VI

THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE, FROM TITUS ANDRONICUS TO THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA

1. TITUS ANDRONICUS

[A Noble Roman Historye of Tytus Andronicus was entered in the Stationers' Register on February 6th, 1593-94. In 1598, Meres mentioned Titus Andronicus as among Shakspere's tragedies. The play, virtually in its present form, was published in quarto, without Shakspere's name, in 1600. There was another anonymous quarto in 1611. Besides Meres's allusion to it, the Centurie of Prayse cites two others during Shakspere's lifetime, neither of which mentions his name. The second of these is in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, which appeared in 1614 "Hee that will sweare Jeronimo1 or Andronicus are the best playes, yet shall passe unexcepted at, heere, as a man whose Judgement shewes it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twentie, or thirtie yeeres." From this, as well as from its general archaism, the inference has been drawn that the play belongs, at latest, to 1589. As Shakspere was not in London before 1587, then, a reasonable conjectural date for it is 1588.

Its precise source is unknown. The story seems to have been familiar. Possibly the play, as we have it, is a retouched version of an older play called Titus and Vespasian, of which a German adaptation exists.

The genuineness of Titus Andronicus has been much questioned, on the ground that it is unworthy of Shakspere; the arguments in its favor rest on Meres's allusion, and on the fact that it was included in the folio of 1623. If Shakspere's, it is probably his earliest work.]

THE frequent doubt as to the genuineness of Titus Andronicus gains color from the place where the play is generally printed. In most editions of Shaks

1 Le., Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, circ. 1588.

pere it occurs between Coriolanus and Romeo and Juliet. Thus placed, it seems little more than a monstrous tissue of absurdities, a thing of which no author who wrote such tragedies as the others could conceivably have been guilty.

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Read by itself, however, particularly at a moment when one is not prepossessed by Shakspere's greater work, it does not seem so bad. Crude as it is in general conception and construction, free as it is from any vigorous strokes of character, it has, here and there, a rhetorical strength and impulse which sweep you on unexpectedly. In the opening scene, for example, where Andronicus commits to the tomb the bodies of his sons,1 who have fallen in battle, his halflyric lament has real beauty:—

"In peace and honour rest you here, my sons;
Rome's readiest champions, repose you here in rest,
Secure from worldly chances and mishaps!

Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,

Here grow no damned grudges; here are no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep:

In peace and honour rest you here, my sons!"

Or again, when Lavinia is brought to him, maimed and ravished, his speech,2 whoever wrote it, has a rude power of its own:

"It was my deer; and he that wounded her

Hath hurt me more than had he kill'd me dead:

For now I stand as one upon a rock

Environ'd with a wilderness of sea,

Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,

Had I but seen thy picture in this plight,
It would have madded me: what shall I do,
Now I behold thy lively body so?

Thou hast no hands, to wipe away thy tears;
Nor tongue, to tell me who hath martyr'd thee:
Thy husband he is dead; and for his death
Thy brothers are condemn'd, and dead by this.
Look, Marcus! ah, son Lucius, look on her!
When I did name her brothers, then fresh tears
Stood on her cheeks, as doth the honey-dew
Upon a gather'd lily, almost wither'd."

Whatever else this is, and there is plenty like it in Titus Andronicus, it is good, sonorous rant.

As sonorously ranting, then, whether Shakspere's or not, the play is a typical example of English tragedy at the moment when Shakspere's theatrical life began. If, in his earlier months of work, he tried his hand at tragedy at all, he certainly must have tried it at this kind of thing; for in substance, as well as in style, Titus Andronicus typifies the early Elizabethan tragedy of blood. The object of this, like that of cheap modern newspapers, was to excite crude emotion by heaping up physical horrors. The penny dreadfuls of our own time preserve the type perennially; something of the sort always persists in theatres of the lower sort; and it is perhaps noteworthy that the titles, and in some degree the style, of these modern monstrosities preserve one of the most marked traits of Elizabethan English, - extravagant allitera

tion. Not only in extravagance of alliterative horrors, but also in serene disregard of historic fact, the lower literature of our own time preserves the old type. Both traits appear, too, in the romantic fancies of young children who take to literature. There has lately been in existence, for example, an appalling melodrama on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, written at the age of ten by an American youth, wherein Charles IX., Catherine de' Medici, and Coligny figured along with a very heroic Adrien de Bourbon, who assassinated Charles, and, serenely ascending the throne, proceeded to govern France according to the liberal principles generally held axiomatic in the United States. It took no more liberty with French history than Titus Andronicus takes with Roman; and both plays are of the same school.

In a way, such stuff seems hardly worth serious attention. At the very moment to which we have attributed Titus Andronicus, however, Marlowe was certainly developing the traditional tragedy of blood into a form which remains grandly if unequally significant in the Jew of Malta. Less than twenty years later, this same school of literature had produced Hamlet and Othello, and King Lear, and Macbeth. Even in them, many of its traits persist. Like their crude prototypes, they appeal to the taste prevalent in all Elizabethan audiences for excessive bloodshed, and stentorian rant. Until we understand that there is an aspect in which these great tragedies and this grotesque Titus Andronicus may rationally be grouped together, we shall not understand the Elizabethan theatre.

Whether Shakspere's or not, then, Titus Andronicus deserves a passing glance in any serious study of Shakspere. If his, as many of the soundest critics are disposed to believe, it deserves more; for, at least in the fact that it differs little from any conventional drama of its time, it throws light on his artistic character. Marlowe and Shakspere were just of an age. The year before that to which we have attributed Titus Andronicus, Marlowe had produced in Tamburlaine not only a popular play but a great tragic poem ; in 1588, he produced another, the Jew of Malta. Whatever Marlowe touched, from the beginning, he instantly transformed into something better. Shakspere, meanwhile, if this play be his, contented himself with frankly imitative, conventional stage-craft.

II. HENRY VI.

[The First and Second Parts of Henry VI., together with Titus Andronicus, were entered in the Stationers' Register, on April 19th, 1602, as transferred from Thomas Millington to Thomas Pavier. There is no specific mention of the Third Part until November 8th, 1623, when it was entered for publication in the folio. In their present form, all three parts first appeared in the folio of 1623.

No other version of the First Part is known. The Second Part is obviously a version of The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, entered on March 12th, 1593-94, and published by Millington in the same year. The Third Part is a similar version of The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, etc., published by Millington in 1595. Both of these quartos were republished in 1600. In none of these entries or publications, prior to 1623, is there any mention of Shakspere's name. Greene's allusion in 1592 is the only contemporary one directly connecting any of these plays with Shakspere. Nash, in the same year, alluded to the popularity of Talbot on the stage.