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IV
There is, then, quite a variety of evidence for supposing Titus Andronicus to be the handiwork of more than one author, and for attributing Act 1, in particular, to George Peele. The best case against reaching this conclusion has been made by Marco Mincoff in Shakespeare: The First Steps (Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1976), pp. 112 — 137 and 210 — 213. Mincoff concedes that the style of the opening scenes of Titus Andronicus "does seem to warrant some suspicions" and that "many of Peele's more obvious mannerisms do appear with considerable frequency, especially in the first act," but finds that the verse lacks Peele's "very typical sentence structure with its relative clauses and appositional phrases often piled three deep." He adds that the Peelean mannerisms "extend, often enough, into passages that are obviously Shakespeare's, and it is impossible to divide the play sharply between two utterly different styles" (pp. 113 — 114). This last difficulty was also acknowledged by Hill, who noted that the anomalous features with which he was concerned were not strongly correlated in their incidence, so that they failed to combine to distinguish particular scenes from others as clearly as an upholder of the theory of dual authorship might wish, though oddities did tend to congregate within Act 1. My own tests, which show Act 1 to be most markedly differentiated from the bulk of the play, but which are inconclusive about whether to associate 2.1 and 4.1 with Act 1 or the remainder, register the same ambiguity. Mincoff's view is that Shakespeare had "many of Peele's more marked cadences running in his mind" (p. 114), and that whether consciously or unconsciously he adopted elements of Peele's style, being particularly susceptible in his writing of the formal first Act, with its set speeches and orations. He shows that in the tightness of its plotting Titus Andronicus represents an advance even on Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and feels it can hardly be coincidental that the backbone of the repertory of Strange's Men (the "Earl of Derby's" servants listed first on the 1594 quarto title page among companies to have performed Titus) was The Spanish Tragedy, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and Peele's The Battle of Alcazar, Kyd's play having been decisive in the shaping of Titus, Marlowe's providing hints for the figure of Aaron, and Peele's, along with his other plays, influencing the style. He supposes that Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus for Strange's Men in 1592, or a little before, having joined the troupe as an actor.
The notion that Shakespeare, having as an actor assimilated the verse dialogue of other playwrights and deciding to experiment with Senecan tragedy, began Titus Andronicus by modelling his style on Peele's has a superficial plausibility, and would certainly account for the play's mixture of Peelean and Shakespearean quirks of style. But it would not be surprising, either, if collaboration between Peele and Shakespeare, or the revision of one dramatist's script by the other, were to create such a stylistic mix. When two authors combine in the composition of a play, it is not uncommon
There can be no doubt that in its overall structure Titus Andronicus bears the stamp of Shakespeare rather than Peele, and much of the writing is more like the early Shakespeare's than anybody else's. Probably no single other playwright at work before the play's publication was capable of such a remarkable achievement. The argument for Peele's involvement put forward here is not motivated by any inclination, like Ravenscroft's, to vilify the play. Peele was Shakespeare's senior, and not incompetent, though the younger dramatist certainly had something to teach him about plotting, and was already a much better poet. I can think of only one way in which the case for Peele's participation in Titus Andronicus might be clinched, and that is by means of an exhaustive examination of verbal parallels. The use of "parallels" in matters of disputed authorship has grown into disfavour, because of the gross misuse of such evidence in the past. The key to its convincing use is exhaustiveness. If a concordance to all Peele's writing were available, it would be possible to check Titus Andronicus line by line and even word by word for collocations and more extensive parallels of phrasing and thought first with Peele and then with Shakespeare. On the theory that Act 1 is substantially Peele's, parallels with Peele's known works should predominate there and parallels with the Shakespeare canon predominate in the rest of the play. Such an investigation might help settle the status of
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