The authorship of Titus Andronicus has been debated since the late 17th century. Titus Andronicus, probably written between 1588 and 1593, appeared in three quarto editions from 1594 to 1601 with no named author. It was first published under William Shakespeare's name in the 1623 First Folio of his plays. However, as with some of his early and late plays, scholars have long surmised that Shakespeare might have collaborated with another playwright. Other plays have also been examined for evidence of co-authorship, but none has been as closely scrutinised or as consistently questioned as Titus. The principal contender for the co-authorship is George Peele.
Very little external evidence is extant regarding the question of authorship. None of the three quarto editions of Titus (1594, 1600 and 1611) name the author, normal practice for Elizabethan plays. 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. While this supports Shakespeare's authorship of the play, questions have tended to focus on the perceived lack of quality in the writing, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the play's stylistic similarities to the work of contemporaneous dramatists.
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.Waith (1984: 1)Hughes (2006: 10) Nevertheless, his idea seems to have been seized upon, and several 18th-century editors made similar claims; Nicholas Rowe in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear in Six Volumes (1709), Alexander Pope in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear (1725), Lewis Theobald in Shakespeare Restored (1726), Samuel Johnson and George Steevens in The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765) and Edmond Malone in The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare (1790). All questioned Shakespeare's authorship, primarily due to the violence 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 18th-century scholars who questioned Shakespeare's authorship included William Guthrie in 1747, John Upton in 1748, Benjamin Heath in 1765, Richard Farmer in 1766, John Pinkerton in 1785, and John Monck Mason also in 1785.Vickers (2002: 152n11) 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."Quoted in Waith (1984: 12)
This trend continued into the 19th century. In 1817, for example, William Hazlitt denied the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship in Characters of Shakespear's Plays. Also in 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a similar claim in Biographia Literaria. 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."Quoted in Vickers (2002: 155) In 1857, Charles Bathurst reiterated the claim that the play was so badly written, Shakespeare simply could not have had anything to do with it.Vickers (2002: 152)
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. 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, 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.See Vickers (2002: 150-156) for a summary of the pre 20th century pro and anti-Shakespearean arguments.
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. The examination of the theory of co-authorship began in 1905, in John Mackinnon Robertson's Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus? In an analysis of the feminine endings and general vocabulary, Robertson concluded that "much of the play is written by George Peele, and it is hardly less certain that much of the rest was written by Robert Greene or Kyd, with some by Marlowe."Robertson (1905: 479) Robertson also suggested that Thomas Lodge 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).Parrott (1919: 21-27) 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.Timberlake (1931: 114-119)
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 Wilson 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."Dover Wilson (xxix-xxx) 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 has argued that borrowing by Shakespeare is just as likely, if not more so, than repetition by Peele,Price (1935: 505) something reiterated by Jonathan Bate; "the problem with all the arguments based on verbal parallels is that imitation is always as likely as authorship."Bate (1995: 82) 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.Hughes (2006: 5)
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 Peele's authorship.Waith (1984: 14-15) 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.See Bate (1995: 79-83) 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."Barnet (2005: 2) 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."Waith (1984: 13-14)