Authorship At the most a few unimportant details of an earlier version of the story (perhaps a novel) neglected in our play, possibly survive.1 The play seems in all essentials to be merely a mutilated and simplified version of the English text. It remains to discuss the claims of this play to be included among the works of Shakespeare. The strength of the external evidence is beyond dispute. Meres in 1598 mentioned Titus Andronicus among the plays on which Shakespeare's fame was founded; every other play in his list being of unquestioned authenticity. The inclusion of the play in the First Folio at least guarantees that Shakespeare had some share in it. Not much weight can be allowed to a late tradition recorded by Ravenscroft, who tells us (Preface to Titus Andronicus, 1687) that he had heard from 'some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not originally his (Shakespeare's) but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master-touches to one or two of the principal parts and characters.' This tradition may of course be authentic; but it may have originated merely in the inevitable attempt to explain how a play in many ways so unlike Shakespeare came to bear his name. A similar hypothesis has commended itself to most English critics who have allowed Shakespeare any participation in the play at all. But the attempts which have been made to specify Shakespearean additions are very unconvincing. To single out a melodious line or a telling image here and there as Shakespeare's, presupposes a theory of literary production which would render every man's title hazardous to the work of his most brilliant moments. The little 1 The most palpable addition to the matter is Morian (Aaron)'s account of his previous relations with the queen of 'Mehrenland,' and the conquest of the land by the Romans. groups of three or six lines which have thus been singled out 1 do not stand off from the context by any discrepancy of manner; the same style and movement merely acquire a somewhat heightened vivacity and colouring. It is at least a delicate criticism which will assign, for instance, the opening phrases of Titus' lament over his ravished Lavinia to Shakespeare: he that wounded her Hath hurt me more than had he kill'd me dead : Environ'd with a wilderness of sea, Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, Will in his brinish bowels swallow him (iii. 1. 91 f.) and yet permit the author of the rude original which Shakespeare touched up' to have written, a few lines farther on,— Look, Marcus! ah, son Lucius, look on her! (iii. 1. 110 f.) Difficult, however, as any 'touching up' theory is to make plausible in detail, the view that the whole is Shakespeare's work is not to be lightly adopted. Neither in the choice of subject nor in the structure of the plot is there much that recalls Shakespeare. In his later dealings as a dramatist with the Roman world he either re-created history, as in the three great Roman tragedies, or frankly ignored it, as in Cymbeline; he never attempted to reproduce or emulate the bizarre invention of Titus, where quasi-historic figures from the age of the Goths play their part in 1 The following have been specified: i. 1. 9, 70-6, 117-119, 141, 142; ii. 1. 82, 83; 2. 1-6; VOL. VII 3. 10-15; iii, 1. 82-86, 91-7; iv. 4. 81-6; v. 2. 21-27; 3. 160-8. 289 U 1 stories borrowed from classic mythology or legend and steeped in the artificial literary atmosphere of Ovid and Seneca. Ignorant as we are of the source of the story, we can hardly be wrong in assuming that the tragic fortunes of Lavinia are modelled on those of the Ovidian Philomela, and the grim vengeance of Titus on the legend of Atreus. The haunted, sunless wood where Atreus slays his nephews (Sen. Thyestes, 650 f.) has passed over into the 'barren detested vale' where Bassianus is slain and Lavinia ravished.2 In the death of Lavinia at her father's hands the memory of Virginia seems to be blended, if not confused, with that of Lucrece; and the confusion may diminish the difficulty we otherwise feel in associating the profuse classical learning of the play with Shakespeare's small Latin and less Greek. In the bloodthirsty Tamora, lastly, who so terribly avenges her slaughtered son, we may perhaps find a reminiscence of the Scythian queen Tomyris, who wreaked her son's death not less grimly upon Cyrus. A promiscuous aggregation of materials like this strikes us as un-Shakespearean. Yet it is not unlike, in the tragic sphere, what the author of Love's Labour's Lost attempted in the sphere of comic satire. The same alert mind which there assembled oddities and extravagances from every phase of contemporary life, may have gratified the same instinct for profusion and multiplicity by weaving from its school-reminiscences this horrible fantasia of classical legends. Moreover, with all the extravagance of certain incidents, Titus Andronicus bears marks of the sanity. and self-control which distinguish even the most 1 The often-repeated state- to rest on an error. There is ment (first made by Steevens) no evidence that the story existed that Painter in the Palace of in any form before the play. Pleasure (1567) mentions 'Titus Andronicus and Tamora' seems 2 Cunliffe, Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 70. daring work of the young Shakespeare. Though perilously full of matter, the plot is clear and compact; the immense tragic forces which are let loose contend for dominance in interest as well as for the triumph of their cause; but their encounters are adequately motived, and with all their energy of wrath they do not lose themselves in the annihilating frenzy which blurs the outlines of Marlowe's Barabas. The three great contrivers of the harms, Titus, Tamora, and Aaron, are shaped with a rude and somewhat uncertain hand; but a trait here and there suggests the future author of Richard III., of Lear, and Othello in this resolute emulator of Marlowe and Kyd.1 Titus and Tamora bear the stamp of the Kydian tragedy of Revenge. Their tragic career is provoked by a deadly, unpardonable wrong. Aaron, on the other hand, is related rather to the Marlowesque tragedy of dæmonic energy,-virtù-which dooms its victims out of pure malignancy.2 But Titus has touches of a Shakespearean magnanimity which remove him far from the blind pursuer of vengeance. His generous disclaimer of the imperial crown in the opening scene fitly preludes the nobly-imagined scene in which he hews off his hand to save his sons. The scene (iii. 2.) where the two brothers so passionately moralise the death of a fly, already heralds those apparently trivial moments of pause which the mature Shakespeare is wont to make pregnant of 1 These faint affinities have been worked out with much ingenuity by Prof. A. Schröer in his interesting study of the play Über Titus Andronicus (Marburg, 1891). 2 There are curious analogies in detail between Aaron and Richard III. He also derives a motive for crime from his unpromising exterior : Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace, Aaron will have his soul black like his face. Cf. also his monologue in ii. 1. with Richard's opening soliloquy. (Schröer, N.S., p. 115.) tragic suggestion. And the tenderness for his child which so suddenly and strangely intrudes upon the fiendish malignity of Aaron, is a trait which might well escape from the pen of the future delineator of Shylock and his daughter. Most critics have recognised Shakespearean touches in the style. Certainly, the bookish allusions which are so abundantly woven into its texture are tempered with many touches caught from the open-air life of nature such as nowhere fail in the young Shakespeare. A woodland brake-a 'pleasant chase '—is the scene of the most tragic deed in the whole play, and we are not allowed to forget over the sufferings of Lavinia the morning dew upon the leaves or their chequered shadow upon the ground as they quiver in the breeze. The data for a conclusive case on the authorship of Titus Andronicus are wholly wanting. English criticism has too peremptorily decided against Shakespeare's claim on the ground of the palpable defects of the plot, and the difficulty of bringing this grim tragedy into relation with the bright and joyous comedy which apparently occupied Shakespeare's early manhood. But we know far too little of that early manhood to be entitled to exclude from it whatever will not fall in with a particular scheme of development; and, in view of the strong external evidence, the more critical course appears to be a qualified acceptance. 1 It has been pointed out by Dr. Cunliffe in his valuable study of the Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, that some of the most striking of the Senecan parallels with which this play abounds occur in the more Shakespearean passages. Cf. e.g. with this passage (ii. 3.) the lines: hic aves querulæ fremunt ramique ventis lene percussi tremunt Hippolytus, 516. |