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I
Introducing his own adaptation of Titus Andronicus in 1687, Thomas Ravenscroft denounced the original as "rather a heap of rubbish than a structure," and claimed to have been told "by some anciently conversant with the stage" that Shakespeare had merely given a few "master-touches" to the work of some "private author."[1] By 1765 Samuel Johnson could write, "All the editors and critics agree . . . in supposing this play spurious. I see no reason for differing from them."[2] Most nineteenth-century scholars continued this tradition of denigration and rejection, though there were some dissenters. Even as late as 1927 no less a commentator than T. S. Eliot called Titus Andronicus "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all."[3] But the tide was turning. John Dover Wilson's edition of Titus Andronicus in the Cambridge New Shakespeare series (1948) was the last to make out a detailed case for dual authorship. Wilson argued that a play by George Peele had been expanded by Peele and Shakespeare, and that although Shakespeare's handiwork was visible throughout the last four Acts, the first Act remained substantially Peele's.[4] Five years later, Arden editor J. C. Maxwell was of two minds. "It may seem tempting to assert roundly that the whole play is by Shakespeare and no one else," he wrote. But he added that he could "never quite believe it while reading Act 1."[5] He too gave grounds for attributing the first Act to Peele.
With the advent, or revival, of an international "Theatre of Cruelty" Titus Andronicus has flourished on the stage and won critical esteem. Peter Brook's 1955 Stratford production, with Laurence Olivier in the title role, discovered something of its power to affect an audience. Eugene M. Waith's
But there are good reasons for thinking that modern scholarship has reached the wrong conclusion. The evidence supplied by earlier scholars that Act 1, at least, was largely, if not wholly, composed by George Peele can be supplemented to such an extent that the balance of probabilities is against Shakespeare's sole responsibility for the play as it has come down to us.
"So what?", the reader may object. "We have the play, it interests us, it seems Shakespearean in design. Who cares whether Shakespeare himself did or did not write such-and-such a scene? Isn't the very concept of authorship problematical, at any rate?" Even critics for whom "Shakespeare" is something more than a signpost to sites from which to disinter the shards of disused ideologies may express impatience with the niggling concerns of the "disintegrationist."
Such attitudes, though understandable, are unscholarly. Either Peele was the author of Act 1 of Titus Andronicus or he was not — in the same sense that I am the author of this article and Roland Barthes is the author of an essay entitled "The Death of the Author."[7] Peele, or Shakespeare, or somebody else was the man in whose brain the speeches were conceived and whose hand held the quill when they were first set down. This is a matter of historical fact. Some facts are less easily established than others — we must be content, as in so many human affairs, with probabilities — but in literary history, no less than in other branches of historical research, we have an obligation to get facts as right as we can. In the case of Titus Adronicus our picture of Shakespeare's beginnings as a dramatist is in question. And so is our notion of his place in the Elizabethan entertainment industry. Collaboration and the refurbishing of scripts were common practice. Did the young Shakespeare, early in his playwriting career, work with his experienced elders, as most other tyro playwrights found it expedient to do? Or was he able, right from the start, to strike out unaided and alone?
Francis Meres's listing of Titus Adronicus in 1598 as one of Shakespeare's plays and its inclusion in the First Folio of 1623 fail to settle the matter.[8] If Shakespeare were responsible for about four-fifths of the play's dialogue, Meres and the Folio editors would have been "fully within their rights in calling it his."[9] To name Shakespeare as author of a work is not necessarily to credit him with every line. After all, Wilson and Maxwell both attributed a share
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