Authorship of Titus Andronicus
Encyclopedia
Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, and possibly George Peele, believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy, and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were...
was probably written between 1588 and 1593. It appreared in three quarto
Quarto
Quarto could refer to:* Quarto, a size or format of a book in which four leaves of a book are created from a standard size sheet of paper* For specific information about quarto texts of William Shakespeare's works, see:...
editions from 1594-1601 with no author named. It was published under William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's name in the 1623 First Folio
First Folio
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio....
of his complete plays. However, as with many of his early works, scholars have long suspected that it may have been one of Shakespeare's collaborations
Shakespeare's collaborations
Like most playwrights of his period, Shakespeare did not always write alone and a number of his plays are collaborative, or were revised after their original composition, although the exact number is open to debate...
with another playwright. While other early plays have also been examined for evidence of co-authorship, none have been as closely scrutinised or as consistently rumoured to have been principally written by another playwright. The principal contendor for the co-authorship is George Peele
George Peele
George Peele , was an English dramatist.-Life:Peele was christened on 25 July 1556. His father, who appears to have belonged to a Devonshire family, was clerk of Christ's Hospital, and wrote two treatises on bookkeeping...
.
The fact that Titus traditionally has the reputation of being Shakespeare's worst play is not unconnected to the in-depth examination of the play's authorship, as many of the scholars who initially attempted to prove he had nothing to do with it did so in an effort to 'save' his reputation, so badly written did they consider the play. Although the play's reputation has improved somewhat in the latter half of the twentieth century, the examination of authorship has intensified, producing three fundamental possibilities: 1) Shakespeare wrote the play alone, 2) he co-wrote it with another author, 3) he had nothing to do with the writing of it at all.
Solid evidence
There is very little solid evidence regarding the question of authorship. None of the three quartoQuarto
Quarto could refer to:* Quarto, a size or format of a book in which four leaves of a book are created from a standard size sheet of paper* For specific information about quarto texts of William Shakespeare's works, see:...
editions of Titus (1594, 1600 and 1611) name the author, but this was normal practice for Elizabethan plays
English Renaissance theatre
English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern English theatre, refers to the theatre of England, largely based in London, which occurred between the Reformation and the closure of the theatres in 1642...
. However, Francis Meres
Francis Meres
Francis Meres was an English churchman and author.He was born at Kirton in the Holland division of Lincolnshire in 1565. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in 1587 and an M.A. in 1591. Two years later he was incorporated an M.A. of Oxford...
does list Titus as one of Shakespeare's tragedies in Palladis Tamia
Palladis Tamia
Palladis Tamia, subtitled "Wits Treasury", is a 1598 book written by the minister Francis Meres. Meres calls it "A Comparative Discourse of our English Poets, with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets", and is important in English literary history as the first critical account of the poems and early...
in 1598. Additionally, John Heminges
John Heminges
John Heminges was an English Renaissance actor. Most noted now as one of the editors of William Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio, Heminges served in his time as an actor and financial manager for the King's Men.-Life:Heminges was born in Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire in 1556...
and Henry Condell
Henry Condell
Henry Condell was an actor in the King's Men, the playing company for which William Shakespeare wrote. With John Heminges, he was instrumental in preparing the First Folio, the collected plays of Shakespeare, published in 1623....
felt sure enough of Shakespeare's authorship to include it in the First Folio
First Folio
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio....
in 1623. This is the only solid evidence available regarding the authorship issue, and as it suggests that Shakespeare did indeed write the play, questions of authorship have tended to focus on the perceived lack of quality in the writing, and, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the play's resemblance to the work of contemporaneous dramatists.
