Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/141

Titus Andronicus 100) is a favorite idea with Shakespeare, because we have it again in Love's Labour's Lost (V. ii. 20, 41).

The attempts at choosing what in the play is genuinely Shakespearean, as distinguished from what may be considered the work of his supposed collaborators, have not met with any greater success. Almost every editor who accepts in part the Shakespearean hypothesis has his favorite list of selections which he believes authentic. Such passages consist in most cases of the more lyrical sections, and include, of course, all the better lines of the tragedy. But there is a remarkable disagreement among them, and such selections, if put together properly, would constitute almost the whole of the play. Coleridge, from a poet's point of view, considered as worthy of Shakespeare only some forty lines from the 'Revenge' scene (V. ii. 20–60), whereas Swinburne, from another poet's point of view, disregarded all but the 'Clown' scene (IV. iii.). The one scene on which there has been more general agreement, perhaps, than on any other, is the second scene of Act III, which appeared for the first time in the Folio, and therefore attracts attention to itself as having perhaps come from Shakespeare's own copy or his MSS. The whole process of picking and choosing must be considered futile, however, and especially since half of the passages tagged as certainly Shakespearean have been shown to be similar to, or identical with, passages in Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and others.

Nor do we find any grounds for more definite conclusions when we examine the passages in Titus which are most strikingly suggestive of lines and scenes in Shakespeare's authenticated works. The theme of Lucrece is similar to that of the plot in which Lavinia figures, but we cannot therefore conclude that Shakespeare is necessarily the author of Titus because he is the author of Lucrece. The poem may, in-