their time might utilize him for a pantaloon at their next halting-place. It seems to me, on the whole, that an examination of the progress in stage technique in these plays is the safer chronology; such an examination, of course, to be made with due allowance for carelessness or indifference (as where the playwright in Timon of Athens grows tired, and-after a matchless action and "business"-abruptly announces that the titular hero is dead, and rings down the curtain on his tombstone). And proceeding upon this line, it seems to me likely that the Titus Andronicus was young Shakespeare's first play, and for the following reasons: What were the plays which would have most attracted a boy just about the time to which the dates have thrown back the composition of Titus Andronicus? Says Heywood in his "Apology for Actors:" "To see, as I have seen, Hercules, in his own shape, hunting the boar, knocking down the bull, taming the hart, fighting the hydra, murdering Geryon, slaughtering Diomed, wounding the Stymphalides, killing the Centaurs, slashing the lions, squeezing the Aragons, draging Cerebus in chains, and these were sights to make an Alexander." The old play of Hieronimo (1570-74) wound up with an epilogue, spoken appropriately by a ghost who gloated over the evening's carnage. In 1594 there was presented a play, "The Magicall Raigne of Selimus, Emporour of the Turkes,"principally a riot of bloodshed, at the end of the first part of which the author assures his audience that "if the first part, gentles, do like you well, the second part shall greater murders tell." "Horatio murdered in his father's bower, Both done to death by old Hieronimo, Aye, these were spectacles to please my soul." And that this was all done with a sound and fury that outHeroded Herod, Shakespeare, if nobody else, has told us. These actors, who, when they speak, They tore passion to tatters, these robustious and periwigpated fellows, and the audiences-like those who gathered in the Old Bowery Theatre "to see Kirby die "-wanted all the bloodshed their money would pay for. "Wake me up when Kirby dies" was the sentiment in those days of old New York, and it would be easy to fill these pages with proof of the same conditions in Tudor London. Therefore it seems to me simple enough, and just what was to be expected, that the boy who would write a play should have followed models which were favorites, not only with those of his own age, but with all the world beside-should have out-Kirbyed Kirby, and cried his quarry on havoc to the extent of thirteen murders and six mayhems in five acts; however, later on, he should have jeered and lampooned those same models and traditions. That Titus Andronicus is gorier than the goriest, not only slaughters, but catches blood; bakes the slaughtered unfortunates into pies and eats them; buries, hangs, and burns; surely, this is only the boyish part of it. What, indeed, could be more boyish? This is the boyishness that tears off birds' wings, sticks pins into beetles, and pelts cats, without a thought of the exquisite suffering inflicted; of the surgeon (who fortunately is ' not a dramatist, and so does not suffer with his patients) or of the hired headsman. Later on this boy was to sound every note and touch every key of human sympathy, to suffer with those who suffered, to dilate as never poet dilated before or since on the human pain, and the quiver of tortured flesh, on the pang a mote or wandering speck of dust would cause a single eye, or the bubble of covering water in a drowning man's ears. Have you the heart? When your head did but ache, I knit my handkercher about your brows," cries Arthur to Hubert. "O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown," cries Clarence. The growth of this dramatic imagination and sympathywhich is all there is, after all, of the dramatic genius-was to bring about this change in the man. Now, however, the boy commits his carnage without compunction, expostulation or commiseration. Not a groan, not a cry escapes from the victims as their blood is supposed to gush. And this was the workmanship of Shakespeare? Surely an interesting study in intellectual development! That there is not in the entire play, except in one instance to be mentioned presently, the slightest element of humor or of comedy to relieve the general ruin and massacre; this again would seem to imply that this is a boy's first effort. Surely there are plenty of autobiographies of celebrated writers, wherein they confess with delightful naïvete that this was about the run of their own boyish exuberances ! Some of our modern editors are squeamish at this catalogue of gore. Says Dr. Furnivall: "Titus Adronicus I do not consider. The play declares, as plainly as play can speak, I am not Shakespeare, my repulsive subject, my blood and horrors are not, and never were his.'" (And further on we shall find Mr. Fleay in the same condition of enervation and moral shock.) But the lackadaisical commentator, who passes to windward of Titus Andronicus on