Did Shakespeare write the play?: Pre twentieth-century theories
The first recorded questioning of Shakespeare's authorship was by Edward RavenscroftEdward Ravenscroft
Edward Ravenscroft , English dramatist, belonged to an ancient Flintshire family.He was entered at the Middle Temple, but devoted his attention mainly to literature. Among his pieces are...
in 1678, when he wrote in the introduction his own adaptation of the play, Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia,
I have been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not Originally his, but brought by a private Author to be Acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two Principal Parts or Characters.Ravenscroft provides no more details, other than to say that he can well believe this to be true, as the play is so poorly written. However, his lack of specifics means that his comments tend not to be taken at face value by most critics. Nevertheless, his theory seems to have been seized upon, and numerous eighteenth century editors made similar claims; Nicholas Rowe in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear in Six Volumes (1709), Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear (1725), Lewis Theobald
Lewis Theobald
Lewis Theobald , British textual editor and author, was a landmark figure both in the history of Shakespearean editing and in literary satire...
in Shakespeare Restored (1726), Samuel Johnson and George Steevens
George Steevens
George Steevens was an English Shakespearean commentator.He was born at Poplar, the son of a captain and later director of the East India Company. He was educated at Eton College and at King's College, Cambridge, where he remained from 1753 to 1756...
in The Plays of William Shakespeare
The Plays of William Shakespeare
The Plays of William Shakespeare was an 18th-century edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. Johnson announced his intention to edit Shakespeare's plays in his Miscellaneous Observations on Macbeth , and a full Proposal for the edition was...
(1765) and Edmond Malone
Edmond Malone
Edmond Malone was an Irish Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare.Assured of an income after the death of his father in 1774, Malone was able to give up his law practice for at first political and then more congenial literary pursuits. He went to London, where he...
in The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare (1790). All questioned Shakespeare's authorship, primarily due to the violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
in the play, which they saw as far in excess of anything else in the canon, and what they perceived as uninspired verse, with each one concluding that, at most, Shakespeare wrote a scene or two. Other eighteenth century scholars who questioned Shakespeare's authorship included William Guthrie
William Guthrie (historian)
William Guthrie was a Scottish writer and journalist, now remembered as a historian.-Life:The son of an Episcopalian clergyman, he was born at Brechin, Forfarshire, in 1708...
in 1747, John Upton in 1748, Benjamin Heath
Benjamin Heath
Benjamin Heath, D.C.L. , English classical scholar and bibliophile, was born at Exeter.He was the eldest of three sons of Benjamin Heath and Elizabeth Kelland. of a wealthy merchant, and was thus able to devote himself mainly to travel and book collecting. He became town clerk of his native city...
in 1765, Richard Farmer
Richard Farmer
Dr Richard Farmer was a Shakespearean scholar and Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is known for his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare , in which he maintained that Shakespeare's knowledge of the classics was through translations, the errors of which he reproduced.-Life:He was born at...
in 1766, John Pinkerton
John Pinkerton
John Pinkerton was a Scottish antiquarian, cartographer, author, numismatist, historian, and early advocate of Germanic racial supremacy theory....
in 1785, and John Monck Mason also in 1785. So strong had the anti-Shakespearean movement become during the eighteenth century that in 1794, Thomas Percy wrote in the introduction to Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry is a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Thomas Percy and published in 1765.-Sources:...
, "Shakespeare's memory has been fully vindicated from the charge of writing the play by the best critics."
This trend continued into the nineteenth century. In 1817, for example, William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is...
denied the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship in Characters of Shakespear's Plays
Characters of Shakespear's Plays
Characters of Shakespear's Plays is an 1817 book of criticism of Shakespeare's plays, written by early nineteenth century English essayist and literary critic William Hazlitt. Composed in reaction to the neoclassical approach to Shakespeare's plays typified by Dr. Johnson, it was among the first...
. Also in 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
made a similar claim in Biographia Literaria
Biographia Literaria
Biographia Literaria, or in full Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of MY LITERARY LIFE and OPINIONS, is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817. The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical...
. Subsequently, in 1832, the Globe Illustrated Shakespeare went so far as to claim there was a universal agreement on the matter of authorship due to the un-Shakespearean "barbarity" of the play's action. Similarly, in An Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1840), Henry Hallam
Henry Hallam
Henry Hallam was an English historian.-Life:The only son of John Hallam, canon of Windsor and dean of Bristol, Henry Hallam was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1799...
wrote "Titus Andronicus is now, by common consent, denied to be, in any sense, a production of Shakespeare." In 1857, Charles Bathurst
Charles Bathurst
Charles Bathurst PC , known as Charles Bragge from 1754 to 1804, was a British politician of the early 19th century.-Background and education:...
reiterated the claim that the play was so badly written, Shakespeare simply could not have had anything to do with it.
