves to make us the more sadly aware of the outrages that time and chance have wrought.

Ben Jonson told Drummond ‘that the half of his comedies were not in print’, and Henslowe's Diary bears witness to a number of lost plays in which he had a hand. What would we not give to have Ben Jonson's handling of a murder melodrama in Page of Plymouth? What light would be thrown on the art of Shakespeare in one of his greatest and most difficult plays, had Chettle and Dekker's Troilus and Cressida survived? How much of the full stature of Dekker, Chapman and Heywood has been hidden from us by the loss of so many plays written in the days of their strength? What obscure dramatists might possibly have stood forth revealed as not unworthy compeers with the great ones?