account of the smell of clotted gore, loses one of the richest of Shakespearian preserves, one packed with history, stage lore, and contemporary incident-as I shall proceed to in some imperfect sort demonstrate. For my own part, I not only "consider" Titus Andronicus, but feel myself tempted to gloat over every throat-cutting and every item of carnage in that juvenile performance. I say to myself, here is the boy who will some day make all this into the very summit of supreme tragedy; here are the firstlings of Shakespeare. Later, all this Nemesis of sufferings will write, not in action, but in pathos and in terror, and the agony of Lear, of Othello, will supplant this brutal action that shall oppress by expression the hearts of all mankind rather than in actual physical fact fill the casual eyes of a handful of rude spectators. And there are other juvenile signs: There were the stories of Virginius, Coriolanus, and Besilarius for models, and young Shakespeare produced a mixture of the two in his title role, and what was more natural that classic allusions should crop out at every turn in a school-boy's first tragedy? In Titus's first speech he says that he took twentyfive sons of his own loins into Rome's service-"half of the number that King Priam had; and then follow allusions to Styx and to the barbarities of the Scythians, the Queen of Troy, etc. We are told that "The Greeks upon advice did bury Ajax, That slew himself, and wise Laertes' son all in the first act. In the second, we have allusions to the story of Vulcan and Venus, to Diana, Hector, Junius Brutus, Lucrece, Dido, Philomel, Semiramis, Pyramus, Cocytus, Tereus, Nilus, and thereafter Etna. Tarquin, Æneas, Troy, Tully's Orator, Cornelia, Hecuba, Ovid's Metamorphoses, a quotation from Seneca's Hypolitus, Apollo, Pallas, Jove, Mercury, Lucrece again, Sybil, Horace, Enceladus, Typhon, Alcides, Acheron, Saturn, Jupiter, Taurus, Hyperion, Progue, Coriolanus, Virginius, Priam's Troy again, Sinon, and so on. Shakespeare in maturity is still full of classical allusion, so full as to keep all scholardom agog with the question as to how much of it he dug out for himself, and how much took at third hand. But the above is a mere catalogue, like Homer's list of ships. He still followed his models, but it was their square not their cube that he assimilated. And it is my idea that the famous opening lines: "Now climbeth Tamora Olympus' top," etc., show how the youthful author's idea of pure tragedy led him to imitate the foremost model of his date, Marlowe; and how well he could write in imitation, where he turned his pen that way. So far from "not considering" Titus Andronicus, as Dr. Furnivall advises, all humanity should be thankful that Shakespeare did not burn his early manuscripts, as did Pope, But but let them remain for us as a most interesting chapter in the development of a Shakespeare, ten thousand times more enticing and exemplary than the acres of essays on Shakespeare's "Mind and Art" and æsthetic, deductive, and creative speculation as to where all that we call Shakespeare came from. It seems, at any rate, that it did not come out of the clouds; descended by no miracle, no dispensation, and no royal road; but had its firstlings, its experiments, its failures; grew by hard work, polish, and correction, from the crude and bungling tragedy in Titus Andronicus, the tame imitation of poor comedy models in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, up to the pure air of the circle within which none but Shakespeare durst walk. yet, but yet, lighted always by the miraculous genius, the genius that even in Titus Adronicus could burst into the pure eloquence of passages like those above quoted. And if we everywhere miss Launcelott Gobbo and Elbow, Dogberry and the ineffable humor of Launce and his dog Crab, why, these were in embryo in the clown with the pigeons, and were yet to come with the master after the 'prentice hand. So I think it was only to have been expected that this boy, fresh from his books, should pack his first tragedy as full of ancient Rome as was the celebrated inaugural address of that President Harrison in which Daniel Webster slaughtered so many redoubtable heroes. But right here this consideration brings us to a Shakespearian excursus as brilliant as it is altogether passed over and unnoticed by the commentators, and which seems, on the whole, cumulative to the general character of immaturity in the Titus Andronicus. The excellent Theobald, in 1733, said: "The story we are to suppose merely fictitious. Andronicus is a surname of pure Greek derivation. And yet the scene is laid in Rome and Saturninus is elected to the empire at the Capitol." And every editor and commentator since, so far as I know, has followed Theobald. But Theobald was more wrong than right. There were two emperors, after the empire was transferred to Byzantium, named Andronicus, one of whom was of about A.D. 1180,* and the other of about A.D. 1330. And now comes in + Id., vi., 177. * Gibbon, iv., 625. |