Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/146

132 and corrected and added to by Grosart, Verity, and latterly by Robertson, contains upwards of a hundred terms which are the common property of Peele, Greene, and Kyd, respectively, but are never used by Shakespeare. If to these be added the host of classical allusions and tags found in Titus and in no other Shakespearean work, the linguistic medium of the play becomes a thing apart in the language of the Shakespearean canon.

But more fundamental than all these considerations of style, metre, vocabulary, and characterization, is the fact that the theme and the author's handling of it, and the general atmosphere and spirit of Titus Andronicus, are wholly unlike and utterly alien to anything we have of Shakespeare, or could expect from him. A theme of such unmitigated horror never appealed to Shakespeare in his later career as a dramatist, and least of all could it have appealed to the young Shakespeare of Love's Labour's Lost and the Midsummer Night's Dream. He came closest to such themes in Romeo and Juliet in the year following the first publication of Titus, and in Hamlet, a few years later, and his method of handling them in those plays is the best evidence of what he could do and would do with the type of tragedy bequeathed to him by Seneca and Kyd. In none of his tragedies does he deal with blood for blood's sake, but in Titus there is no relief from blood-letting, either by the inevitable Shakespearean interspersion of comic scenes, or by the interjection of another and more romantic plot. Horrors are heaped on horrors in a way that would have sickened the sentimental author of Shakespeare's early plays, and would have disgusted the author of Othello and King Lear. And all to no purpose. In Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy and the bloodshed result in the burying of the parents' strife; in Othello, it is the cause which leads a man great of heart to slay Desdemona, not