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INTRODUCTION to the Kittredge Edition
Titus Andronicus
On January 24, 1594, Henslowe’s Diary records “Titus & Ondronicous” as a new play acted by the Earl of Sussex’s men. On February 6th “a Noble Roman Historye of Tytus Andronicus” was entered in the Stationers’ Register by John Danter, who printed the First Quarto in the same year. The title page professes to give the tragedy “As it was Plaide by the…Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants.” This identifies it with that recorded by Henslowe as “new,” and would fix the date of composition as not later than 1593.
In the Induction to Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the Articles of Agreement between the spectators and the author (dated October 31, 1614) provide that “he that will swear Jeronimo [i.e. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy] or Andronicus are the best plays yet, shall pass unexcepted at here, as a man whose judgment shows it is constant, and hath stood still these five-and-twenty or thirty years.” This would put The Spanish Tragedy back to 1584–1589; but twenty-five and thirty are obviously round numbers. It is certainly older than Titus Andronicus; and, if we date Kyd’s play about 1589, we are at liberty to put Titus Andronicus anywhere in the first half of the next decade. On the whole, it is safe to settle upon 1592 or 1593, with preference for 1592. For the text, the First Quarto (1594) is the authority. Two other quartos, which came out in 1600 and 1611, supply act 5, scene 3, lines 201–04. The second scene of act 3 appears for the first time in the Folio.
Shakespeare’s connection with
Titus Andronicus has been a moot question for two centuries and a half, ever since the irresponsible minor playwright Edward Ravenscroft, in the Address prefixed to his
Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (acted in 1678, printed in 1687), acknowledged his indebtedness to Shakespeare’s play and remarked, “I have been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not Originally his, but brought by a private Authour to be Acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the Principal Parts or Characters.” The idle gossip which he reports (or invents) cannot weigh against the positive assertion of Meres—made in 1598, when the play was only five or six years old—that it is one of Shakespeare’s ‘excellent’ tragedies. Nobody would have listened to Ravenscroft but for the feeling that
Titus Andronicus is too horrible to be Shakespeare’s. But Shakespeare was always prone to try experiments, and it would be strange if he had not written one out-and-out tragedy of blood when Kyd had shown how powerfully such things appealed to playgoers…
