Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/127

Titus Andronicus Strange's men on April 11, 1592, and frequently thereafter. No copy of this play now exists. There is, furthermore, a volume, Englische Comedien und Tragedien, 1620, which comprises the repertory of a group of English comedians acting in Germany in the early seventeenth century, and which contains a play entitled Eine sehr Klägliche Tragœdia von Tito Andronico und der hoffertigen Kayserin. In this play Titus's son is called Vespasianus instead of Lucius. It has been assumed, therefore, in some quarters that Henslowe's 'tittus & vespacia' was the original of the German play and at the same time an earlier version of our English Titus Andronicus. But such assumptions are more or less gratuitous. There may have been an earlier play than our Titus Andronicus on the same subject. But in all probability the 'tittus & vespacia' of Henslowe had nothing to do with the play recorded elsewhere by him as 'titus & ondronicus' (our Titus Andronicus), but dealt instead with the heroic theme of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian, the second of the Flavian emperors, and the hero of later tragedies by Corneille and Racine. The German play is quite certainly a translation, albeit a very free one, of our Titus Andronicus. The fact that Titus's son, Lucius, is given the name Vespasian in the German play can be easily explained, as Mr. R. Crompton Rhodes points out (Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 1924): Lucius is the son of Titus and an emperor of