However, even in the midst of these doubts, there were voices arguing for Shakespeare's authorship. A major early defender of Shakespeare's claim to authorship was Edward Capell
Edward Capell
Edward Capell , English Shakespearian critic, was born at Troston Hall in Suffolk.-Biography:Through the influence of the Duke of Grafton he was appointed to the office of deputy-inspector of plays in 1737, with a salary of £200 per annum, and in 1745 he was made groom of the privy chamber through...
. In his 1768 ten-volume edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, Mr William Shakespeare, His Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, Capell acknowledged that the play was poorly written, but he argued that the violence was normal in the Elizabethan theatre, and he also pointed out the unlikelihood of Condell and Heminges including a play in the First Folio which they knew not to be by Shakespeare. Capell argued that nothing would be achieved by such a move, and in any case, there would have been any number of people who could have disputed such a thing. Capell also argued on aesthetic grounds that the play was Shakespearean, pointing specifically to Act 3 as being indicative of Shakespeare's style, and citing such elements as classical allusions and versification as more akin to Shakespeare than any other dramatist of the time.
In 1843, Charles Knight
Charles Knight (publisher)
Charles Knight was an English publisher and author.-Early life:The son of a bookseller and printer at Windsor, he was apprenticed to his father...
, in the Preface to his pictorial edition of Shakespeare, specifically challenged claims that there was universal agreement that Shakespeare did not write the play. Knight pointed out that there was no such consent, especially in Germany, where Shakespeare was acknowledged by most major scholars as being the author. Knight made specific reference to August Wilhelm Schlegel and Hermann Ulrici
Hermann Ulrici
Hermann Ulrici was a German philosopher. He was co-editor of the philosophical journal Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik. He also wrote under the pseudonym of Ulrich Reimann....
.
The question of co-authorship
Twentieth century criticism has moved away from trying to prove or disprove that Shakespeare wrote the play, with most scholars now accepting that he was definitely involved in the composition in some manner, and has instead come to focus on the issue of co-authorship. The examination of the theory of co-authorship began in 1905, in John Mackinnon RobertsonJ. M. Robertson
John Mackinnon Robertson was a prolific journalist, advocate of rationalism and secularism, and Liberal Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom for Tyneside from 1906 to 1918.- Biography :...
's Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus? In an analysis of the feminine ending
Feminine ending
Feminine ending, in grammatical gender, is a term that refers to the final syllable or suffixed letters that mark words as feminine.It can also refer to:*Feminine ending, in meter , a line of verse that ends with an unstressed syllable...
s and general vocabulary, Robertson concluded that "much of the play is written by George Peele
George Peele
George Peele , was an English dramatist.-Life:Peele was christened on 25 July 1556. His father, who appears to have belonged to a Devonshire family, was clerk of Christ's Hospital, and wrote two treatises on bookkeeping...
, and it is hardly less certain that much of the rest was written by Robert Greene or Kyd
Thomas Kyd
Thomas Kyd was an English dramatist, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama....
, with some by Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
." Robertson also suggested that Thomas Lodge
Thomas Lodge
Thomas Lodge was an English dramatist and writer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.-Early life and education:...
may have contributed. Similarly, in 1919, T.M. Parrott reached the conclusion that Shakespeare revised the original work of Peele. Like Robertson, Parrott paid particular attention to feminine endings, which he argued were more abundant in Shakespeare than in any of his contemporaries. In Shakespeare's other work, feminine endings tended to be distributed evenly throughout the plays, but in Titus some scenes had far more than others. This led Parrott to conclude that there were two authors, and upon comparison with the distribution of feminine endings in other plays of the era, that the other author must be Peele. Parrott specifically concluded that 2.1 and 4.1 were by Peele (feminine endings of 2.3% and 2.5% respectively). In 1931, Philip Timberlake modified Parrott's methodology and concluded that feminine endings composed 8.4% of the entire play, with Act I only 2.7%, and both 2.1 and 4.1 only 2.4% each. Other parts of the play had substantially more, such as 5.1 for example, which had 20.2%, or 3.2 which had 12.6%. In a comparative analysis, Timberlake discovered that Greene averaged 0.1-1.6%, Marlowe 0.4-3.7%, Kyd 1.2-10.2% and Peele 1.5-5.4%, with Shakespeare averaging 4.3-16.8%. These figures led Timberlake to conclude that Shakespeare definitely had a major hand in the play, but was not the sole author. He did not posit any specific collaborator, but suggested that his findings were in line with those of scholars who found traces of Peele or Greene.
