Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/140

126 of the play. Few hard and fast conclusions can be drawn from all the evidence produced, however, as there is little agreement among critics as to its proper interpretation. Studies of the metre of the play, with special attention to the number of double and triple endings, riming lines, and the quality of the blank verse employed in it, have been made in endeavors to throw light on the question of authorship, but nothing definitely conclusive has come of it, so varied are the constructions placed upon the data obtained. Again, the elaborate investigations of the style of the play and the innumerable similarities of idea and expression between Titus and other Elizabethan plays have resulted in the discovery of much valuable information as to the wholesale borrowings of the writers of the time, but the findings are construed in widely different ways. What seems to one critic or school convincing evidence of Shakespearean workmanship, is often quite as convincing to another that Shakespeare had nothing to do with the play. Flügel, for instance, thought Aaron as un-Shakespearean as could be, whereas Saintsbury, Collins, Parrott, and others have found him genuinely Shakespearean. Schröer and Parrott, again, consider the classical allusions quite in Shakespeare's manner; but, says Robertson, who finds the classical allusions thoroughly pre-Shakespearean, 'what is obviously non-Shakespearean is the classicism of the play.' Not only are the critics in disagreement with one another, but they are not consistent with themselves. Schröer, whose study, Über Titus Andronicus, 1891, is the most comprehensive of the German arguments advocating Shakespeare's authorship of the play, contends, as Robertson notes, that 'verbal coincidence between two poems speaks rather against than for identity of authorship—' (p. 73), and yet some fifty-two pages later he argues that Aaron's praise of blackness (IV. ii. 72,