Page:Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale.djvu/150

136 is claimed, George Peele is the foremost. His influence and his mannerisms are evident throughout the play, which is as Peelean in spirit as it is non-Shakespearean. Indeed, if the play were not specially credited to Shakespeare, there can be little doubt that it would be readily assigned to Peele by the majority of students of Elizabethan drama. 'Almost every page', says Dugdale Sykes, 'exhibits traces of Peele's vocabulary and phrasing.' At least one third of the entire play has been shown to be directly or indirectly copied from his works. The most important developments in the study and criticism of Titus during the present century have centered in the question of Peele's connection with the play, and to the earlier proofs of Fleay, Verity, and Crawford of his great share in its text, abundant evidence has been added by the exhaustive researches of Sykes and Robertson. J. Q. Adams adheres to the theory of Peele's authorship of the play in his Life, and it is not unreasonable to expect that future critics may consider the evidence sufficient to establish his claim to the play. When all allowances are made for the Elizabethan tendency toward imitation of other works, the play still remains characteristically Peelean, exhibiting all his sentimentality, his weakness for rodomontade, his fondness for the historical background in tragedy, his peculiar interest in Oriental themes, his love of martial exp;oits and exploiters, and his glorification of the fatherland, identical here with Rome, as it is in David and Bethsabe with Judæa. Surely there was no one se likely as Peele to have chosen such a subject for a tragedy, and, given the theme here found, there can be little doubt that he would have written substantially what we have in Titus Andronicus.

What conclusions, then, are to be drawn from all the mass of critical discussion on the authorship of