The whispering past

From Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson. Page 18.

Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author’s identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous. Thomas Kyd wrote the most successful play of its day, The Spanish Tragedy, but we know this only because of a passing reference to his authorship in a document written some twenty years after his death (and then lost for nearly two hundred years).

Reminds me of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. From the first century B.C. it was influential and widely quoted and mentioned in antiquity but, with the fall of Rome and the dark ages, dwindled to two copies extant when it was rediscovered in January 1417, by Poggio Bracciolini.

Leaves of grass as it were.