Why Peele?
The main rationale for the predominance of Peele as co-author is due to certain linguistic characteristics which have been detected in the play. For example, J. Dover WilsonJ. Dover Wilson
John Dover Wilson CH was a professor and scholar of Renaissance drama, focusing particularly on the work of William Shakespeare...
writes of the repetition of phrases and sentiments in Act 1 that "most of the clichés and tricks are indubitably Peele's. No dramatist of the age is so apt to repeat himself or so much given to odd or strained phrases." Robertson identified 133 words and phrases in Titus which he felt strongly indicated Peele. Many of these concern Peele's poem The Honour of the Garter (1593). One word in particular has advanced the Peele argument; "palliament" (1.1.182), meaning robe and possibly derived from the Latin "pallium" and/or "palludamentum." As first illustrated by George Steevens in 1773, this word occurs in only one other place outside Titus, in The Honour of the Garter. In relation to this, however, Hereward Thimbleby Price
Hereward Thimbleby Price
Hereward Thimbleby Price was an English author and Professor of English at the University of Michigan.Price was born in a small town in Madagascar named Ambatolahinandrianisiahana as a son of an English missionary. Returning to England he was educated at various private schools, and in 1899 he was...
has argued that borrowing by Shakespeare is just as likely, if not more so, than repetition by Peele, something reiterated by Jonathan Bate
Jonathan Bate
Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism...
; "the problem with all the arguments based on verbal parallels is that imitation is always as likely as authorship." Alan Hughes further points out that because the play appears to have undergone a period of revision, the situation is complicated even more, as it is unknown when the word was added; initially or during the revision.
Another commonly cited word is "architect". Titus is the only play in which Shakespeare used the word, whereas Peele used it four times. However, it was also commonly used by their contemporaries, so it provides no solid evidence of Peel's authorship. This is because, as Jonathan Bate has argued, a major problem with the vocabulary/grammar argument is that not only must certain words and grammatical constructions be shown to be common to Peele and uncommon to Shakespeare, they must also be shown to be uncommon to every other dramatist of the period as well, as only then do they provide direct evidence of Peele's authorship. A similar argument has been made regarding the perceived lack of quality in the play. Sylvan Barnet, in his 1963 edition of the play for the Signet Classic Shakespeare argues "however displeased we may be by part or all of Titus, there is no utterly convincing evidence that it is not entirely by Shakespeare." Similarly, Eugene M. Waith argues, "That Shakespeare had a grander tragic vision or wrote finer dramatic poetry in other plays is no argument that he did not write this one."
Shakespeare as sole author
The first major critic to challenge Robertson and Parrott was E.K. Chambers. Writing in 1930, in an essay entitled "The Disintegration of Shakespeare"; Chambers reacted to Robertson's general dismissal of the authoritativeness of the First Folio, and although he never mentions Titus specifically, he does set about countering Robertson's parallel vocabulary theory in general. Chambers’ criticisms of Robertson's methodologies have been accepted ever since, and Robertson's findings are no longer considered valid. Subsequently, in 1933, Arthur M. Sampley employed the techniques of Parrott to argue against Peele as co-author. In his analysis of four of Peele's plays, The Arraignment of Paris (1584), The Love of King David and fair Bathseba (1588), The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the FirstFamous Chronicle of King Edward the First
"The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First" is a play by George Peele, published 1593, chronicling the career of Edward I of England.The play concentrates on the power struggle between Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, also glancing at the reign and fall of John Balliol...
(1593) and The Old Wives' Tale
The Old Wives' Tale (play)
The Old Wives' Tale is a play by George Peele first printed in England in 1595. The play has been identified as the first English work to satirize the romantic dramas popular at the time. Although only the titles of most of these popular works have survived, they seem to be unrelated composites of...
