On September 4, in 1614, a woman named Alice Mustian put on a play in the English city of Salisbury. Erecting a stage in her own backyard, Mustian assembled a group of local children, including her ten-year-old son Phillip, to perform a play based on local gossip: that Mary Roberts, the wife of a joiner, had had an affair with a baker named Robert Humphries.
Nothing except eyewitness accounts of Mustian’s play has survived to the modern day. This is the case for most plays written and performed in early modern England. The vast majority have been lost, and are known only by sparse and fragmentary evidence, if at all.
