Page:The Plays of William Shakspeare (1778).djvu/294

[ 278 ] extracted by Mr. Tyrwhitt from Robert Greene’s Groatworth of Witte bought with a Million of Repentance, in which there is an evident alluion to our author’s name, as well as to one of his plays.

At what time oever he became acquainted with the theatre, we may preume that he had not compoed his firt play long before it was acted; for being early incumbered with a young family, and not in very affluent circumtances, it is improbable that he hould have uffered it to lie in his cloet, without endeavouring to derive ome profit from it; and in the mierable tate of the drama in thoe days, the meanet of his genuine plays mut have been a valuable acquiition, and would hardly have been refued by any of the managers of our ancient theatres.

Titus Andronicus appears to have been acted before any other play attributed to Shakpeare; and therefore, as it has been admitted into all the editions of his works, whoever might have been the writer of it, it is entitled to the firt place in this general lit of his dramas. From Ben Jonon’s induction to Bartholomew Fair, 1614, we learn that Andronicus had been exhibited twenty-five or thirty years before, that is, at the lowet computation, in 1580; or, taking a middle period, (which is perhaps more jut) in 1587. In our author's dedication of his Venus and Adonis to lord Southampton, in 1593, he tells us, as Mr. Steevens has oberved, that that poem was “ the firt heir of his invention:” and if we were ure that it was publihed immediately, or oon, after it was written, it would at once prove Titus Andronicus not to be the production of Shakpeare, and nearly acertain the time when he commenced a dramatick writer. But we