(1595), Sampley concluded that characteristics of Peele include complex plots, extraneous material in the dialogue, and a general lack of unity, none of which are present in Titus. Sampley argued that Act 1 in particular, usually cited as the most likely part of the play to have been written by Peele (such as by Dover Wilson for example, who provides a damning close reading
Close reading
Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they...
of the theatrical quality of the act), is extremely tightly unified and sets up everything that follows perfectly. This is unlike anything found in any of Peele's plays.
In 1943, building on Sampley's work, Hereward Thimbleby Price wrote, "the best parallel by which we can test authorship is construction. Phrases may be borrowed here and there but construction refers to the planning of the work as a whole." Price concluded that the best examples of similar constructions to Titus are found in other plays by Shakespeare, not Peele. Like Sampley, Price concludes that although the opening scene does sound like Peele it is nothing like him in either construction or intent; "nothing in the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries can be compared to it for a moment." In a more general sense, Price argues that the play as a whole exhibited "intricacy with clearness, a firm hand on the story, a swift succession of effective situations logically leading out of what precedes and on to what follows, these are qualities lacking in the dramatists who are supposed to have shared in the composition of Titus." He also argued that the uneven distribution of feminine endings noted by Parrott and Timberlake was typical of Shakespeare's early plays.
Shakespeare as co-author
In 1948, Dover Wilson rejected Chambers, Sampley and Price, and instead supported Parrott and Timberlake, believing that Shakespeare edited a play originally written by Peele; "we must look to George Peele for the authorship, not only of Act 1, but of most of the basic text upon which Shakespeare worked." However, he goes on to assert that Shakespeare so thoroughly revised Peele "that Meres and the editors of the Folio were fully within their rights in calling it his. The aesthetic responsibility for it is therefore his also." He dismisses the involvement of Marlow, Greene and Kyd and uses evidence of grammatical and metrical repetition in Act 1, especially the use of the vocative caseVocative case
The vocative case is the case used for a noun identifying the person being addressed and/or occasionally the determiners of that noun. A vocative expression is an expression of direct address, wherein the identity of the party being spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence...
. He lists many pages of parallels with Peele's work; the poems The Tale of Troy (1579), The Honour of the Garter, An Eclogue Gratulatory (1589), Polyhymnia (1590), Descensus Astraeae (1591) and the plays The Arraignment of Paris (1584), The Battle of Alcazar (1588), David and Bathsheba (1588) and Edward I (1593). His theory is that originally, Peele wrote a short play for provincial performance by a touring company during the plague years of 1592-1594. However, upon returning to London, the play was deemed too short, and needed expanding, which is where Shakespeare got involved. Dover Wilson suggests that the reason Shakespeare was asked was because he was working on the thematically similar poems Venus and Adonis
Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem)
Venus and Adonis is a poem by William Shakespeare, written in 1592–1593, with a plot based on passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work, using constantly shifting tone and perspective to present contrasting views of the nature of love.-Publication:Venus and Adonis was...
and The Rape of Lucrece
The Rape of Lucrece
The Rape of Lucrece is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis , Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to write a "graver work"...
at the time. However, because Shakespeare was unhappy working on the play, he purposely wrote badly. According to Dover Wilson "you can see him laughing behind his hand through most of the scenes he rehandled."
In his Arden Shakespeare
Arden Shakespeare
The Arden Shakespeare is a long-running series of scholarly editions of the works of William Shakespeare. It presents fully edited modern-spelling editions of the plays and poems, with lengthy introductions and full commentaries...
2nd Series edition of the play in 1953, J.C. Maxwell stated that he wished he could assert that Shakespeare was the sole author, but because he was reminded so much of Peele's grammatical constructions, especially in Act 1, he could not. In 1957, R.F. Hill approached the issue in another way; using rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
. He took 130 rhetorical device
Rhetorical device
In rhetoric, a rhetorical device or resource of language is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading him or her towards considering a topic from a different perspective. While rhetorical devices may be used to evoke an...
s and analysed their occurrence in eleven early Shakespearean plays, finding Titus anomalous in several ways. Alliteration
Alliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
was far more frequent in Titus than elsewhere, but Titus also contained far less sustained metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
s than in other plays in the canon. Both frequent alliteration and absence of lengthy metaphors occur most in Act 1. Hill also analysed antimetabole
Antimetabole
In rhetoric, antimetabole is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order...
