Forgotten characters and plots in theatre.
- One version of this in theatre is the ghost character
: a character who's listed in the cast or directed to appear on stage, but who doesn't actually do or affect anything. This can indicate a mistake on the playwright's part: they planned the character, then later effectively dropped them, but forgot to delete them altogether. There are several cases in Shakespeare (not helped by all the various early editions and cribs of his plays). One example is Leonato's wife Innogen in Much Ado About Nothing, who is listed in the cast and a stage direction, then never heard from again, not even in the wedding scene where she might be expected to react to her daughter's humiliation. In some productions (e.g. the David Tennant/Catherine Tate one), her role is expanded, often by giving many of Antonio's lines to her. - In the epilogue to Angels in America, we see Prior, Belize, Louis, and Joe's mother are all pretty chummy with each other five years after the events of the play, but Joe seems to be pretty much forgotten.
- Adam, beloved Old Retainer and sidekick of Orlando in As You Like It, disappears after they arrive in Arden. Since Adam is elderly and nearly starves to death on the journey, some productions imply that he died; scholars speculate that the actor who played him may have needed to double as someone important during the second half of the show. (Whatever Shakespeare's intention was, Adam doesn't die in the source material.)
- Cyrano de Bergerac: Did Viscount de Valvert survive his Sword Fight with Cyrano at Act I Scene IV or not? The last we see about him was that his friends carried him after his defeat, and after a little mention by Roxane at Act II Scene IV, we never heard of him again.
- In Henry IV, Part 2, all of Prince Hal's old Eastcheap companions are rounded up and sent to prison once he ascends the throne... except for Poins, who hasn't been seen or spoken of since the end of Act 2. This is particularly jarring in The Hollow Crown, where his role is expanded considerably, but he still disappears without explanation.
- In King Lear, Shakespeare decides to Shoo Out the Clowns and have the Fool drop out of the plot after Act 3, even though he was a constant companion of Lear up to that point. Some stage productions interpret this as the Fool dying — perhaps influenced by the line "My poor fool is hanged" in the last scene, though most critics interpret that line as referring to Cordelia. (A Doylist theory is that in the original production, the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same actor, explaining the former's disappearance and making that line an inside joke.)
- In Les Misérables, the catalyst of the story, Valjean's nephew for whom he stole the bread, is never seen nor anything said about him after Valjean gets out of prison.
- Love Never Dies ends with the near-insane Meg accidentally killing Christine, but she sees no closure for her character arc in favor of wrapping up the Phantom's relationships with Christine and Gustave. It's actually worse in the original London version, which opens with a prologue set years later that sees her mother Madame Giry revisiting the ruins of Phantasma, but Meg isn't with her. Was she arrested and imprisoned — or even executed? Did she commit suicide?
- In Macbeth, Fleance speaks a grand total of two lines, escapes death at the hands of the murderers Macbeth sent after him and Banquo, then...disappears. He's not even mentioned at the end. More than a bit puzzling because per the witches' prophecy, he's destined to someday be the rightful king of Scotland, and, as he's now missing and with no living guardians, it's more than a little important that someone find him. In Holinshed's Chronicles, which Shakespeare based much of the plot on, he kept running until he settled in Wales and it's his son who came back and became king.
- Miss Saigon: Gigi Van Tranh and the rest of the girls from Dreamland all disappear from the narrative towards the end of Act 1 when the narrative skips ahead a few years. Their fates following the Fall of Saigon are never revealed.
- Cirque du Soleil's Mystère raises this question by leaving a key character (and more importantly performer), Brian Le Petit, out of the curtain call. The answer is All There in the Manual: when Moha-Samedi hauls him out of the theater, it's for good, as Brian wasn't "part of the show" to begin with.
- When Iago's plan starts blowing up in his face in Othello, Iago frantically covers his tracks and implicates Bianca in the plot to kill Cassio. Bianca is arrested and dragged off, and that's the last time she's seen. It's not even stated if she'll be released after Iago is finally exposed.
- Watching the original play version of Peter Pan, you might wonder, "What happened to that rich cake Hook was going to kill the Lost Boys with"? There are several answers to this question:
- A stage direction after Hook enters, discouraged that the boys have found a mother, suggests that he "has perhaps found the large rich damp cake untouched".
- The novel expands this as one of the Noodle Incident adventures the children have in Neverland: "[The pirates] placed it in one cunning spot after another; but always Wendy snatched it from the hands of her children, so that in time it lost its succulence, and became as hard as a stone, and was used as a missile, and Hook fell over it in the dark."
- In the musical, the boys find the cake at the end of the "Wendy House" scene. Wendy tells them not to eat it, and they go inside.
- Romeo and Juliet: Where the hell does Benvolio go after Mercutio dies?!
- It has been speculated by a commentary on the book that Benvolio's line "That is the truth or let Benvolio die" is significant, given that he lied and said Tybalt started the fight with Mercutio (when it was the other way around). It is unlikely, however, that he was actually killed, so his disappearance remains a mystery.
- At least one revision done long after Shakespeare died had one of the nobles at the end of the play announce that Benvolio was also dead. They still fail to mention how.
- Another common interpretation is related to Benvolio's Meaningful Name. "Benvolio" means goodwill in Latin. He's around for all of the more comedy-like parts — perhaps Benvolio is only a metaphor after all.
- It has been speculated by a commentary on the book that Benvolio's line "That is the truth or let Benvolio die" is significant, given that he lied and said Tybalt started the fight with Mercutio (when it was the other way around). It is unlikely, however, that he was actually killed, so his disappearance remains a mystery.
- The Taming of the Shrew starts out as a play-within-a-play; a lord and his servants trick a drunken peasant named Christopher Sly into thinking that he's the lord by dressing him up and waiting on him, telling him that he's been mad for years. They all sit down to watch a play about Katerina and Petruchio...and then they don't show up again. One ending has Sly waking up, convinced that he dreamed the whole thing and eager to try the trick of "taming a shrew" out on his own wife; however, many scholars think that it was added later and that Shakespeare never wrote it.
- In The Tempest, Ferdinand mentions that he was hanging out with Antonio's son just before the titular storm hit. This character is never mentioned again. If he was lost in the shipwreck, you'd think that Antonio would mention it; just see how worried Alonso is about Ferdinand. It's possible that he's with their group, but if so, he never speaks. As Antonio's heir, as well as the nephew/cousin of Prospero and Miranda, you'd think that he'd have something to say about the family's dramatic reunion.
