Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/144

130 three have little in common but their imperiousness. The treatment of the character of Titus certainly does not suggest Shakespeare's handling of the characters of Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. Nor does young Lucius seem to have more than his tender years in common with Prince Arthur and the young princes of Richard III. There is, however, one character, the Clown, in Titus, who is quite in the manner and tradition of Shakespeare, but even he is not distinctively and exclusively Shakespearean. Elizabethan and Tudor drama have clowns and to spare, and the clown of Titus is not more like the clowns of Shakespeare than he is like those of his contemporaries. But he is the one typically Shakespearean thing in the entire play, and he may very well be conceded to Shakespeare as being of a piece with Launce, Launcelot Gobbo, and Elbow, and as constituting one of the 'master-touches' which Ravenscroft represents Shakespeare as imparting to the play.

Previous study of characters, metre, phrasing, and general stylistic qualities cannot, therefore, be said to have produced any conclusive or convincing reasons for considering Titus Shakespeare's. The work of critics, ranging from the early observations of Steevens and Malone down to the exhaustive researches of Robertson, have proved that the play is a collection of materials drawn from a common stock used by all Elizabethan dramatists, and that, in particular, it is a tissue of words, phrases, and sentiments taken largely from Peele, Greene, Kyd, Marlowe, and Lodge. The author, or authors, of Titus Andronicus, whoever they were, simply followed the common habit of turning to other authors and similar works: what they thought they might require, they went and took to furnish out a lamentable Roman tragedy.

Close examination of the text of Titus, therefore, reveals no more reason for including it in the canon of