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If this, then, were the temper of the dramatic writers and audiences of the time, what wonder that Shakespeare, a comparative beginner, sought in his own phrase to outherod Herod" by selecting a plot so rife with horrors as Titus Andronicus! And his selection was justified by the event, for this play was obviously a great success, and no doubt laid the foundation of Shakespeare's reputation as a writer of Tragedy, just as it also forms the first, if in some respects the worst, of his great series of "Roman" plays.

There is a point of great importance, but which it is quite impossible for me to enter upon here with the necessary fulness; I mean, the question of versification. And the reason of this is that I am very sceptical of the value of the usually-employed, what I must be excused calling the mechanical tests, by which it is sought to discriminate between what is Shakespeare's and what is not. As a writer of hundreds of lines of blank verse myself, which some critics rightly or wrongly have praised, I confess to feeling a revolt against such tests as "feminine endings," " run-on lines," "feminine cæsuras," and so forth, being used as a decisive test of authorship. One thing I feel perfectly certain of is, that Marlowe, Shakespeare, and even Milton, and later Tennyson, Keats, Browning, and Swinburne, never consciously thought of these things, but wrote by ear, as a musical composer does. But it may, no doubt, be argued that writers may have an unconscious preference for certain rhythmic effects without analysing them, and that is perfectly true. But would any of these analytic measurers of Shakespeare's verse undertake to distinguish by their rules between the blank verse of Milton, Keats, Tennyson,

Browning, or Swinburne? I greatly doubt it, and yet these all write blank verse with a difference, which to the trained

ear is often very marked. The fact is that so many phonetic elements, alliteration, assonance, and other consonantal or vocal juxtapositions, enter into the structure of blank verse, that it would require a far more delicate and complex verse-analysis to give anything like an adequate test, which could be relied upon to distinguish between the verse of one writer and another. But this complex verse-analysis has never been thoroughly worked out. I have given a great deal of attention to it myself, and intend to return to it again as soon as possible; but my results are not ripe enough to be applied with confidence to the present case, and even to explain my method would take far too long on this occasion.

But let not the reader imagine that I am making light of these mechanical tests because they make against Shakespeare's authorship of Titus Andronicus. On the contrary, Professor Schröer1 has gone into this matter very thoroughly, and, so far as he arrives at any positive results, they favour Shakespeare's authorship.

Now I fancy every expert in verse, just as an expert in any other art, would fancy that he could distinguish in the great majority of cases between the works of different masters. What, for example, would be the Olympian wrath of an art-critic if one told him he could not tell a Velasquez from a Rembrandt, a Constable from a Turner, and so forth! So, I think, a literary expert might be justifiably wroth if told he could not distinguish between the verse of Tennyson and Browning, Milton and Keats 1 Ueber Titus Andronicus, p. 31, etc.

Shelley or Byron. No doubt every line or verse is not intensely characteristic of its author; but, given a fair number of examples and quotations of sufficient length, I am inclined to think the expert would be very frequently right.

Now, having tried to write nearly every known form of English verse and experimented in new ones, I think I may without vanity claim to be an expert in regard to versification; and I therefore think that my impressions of the verse of this play may not be without value.

The versification of this play varies considerably, being at times somewhat humdrum, but never bad, never quite so mechanical as to suggest the possibility of so wooden and defective a metrist as Kyd having any hand in it. On the other hand, there are a good many passages of great metrical beauty, a metrical beauty such that taken in connection with their other merits, it appears to me that there were only two men who could have written them-Marlowe or Shakespeare. Now the play as a whole cannot be by Marlowe, because he cannot be the "private author" of the Ravenscroft invention, nor is it conceivable that had Marlowe written it Shakespeare would not have been suffered to rob him, as in that case he must have done, of all the credit of such a successful play. The same argument applies to Greene, as shown above, and I personally think these passages are beyond Greene, even at his best, and Greene's blank verse has to my ear a more mechanical rhythm than either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's.

To revert for a moment to more obvious points in versification, such as the presence of rhymed couplets, faulty or broken lines, and matters of accentuation and pronuncia

tion, I think I may safely and broadly assert that the play shows nothing that militates against Shakespeare's authorship. In fact, in all these points the practices of the author of Titus Andronicus and of Shakespeare in his later and greater plays will be found to agree. The rhymed couplets, for instance, are generally used to clinch some important point in the argument, or as a finish at the end of a scene, act, or important speech. The occurrence of four-feet and six-feet lines instead of the ordinary five-feet line is by no means confined to this play, as will be found by reference to Abbott's Grammar and similar books, and the same may be said of broken lines, which usually mark passages of high excitement. So that any inferences to be drawn from these practices or defects tell only in favour rather than against Shakespeare's claim.

I have pointed out in the notes to this play that there is a great difficulty in making out a consistent time-scheme for the action, especially between the first and second Acts, where an interval seems absolutely necessary; but it is impossible, unless we adopt the somewhat awkward hypothesis that there were two great huntings, instead of one, to work out a logical time-scheme. But this is only of a piece with Shakespeare's treatment of the time element in his other plays, where he seems quite regardless of consistency in this respect, and conforms the time to the necessities of the story, quite apart from actual probabilities and possibilities; so that this fault, if fault it be, only serves to confirm Shakespeare's authorship. The fact is, Shakespeare wrote

1 P. A. Daniel, "Time Analysis of Titus Andronicus," New Shak. Soc., Series I. pt. 11. vol. vi. p. 188. Edward Rose, "The Inconsistency of Time in Shakespeare's Plays," New Shak. Soc., Series I. vol viii. p. 33.

for his audiences, and not for the student and critic in the closet. In the rush of passion and action in such a drama no audience whatever would pause to notice, still less to discuss, such discrepancies. But what is extremely remarkable is that while Shakespeare sets at nought the probabilities and even possibilities of time and place, still more the so-called unities of time and space, no dramatic author so well exemplifies the essential conditions of Aristotle's doctrine of what Tragedy is and ought to be. So much so that in lecturing on Aristotle's Poetics to my class, I was not only able, I was indeed often compelled, to use examples from Shakespeare, as the best illustrations of what is most essential in Aristotle's doctrine. At the same time, Shakespeare avoids the one salient error of Aristotle's theory, the undue exaltation of the "fable" over the "characterisation." Indeed, were one to go on internal evidence alone, one would be tempted to argue that Shakespeare must have had access to Aristotle's Treatise. This he may have obtained, either through a Latin version, or through conversations with Ben Jonson, who, being a good scholar, could read the original.

I have treated the question of the authorship of this play very fully; because, as I have already indicated, there lies the key of the whole position regarding the authorship of the Shakespearian plays. The man who wrote Titus Andronicus, in what we may call his dramatic youth, had undoubtedly sufficient classical and other learning, sufficient literary and poetic ability, ample psychologic acumen and dramatic genius to have written in his maturity all the masterpieces associated with the name of Shakespeare. If it was not the same man who wrote the great tragedies attributed to

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