which he undertook to do. It is highly probable that he was personally acquainted with Shakespeare, perhaps his personal friend, as he speaks of "his sugared Sonnets among his private friends," though these were not printed till 1609, eleven years after the mentioning of them in his Palladis Tamia. All his other statements of fact respecting the Poet are admitted as true. There was not the least occasion for his assigning this play to Shakespeare, were it

not so.

The second is, that Titus Andronicus was included by Heminge and Condell in their collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, in 1623. The editors were the Poet's old friends and fellow-actors: his connection with them was so close and intimate, that he mentioned them in his Will: "To my Fellows, John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell, xxvi. s. viii. d. apiece, to buy them Rings." They had therefore every possible opportunity for knowing what plays were written by Shakespeare, and no conceivable motive for printing any as his that were not so; since, had they done such a thing, there could not but be men living, able to expose them.

Now, we will by no means affirm that there might not be qualities of style and workmanship sufficient to overbear such facts as these: but we have not the slightest hesitation in affirming that no inference grounded on the qualities of the play in question can be strong enough to outface them. Inferior it is, undoubtedly, in workmanship and style, to most of the other plays received as Shakespeare's; yet it differs not more in these respects from The Comedy of Errors, for example, than this does from A Midsumner-Night's Dream; nay, it hardly differs more from A Midsummer-Night's Dream, than this does from The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. Its comparative smoothness and regularity of versification, its frequency and occasional awkwardness of classical allusion, and its unartistic redundancy of blood and horror, are no more than were to be expected in the first efforts of the Poet's apprenticeship, when he could not but be ignorant of his powers, and

would have to try what he could do with such elements of strength as lay around him in the theatrical antecedents of his time, before he could find, and in order to find, the strength that was in himself.

Accordingly, the play bears a close resemblance to the best specimens of dramatic production known on the English stage at the time we suppose it to have been written; and it resembles them in their best qualities. Marlowe, whose Tamburlaine was acted before 1587, had just unfettered the English drama from the shackles of rhyme, and touched its versification with the first beginnings of freedom and variety. As if to square the account for this advance upon the dramatic taste and culture of the time, he trained his verse to a stately and high-resounding march, and often made it puff well nigh to the cracking of its cheeks with rhetorical grandiloquence and smoke. The theatrical audiences then to be had would hardly bestow much applause on any tragedies but what gave them to "sup full of horrors"; and Marlowe was apt enough, without the stimulus of any such motives, to provide them banquets of that sort. To distinguish rightly between the broad and vulgar ways of the horrible, and the high and subtle courses of tragic terror, was a point of art which he did not live to reach, and probably could not have reached if he had lived. To discover these hidden courses required the far clearer and keener vision of Shakespeare; nor does it stand to reason that even he or any other man could have discovered them, without first practising in the ways already opened and approved. Of course, as experience gradually developed his native strengths, and at the same time taught him what they were sufficient for, he would naturally throw aside, one after another, the strengths of custom, of example, and public taste; since these would grow to be felt as incumbrances, as he grew able to do better without them.

And this would naturally be the case much more in his efforts at tragedy than at comedy. For the elements of comedy, besides being more light and wieldy in themselves,

had been playing freely about his boyhood, and mingling in his earliest observations of human life and character: so that here he would be apt to cast himself more quickly and unreservedly upon nature as he had been used to meet and converse with her. Tragedy, on the other hand, must in reason have been to him a much more artificial thing; and he would needs require both a larger measure and a stronger faculty of observation and experience, before he could find the elements of it in nature, and become able to digest and modulate them into the many-toned, yet severe and nicely-balanced harmony of dramatic art. Is it not clear, then, that in proportion as he lacked the power to seize and wield the natural elements of tragedy in his first efforts that way, he would be governed by what stood before him, and the adventitious helps and influences of the time be prominently reproduced in his work? Therefore it is, we doubt not, that his earlier comedies are so much more Shakespearean in style and spirit and characterization, than his tragedies of the same period. For can it be questioned, that such a man so circumstanced would sooner find himself, and sooner make others find him, in comedy than in tragedy?

Our own opinion, therefore, runs entirely with those of the later editors, Knight, Collier, and Verplanck, that Titus Andronicus is substantially Shakespeare's work. Whether he be responsible for the whole of it, is another question, one, we think, impossible to determine, and not easy even to make up an opinion upon. It has, to our mind, no such inequalities of style and execution as are found in Pericles and Timon of Athens. Inferior as it is in comparison with the Poet's later tragedies, its course seems tolerably sustained: at least, we do not discover that it anywhere either falls greatly below or rises greatly above itself. There is indeed a certain overwrought lustihood and incontinence of wickedness in Tamora and the Moor, which have no parallel or counterpart in the other characters; but this is nothing to the purpose. The play, therefore, nowise

compels the supposal of more than one hand in the writing; and this is pretty much all we can say about it.

The play seems to be without any foundation in authentic history. How or whence the story originated, has not been revealed to us, unless in the play itself. The scene of the incidents seems to be nowhere, the time, nowhen. The classical allusions, though numerous enough, are but such as might have been supplied by the "small Latin and less Greek," accorded to Shakespeare by the greatest scholarship of the time. The sentiments and customs of ages and nations far asunder in time and space, Pagan gods and Popish observances, are jumbled together in "most admired confusion"; and indeed the matter generally seems to have been patched up at random from what the author had learned in books, instead of being a coherent projection from what he had seen or felt of the living nature within and around him. There may have been an older play on the subject, from which the Poet derived more or less of the plot and incidents; though none such has come down to us. Remains but to add that there is an old ballad on the same subject, which was entered at the Stationers' by John Danter at the same time with the play, and may be seen (for it is doubtless the same) in Percy's Reliques: but which of them was written first, we have no means of deciding, save that, as Percy remarks, "the ballad differs from the play in several particulars which a simple balladwriter would be less likely to alter than an inventive tragedian."

COMMENTS

By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS

TAMORA

Saturnine braves and insults the benefactor who has given him a crown, and the Gothic Tamora prepares to wreak her vengeance, as empress, on the family that bereaved her of a son. The very morning after her marriage and that of Lavinia with Bassianus she takes the occasion of a hunt,-the courtly compliment of the yet unawakened Titus Andronicus, and with the aid of her paramour Aaron, the Moor, and her brutal sons, Chiron and Demetrius, she abuses and maims Lavinia, murders Bassianus, and destroys by false accusation two of the sons of Andronicus. Still the author does not allow us to take unhesitating party,-for Bassianus and Lavinia are as wanting in prudence as temper, and heap provocation upon her that she could scarcely be expected to bear. It is a point of art by which the black wickedness of Tamora is deepened to the imagination, that we are made to despise and detest her, notwithstanding that her wrongs and provocations have been such as might easily wean our sympathies from very compassionable victims. By mastery of dramatic chiaroscuro, however, we follow sympathetically the distinctive distances of hatefulness, and never lose our way so far as to palliate the atrocities of Tamora, or to refuse our pity to the woes of the Andronicus.-LLOYD, Critical Essays.

AARON THE MOOR

More noteworthy, however, than Titus is Aaron the Moor, the arch-villain of the drama. In the cynical ef

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