, epanalepsis
Epanalepsis
The epanalepsis is a figure of speech defined by the repetition of the initial word of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence. The beginning and the end are the two positions of stronger emphasis in a sentence; so, by having the same phrase in both places, the speaker...
, epizeuxis
Epizeuxis
In rhetoric, an epizeuxis is the repetition of words in immediate succession, for vehemence or emphasis.Examples:* "O horror, horror, horror." * "Words, words, words." * "Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain."...
and "the repetition of a clause
Clause
In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. In some languages it may be a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in other languages in certain clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase,...
with an inversion in the order of its grammatical parts." His discovery that Act 1 was unique in the amount of all of these rhetorical devices when compared with the rest of the canon led him to conclude that Shakespeare did not write it.
In 1979, Macdonald Jackson approached the issue from another new perspective; a rare word test. His results showed a marked difference between Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1 on the one hand, and the rest of the play on the other. He showed that in Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1, rare vocabulary occurred much less frequently than in any other Shakespeare play, whereas in the rest of the play rare words are more common, placing it closest to The Taming of the Shrew. Jackson acknowledged that this discrepancy could possibly have arisen from Shakespeare returning to edit a play he wrote in his youth, and complicating the vocabulary at that time, but he favours the suggestion of Peele as co-author, especially insofar as the rare word distribution of Act 1 is roughly analogous to Peele's own plays.
In his 1984 edition of the play for The Oxford Shakespeare
The Oxford Shakespeare
The Oxford Shakespeare is a common term for the range of editions of William Shakespeare's works produced by Oxford University Press. The Oxford Shakespeare is produced under the general editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.-The Complete Works:...
, Eugene M. Waith argued for Shakespeare's sole authorship. Believing that Titus was Shakespeare's first attempt at tragedy, he argued that any lapses can be attributed to uncertainty and inexperience rather than co-authorship. Brian Vickers, however, is highly critical of Waith's analysis, attacking his "blanket refusal either to report the case for co-authorship fairly, or to engage in a series evaluation of its arguments." He also believes that Waith's "evidence consists largely in suppressing the evidence of other scholars." In the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works of 1986, in his introduction to the play, Stanley Wells
Stanley Wells
Stanley William Wells, CBE, is a Shakespeare scholar and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.Wells took his first degree at University College, London, and was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick in 2008...
makes no reference to the authorship debate whatsoever, but in the 1987 Textual Companion, Gary Taylor
Gary Taylor (English literature scholar)
Gary Taylor is George Matthew Edgar Professor of English at Florida State University, author of numerous books and articles, and joint editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and .-Life:...
explicitly states that Shakespeare appears to have written only part of the play. Accepting the evidence of feminine endings which seem to suggest that Shakespeare did not write Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1, Taylor supported Jackson's findings in 1979.
In 1987, Marina Tarlinskaja used a quantitative analysis of the occurrence of stresses
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
in the iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet"...
line, producing a stress profile for each play studied. Her complex analysis divided Titus into an A part (Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1) and a B part (everything else). She ultimately concluded that part A was written in a more archaic style than part B, and that each part was almost certainly written by a different person. Part B corresponded to stress analysis elsewhere in Shakespeare's early drama; part A to Peele's later drama.
In his 1994 edition of the play for the New Cambridge Shakespeare
New Cambridge Shakespeare
The New Cambridge Shakespeare is a series of scholarly editions of the plays of William Shakespeare published by Cambridge University Press. The series began in 1984, publishing several new editions each year. To date, the majority of Shakespeare's plays and poems have been published in the series...
, Alan Hughes dismissed the possibility of Shakespeare having a co-author. He believes that in a first draft of the play written before Shakespeare came to London, and which is now lost, Shakespeare was heavily influenced by Peele, but when he returned to edit the play c.1593 he removed much of the Peele influence, although he left Act 1 untouched. Again, Vickers is highly critical of Hughes' methods, believing that he simply wasn't familiar enough with the scholarship to make any kind of claim regarding authorship, and criticising his "refusal either to cite the scholarly tradition fairly or to think for himself about the large stylistic discrepancies within the play." In his 2006 revised edition of the play, Hughes' arguments remained unchanged, and he makes no response to Vickers' criticisms.
