Ye Unearthly Childe

One of the stranger texts to have been discovered in recent years is what purports to be an account of a lost Shakespeare play titled 'Ye Unearthly Childe', although it seems unlikely that this was the title accorded the work by Shakespeare - if indeed it was written by him. The account is part of a set of diaries, badly damaged in the Great Fire of London (1666) and with no clue as to the identity of the author. The diaries were then lost until they were rediscovered in the 1960s. Even then, it was another fifty years before the possible importance of the text described was realised. // Sadly, the text is incomplete - there are just a few fragments with brief explanatory notes linking them. It seems likely that the sequences were transcribed during a performance, but unfortunately the earlier pages that probably explained where and when this performance took place were lost to the flames.