Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/149

Titus Andronicus That they are Shakespeare's has never been questioned, but if they had occurred in Titus, would they not certainly be catalogued as Peele's or Marlowe's by just such reasoning? If mere similarity or identity of thought or expression is to be accepted as a criterion of authorship, then almost any Elizabethan dramatist may be proved to have written parts of almost any play of the time.

The play is so patently of the same species as the Spanish Tragedy, that Kyd was early suggested by Farmer as author of Titus. Hartley Coleridge concurred in this, and Fleay, Sir Sidney Lee, Parrott, and Robertson have since thought Kyd a probable first draftsman of the play. Boswell preferred to consider Marlowe, and Fleay also inclined to this opinion. The character of Aaron is by almost all critics conceded to be modeled on Marlowe's Barabas and Ithamore. Much of the verse also, if not Marlowe's, is close imitation of that poet's lines. The share of Robert Greene in Titus has received more attention than that of any other of the possible authors except Peele. In along and scholarly article Grosart set forth his many claims to the authorship, and he has received the serious consideration of every critic since. The play unquestionably contains much that was written by Greene, but whether his passages got into it by his own pen, or whether his imitators put them there is a problem that cannot be solved. Parrott and Robertson agree substantially in conceding to Greene's authorship the first scene of Act II, and traces of his manner are not wanting throughout the play. Grant White thought Titus was written by Greene, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, and later revised by Shakespeare.

But of all those for whom the authorship of Titus