In 1995, Brian Boyd
Brian Boyd
Brian Boyd is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution...
tackled the issue by focusing on repetition in the parts of the play attributed to Peele. He illustrated that references to Rome ("Romans", "Rome's" etc) occur 68 times in 495 lines (1 in every 7 lines), but elsewhere in the play such references occur only 54 times in 1944 lines (1 in 36). This low figure matches Shakespeare's other roman plays; Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar (play)
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, also known simply as Julius Caesar, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1599. It portrays the 44 BC conspiracy against...
(1 in 38), Coriolanus
Coriolanus
Gaius Marcius Coriolanus was a Roman general who is said to have lived in the 5th century BC. He received his toponymic cognomen "Coriolanus" because of his exceptional valor in a Roman siege of the Volscian city of Corioli. He was then promoted to a general...
(1 in 34) and Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. The plot is based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony...
(1 in 39). This suggested to Boyd that Act 1 was unique. He also analysed the use of the words "brother" and "brethren". In Act 1, "brethren" is used four times, but elsewhere in the play only once. However, Act 1 uses "brother" only once, but elsewhere it is used seven times. In their other plays, Shakespeare uses "brother" much more often than "brethren", whereas Peele tended to favour "brethren", again indicative of the uniqueness of Act 1 and tentative evidence for Peele's co-authorship.
In his 1995 edition of the play for the Arden Shakespeare 3rd series, Jonathan Bate argued that Shakespeare almost certainly wrote the play alone. However, since that time, Bate has come out in support of Brian Vickers' 2002 book Shakespeare, Co-Author which restates the case for Peele as the author of Act 1. Writing in the program for the 2003 Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
production of the play, Bate states
if the play has a fault, it is that the formality of both language and action in the opening scenes create a sense of stiffness that suggests classicismClassicismClassicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
at its most tedious. This is probably not Shakespeare's fault: modern scholarship has persuasively demonstrated by means of close stylistic analysis that Titus Andronicus was begun by another dramatist, George Peele, who had a high-level classical education and a taste for large-scale symmetrical stage encounters spoken in high-flown rhetoric. We don't know whether the play was written as a purposeful collaboration or whether Shakespeare came in to do a re-write or to complete an unfinished work. Nor do we know at precisely what point the writing became his alone - though there is no doubt that he is the author of all the most dramatic scenes, from the rape through the hand-chopping to the fly-killing banquet to the feast at the climax.
In 1996, Macdonald Jackson returned to the authorship question by focusing on the stage directions in the 1594 quarto (Q1) and compared them to stage directions in Peele. In particular, the phrase "and others as many as can be" is found in both Titus (1.1.69) and Peele's Edward I (1.1.1). Due to the lack of specificity, this stage direction is usually taken as authorial (stage directions added by the theatre or acting company tend to be more specific). Jackson pointed out that these two examples are the only recorded examples in all of Elizabethan theatre. He also identified a hybrid form of speech headings combined with stage business in Q1; e.g. "Marcus Andronicus with the Crowne" (1.1.17) and "all kneele and say" (1.1.386). Nowhere else in all of Shakespeare is this hybridisation seen, but it is common throughout Peele, especially in Edward I e.g. "Longshanks kisses them both and speaks", "Bishop speaks to her in her bed". Jackson found twenty examples in Edward I; six each in The Battle of Alcazar and David and Bathseba and eleven in The Arraignment of Paris. He combined these discoveries with a new metrical analysis of the function word
Function word
Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker...
s "and" and "with". In Act 1 of Titus, the rate of these words is every 12.7 lines, but elsewhere in the play it is every 24.7 lines. Elsewhere in Shakespeare, the lowest rate is in The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's earliest plays. It is his shortest and one of his most farcical comedies, with a major part of the humour coming from slapstick and mistaken identity, in addition to puns and word play. The Comedy of Errors is one of only two of Shakespeare's...
