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In 1778 Edmond Malone, in his essay entitled "An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays attributed to Shakspeare were Written,"[1] set down a list of thirty-four "ancient plays," the names of which, he stated, had been preserved, but which were otherwise in 1778 unknown, having apparently never been printed.[2] The recent discovery in MS of Thomas Middleton's The Witch had led him to hope that some of these other old plays might similarly have survived and yet be discovered. "The resemblance between Macbeth and this newly discovered piece by Middleton, naturally suggests a wish, that if any of the unpublished plays, above enumerated, be yet in being, (besides Timon and Sir Thomas More, which are known to be extant) their possessors would condescend to examine them with attention; as hence, perhaps, new lights might be thrown on others of our author's [i.e., Shakespeare's] plays."[3] An indefatigable scholar, Malone had culled his list of titles from a number of older printed and MS sources; three titles, for example—The Cradle of Securitie, Hit the Naile o' the Head, The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom—he apparently found in the extant MS of Sir Thomas More, for they appear together in his list, just above Sir Thomas More itself. The Cradle of Securitie may have come also from another source, R. W.'s Mount Tabor (1639), which Malone knew by at least 1790;[4] but the only known source for the title of Hit the Naile remains to this day the Sir Thomas More MS, which was in fact cited by

Malone as his source for both the Cradle and the Hit the Naile titles, in two of his contributions to Isaac Reed's 1782 revised edition, Biographia Dramatica, of David Erskine Baker's 1764 The Companion to the Playhouse.[5] Other sources used by Malone included the Stationers' Register[6] and Chetwood's British Theatre (1750).[7] Malone's list reappeared in later editions of the "Attempt" (published in editions of Shakespeare's plays issued in 1785, 1790, 1793, and later), the list being greatly enlarged in 1785 by twenty-three additional titles,[8] nineteen of which were first printed in Malone's 1780 Supplement to the 1778 Shakespeare edition.[9] (One other title added in the Supplement was dropped in 1785.) One 1778 title, The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, was removed in 1785, the play's existence in print having by then been discovered.[10]

In a recent article in Studies in Bibliography,[11] John Freehafer has suggested that Malone derived about one quarter of the titles in his 1778 list from the now-notorious MS list (with memorandum) written by John Warburton (1682-1759), Somerset Herald, of MS plays supposedly once in his possession and unhappily nearly all destroyed by his servant, who used them for placing under pie bottoms.[12] This list, still extant and prefixed (as in Warburton's time) to the volume of three plays (and a fragment) once owned by Warburton, British Museum MS. Lansdowne 807, had previously been believed to have been unknown to scholars before its publication in Isaac Reed's 1803 edition of Shakespeare's plays.[13] This 1803 printing had been referred to in the 1807 sale catalogue of the Lansdowne

library,[14] in Samuel Egerton Brydges' Censura Literaria, vol. 5 (1807),[15] and by W. W. Greg in 1911.[16] Freehafer correctly points out that Reed in fact first published the list in the 1793 fourth edition of the Plays,[17] that Reed's 1782 Biographia Dramatica, to which Malone contributed,[18] also shows definite knowledge of Warburton's list and memorandum,[19] and that nine of Malone's thirty-four 1778 titles are to be found in Warburton's list,[20] while one more Malone title is that of a play once owned by Warburton though not listed by him.[21] Freehafer argues that Malone knew of Warburton's list (and collection) in 1778, used it for his "Attempt," and was the source of the information from it appearing in the 1782 Biographia Dramatica. In fact, however, Malone in 1778 does not seem to have known of the existence of the list, but apparently drew his "Warburton" titles from other sources; and the provider (direct or indirect) of the Warburton material in Biographia Dramatica appears to have been, not Malone, but George Steevens, who was the first to publish Warburton's list, as early as May 1780, in an unsigned letter to The St. James's Chronicle.[22]