Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/143

Titus Andronicus which he gives, are unmistakable, and he accordingly assigns the paralleled lines and Tamora's speech to Shakespeare; but, as Robertson observes, it does not follow necessarily that Shakespeare must himself have written Tamora's speech. Any of his contemporaries would have copied such a fine passage without scruple if he had wished to do so.

The studies of the characters of the play in relation to those of others of Shakespeare's plays have been no more conclusive in their results. Aaron, for example, is quite generally considered, by all who uphold Shakespeare's intimate connection with the play, as a first draft and prototype of Shylock, Iago, Richard III, Edmund, and most of Shakespeare's villains. It is by external and superficial implications, however, rather than by inherent likenesses that he is connected with them. He is a Moor, and the tragedy of Othello the Moor is at once suggested, wherein, as it happens, there is Iago, a villain in the popular sense, and certain similarities in the characters of Iago and Aaron begin to appear. But fundamentally and essentially Aaron and Iago are not of the same stripe. Aaron is pre-Shakespearean rather than Shakespearean, and belongs to the tribe of Tamburlaine, Barabas, Ithamore, Eleazar, and Peele's Moor, Muly Muhamet, rather than to that of Iago. His melodramatic rant and braggadocio, and his comic-opera frenzy for evil-doing, form a striking contrast to the tragically sinister and motiveless malignity of Iago. As for his relation to Shylock, is not the apparent connection between them based subconsciously on the circumstance of their being members respectively of races alike alien and despised from the Elizabethan point of view? Similarities and parallels between Tamora, and the Margaret of the Henry VI trilogy (who is fundamentally non-Shakespearean), on the one hand, and Lady Macbeth on the other, seem equally superficial. The