[4] Titus thus invokes an audience sympathetic with nationalistic sentiments, and he goes on to explain his victorious return to Rome from wars with the Goths.
On three of the four surviving ballads, the full title is quite long: "The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus; with the Fall of his 25 sons, in the Wars with the Goths, with the manner of the Ravishment of his Daughter Lavinia, by the Empresses two Sons, through the means of a bloody Moor, taken by the sword of Titus, in the War: with his Revenge upon their cruel and inhumane Act."
[6] Each existing broadside designates Fortune my Foe as the correct tune with a notation just beneath or next to the title of the ballad.
Like many ballads, the surviving copies in the Roxburghe, Huntington, and Pepys collections are printed on broadside sheets in blackletter, or what we mostly commonly now call gothic, type.
[8] Similarly, the woodcut on the Huntington's broadside facsimile illustrates a scene which is delineated as a moment, not from Titus's tale, but from classical epic.
In the foreground, the woodcut depicts Titus killing the Queen's sons and draining their blood into a basin that Lavinia holds.
Next to Titus's revenge act, the woodcut shows the Moor to the side as having been half-buried, standing up in the ground.
In the background, the woodcut illustrates Lavinia writing the names of her rapists/mutilators in the dirt with a stick balanced between the stumps of her arms.