Authorship of Titus Andronicus

Francis Meres lists Titus as one of Shakespeare's tragedies in Palladis Tamia in 1598, and John Heminges and Henry Condell included it in the First Folio in 1623.

In 1687 Edward Ravenscroft was the first to question Shakespeare's authorship in the introduction to 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 of the Principal Parts or Characters; this I am apt to believe, because 'tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his Works, It seems rather a heap of Rubbish then a Structure.Ravenscroft's vague comments tend not to be taken at face value by most critics.

[3] 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, "Shakespeare's memory has been fully vindicated from the charge of writing the play by the best critics.

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 wrote "Titus Andronicus is now, by common consent, denied to be, in any sense, a production of Shakespeare.

[7] From the twentieth-century onward, criticism 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.

[9] 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.

In relation to this, however, Hereward Thimbleby Price has argued that borrowing by Shakespeare is just as likely, if not more so, than repetition by Peele,[12] something reiterated by Jonathan Bate; "the problem with all the arguments based on verbal parallels is that imitation is always as likely as authorship.

"[17] 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.

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 First (1593) and The Old Wives' Tale (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.

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.

"[23] 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.

"[26] He dismisses the involvement of Marlowe, Greene and Kyd and uses evidence of grammatical and metrical repetition in Act 1, especially the use of the vocative case.

[27] 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).

Dover Wilson suggests that the reason Shakespeare was asked was because he was working on the thematically similar poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece at the time.

He took 130 rhetorical devices and analysed their occurrence in eleven early Shakespearean plays, finding Titus anomalous in several ways.

"[31] 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.

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."

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.

[35] 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.

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.

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.

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.

[40] 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).

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.

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.

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.

"[44] 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.

Vickers also attempts to show that Shakespeare is much more adept at employing rhetorical devices than Peele; and gives numerous examples throughout the play of the use of antimetabole, anadiplosis, epanalepsis, epizeuxis, articulus, epanorthosis, epistrophe, aposiopesis, anaphora, polyptoton, synoeciosis, polysyndeton 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.