Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/145

Titus Andronicus Shakespeare's plays than could be found for including many of those pre-Shakespearean plays with which it is organically and spiritually connected—the Spanish Tragedy, Lust's Dominion, Selimus, the Battle of Alcazar, the Troublesome Reign, the Chronicle History of King Leir, and others.

But it is not merely or chiefly the negative argument—that Titus is lacking in distinctive and convincing Shakespearean characteristics—that justifies the rejection of the play as Shakespeare's, but the more fundamental and positive fact that it contains much that is certainly not Shakespeare's and that is as certainly the work of other Elizabethans. That the version of the play which was printed in the 1594 Quarto could not have been completed earlier than the middle of the year 1593 is proved by the fact that it copies directly or indirectly many phrases and passages of Peele's Honour of the Garter, which was written to celebrate an event that occurred on June 26, 1593; and yet the language, the metre, and the style of Titus is noticeably different from that of the works which Shakespeare had already written and was writing during this particular period—the Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. As late as 1593 he would hardly have written such bad lines or constructed so poor a play. If he had written it as early as 1589 or 1590, he could hardly have written in a style so wholly unlike that of the Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost, which he was presumably engaged in composing at that time.

Moreover, the language of Titus is shot through with words and expressions which Shakespeare did not use in any of his unquestioned works. A list of these words peculiar to Titus, first begun by Fleay,