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Titus Andronicus exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience, yet we are told by Jonson that they were not only borne but praised. That Shakespeare wrote any part of it, though Theobald declares it incontestable, I see no reason for believing. I do not find Shakespeare's touches very discernible.' Malone thought that Shakespeare might have written a few lines in the play, or perhaps have given some assistance to the author in revising it.

In the nineteenth century, critics were more widely divided in their opinions. Seymour, Drake, Singer, the Coleridges, Hallam, Dyce, Fleay, and others denied that Shakespeare had any part in its composition. Furnivall (Introduction to Leopold Shakspere), Ingleby (Shakespeare: The Man and the Book), Dowden (Shakspere: His Mind and Art), Herford (Introduction to Eversley Shakespeare), Hudson, and Rolfe, agreed that very little of the play could have been written by Shakespeare. On the other hand, a group of critics of whom we may name Collier (Annals of the Stage, 1831), Verplanck (Illustrated Shakespeare, 1847), Knight (Pictorial Shakespeare, 1867), Appleton Morgan (Bankside Shakespeare, 1890), and Crawford ('The Date and Authenticity of "Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1900), considered the play the work of Shakespeare, his earliest and crudest composition, produced when he was still under the influence of his predecessors. The latter view was concurred in almost unanimously by the German school: Schlegel, Delius, Bodenstedt, Franz Horn, Ulrici, Kurz, Sarrazin, Brandl, Creizenach, and Schröer. Gervinus, as in other matters of Shakespearean criticism, dissented from the opinion of his countrymen, and sided with the British school which denied Shakespeare's authorship of Titus.

The twentieth century brought with it the discovery of the First Quarto of Titus, and consequent fresh