(17.6), but in Peele's plays, the rate is always between 8.3 and 13.6. Jackson concluded that the chances of this being a coincidence are less than one in ten thousand, arguing that "Peele shows the same partiality for "and" and "with" that distinguishes Act 1 of Titus Andronicus from the rest of the Shakespeare canon." Subsequently, in 1997, Jackson revised Boyd's figures somewhat, pointing out that "brothers" and "brethren" occur nine times each in Titus; eight of the examples of "brethren" are in Act 1, but only one example of "brothers". In Shakespeare's early plays, there are twenty-three uses of "brothers" and only two of "brethren", whereas in Peele there are nine uses of "brethren" and only one of "brothers".
Brian Vickers
The most extensive analysis of the co-authorship theory is that of Brian Vickers in 2002. A strong advocate of the Peele theory, Vickers opens his preface by arguing "given that collaboration was very common in Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline theatre, and that every major and most minor dramatists shared in the writing of plays, it would be highly unusual if Shakespeare had not done so." As well as elaborating on the work of previous analysts such as Parrott, Timberlake, Dover Wilson, Tarlinskaja, Boyd and Jackson, Vickers devises three additional authorship tests. The first is an analysis of polysyllabic words (words of three syllables or more, excluding names), a test which has been successfully used to distinguish the work of John WebsterJohn Webster
John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.- Biography :Webster's life is obscure, and the dates...
and Thomas Dekker. Vickers shows that in Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1, polysyllabic words occur every 2.8 lines, a comparable number to elsewhere in Peele. Elsewhere in Titus, however, the rate is every 3.3 lines, similar to elsewhere in Shakespeare. His second test involves counting examples of alliteration, a technique favoured by Peele throughout his career. In Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1, alliteration is found at a rate of once every 2.7 lines. Elsewhere in the play, it occurs every 4.3 lines. The high rate of Act 1 corresponds to the average rate in Peele and the low rate elsewhere to the rate in Shakespeare. The third test is counting vocatives. In Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1, the rate of vocatives is once every 4.2 lines. Elsewhere it is once every 8.7 lines. As comparison, in Peele's Edward I, the rate is once every 4.3 lines, and throughout Shakespeare, it never falls below once every 6.3 lines. Again, the numbers seem to equate Peele with Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1 and Shakespeare with the rest of the play. Vickers also attempts to show that Shakespeare is much more adapt at employing rhetorical devices than Peele; and gives numerous examples throughout the play of the use of antimetabole, anadiplosis
Anadiplosis
Anadiplosis is the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause. The word is used at the end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next sentence.-Examples:...
, epanalepsis, epizeuxis, articulus
Article (grammar)
An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
, epanorthosis
Epanorthosis
An epanorthosis is a figure of speech that signifies emphatic word replacement. The example "thousands, no, millions!" is a stock example. More often, however, epanorthosis signifies immediate and emphatic self-correction, and as such often follows a Freudian slip .Examples:*"The psychologist known...
, epistrophe
Epistrophe
Epistrophe , also known as epiphora , is a figure of speech and the counterpart of anaphora. It is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences...
, aposiopesis
Aposiopesis
Aposiopesis is a figure of speech wherein a sentence is deliberately broken off and left unfinished, the ending to be supplied by the imagination, giving an impression of unwillingness or inability to continue. An example would be the threat "Get out, or else—!" This device often portrays its...
, anaphora
Anaphora (linguistics)
In linguistics, anaphora is an instance of an expression referring to another. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic--for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent...
, polyptoton
Polyptoton
Polyptoton is the stylistic scheme in which words derived from the same root are repeated . A related stylistic device is antanaclasis, in which the same word is repeated, but each time with a different sense....
, synoeciosis
Enantiosis
Enantiosis, synoeciosis or discordia concors is a rhetorical device in which opposites are juxtaposed so that the contrast between them is striking. Examples include the famous maxim of Augustus, festina lente , and the following passage from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians:...
, polysyndeton
Polysyndeton
Polysyndeton is the use of several conjunctions in close succession, especially where some might be omitted . It is a stylistic scheme used to achieve a variety of effects: it can increase the rhythm of prose, speed or slow its pace, convey solemnity or even ecstasy and childlike exuberance...
and asteismus. His analysis of these devices leads him to conclude "whether using the same rhetorical figures as Peele had used, or deploying his own much wider thesaurus, Shakespeare distinguishes himself from his co-author by the economy, functionality and the expressive power with which he employs these traditional resources."