what is either one of the most curious of coincidences or an evidence of some very remarkable heterophemy on Shakespeare's part superinduced by reminiscence of some very unusual lines of reading. In Act IV., scene iii., line 1, Titus Andronicus, who has gone stark mad, writes letters, ties them to arrows, and hurls these arrows at random around the public places of the city. The letters are incoherent, some of them only verses from Horace which are as inapposite as ineffective. Why should this incident have been introduced? It leads to nothing, produces no effect, is at once forgotten. By turning, however, to the historian Nicetas, we find that the first Andronicus once beleaguered the city of Nicæa; and, determining to offer it a truce before storming it, wrote out the terms of peace he was willing to grant, attached these writings to arrows, and caused them to be shot into the city. But there is nothing unusual about so simple a coincidence as this, and it were inane to infer from it that Shakespeare had read about this Andronicus! Wait a bit-let us look at the other imperial Andronicus! Act IV., iii., 75, a clown enters Titus Andronicus's study with two pigeons in a basket. It does not appear that he was sent for, that any pigeons had been ordered: he does not offer the pigeons to Andronicus to sell, nor does it appear that the clown had been set to catch some of Andronicus's own pigeons. All that passes in reference to the pigeons is that Andronicus orders the clown to take the pigeons to the Emperor, who will reward him (the clown) for them. Then, in the next scene, the Emperor and Tamora are discovered, the clown enters, offers the pigeons to the Emperor, who promptly orders him to be hanged! What have this clown and these pigeons to do with the plot, with the story? Absolutely nothing at all. Why are they introduced? Nobody can guess, unless the following story, told of this second Andronicus, by Gibbon has something to do with the case. It seems that during the reign of this second Andronicus, the Patriarch Athanasius became obnoxious to the people and the throne, so that Andronicus was obliged to remove him from office and exile

Gibbon,., chap. lxiii.

him. Athanasius, however, had his revenge. He made his ecclesiastical Will and published it. He then made a codicil to this Will, concealed it in an earthen pot, and had the pot secreted in the capital of one of the columns supporting the dome of St. Sophia. In the Will he forgave his enemies, breathed charity and peace to everybody, and commended all hands to Heaven. But in the codicil he cursed Andronicus and the people of the empire, and forbade them ever to enter heaven or into the company or vicinity of the Trinity, the saints, or the angels. Athanasius disappeared, and his successor reigned in his stead. But, one day, four years after, a clown, climbing up the dome of St. Sophia after pigeons, found the pot and the codicil. All Byzantium trembled at the curse. The synod of bishops declared it valid and that the only way it could be disposed of was to get it unsaid by the authority who had said it. Athanasius, being the Patriarch, had pronounced it, and so Athanasius must be made Patriarch again to unpronounce it, which, of course, was done. Now, this looks, one must admit, as if young Shakespeare had read, or otherwise had access to, the story of these two Emperors Andronicus. The immaturity is apparent then in the use of the stories, not in employing them as part of his action, as later in life he would have managed to do, but simply incorporating them in his text, and leaving them there utterly objectless and without use of or recurrence to them in any way again. He has the craving for expression; as yet the power of dramatic expression is lacking. Shakespeare, like the rest of us, must tarry until his beard is grown. Just now he is simply not strong enough to handle his material. (Possibly because there is no point made about the pigeons in the play, no impression was made on the balladist; at least the "Ballad " of which we have spoken says nothing whatever about the birds.) Again, our young playmaker outlines his Aaron, but, the power of dramatic delineation being wanting, fills in his outline by statement and braggadocio. This Aaron, as he stands, is a monster, far more practicable in opera bouffe than in real tragedy. Like the Gilbert-Sullivan

Lord of Ruddygore, he must have his one crime a day, according to his own speech:

"I curse the day-and yet I think

Few come within the compass of my curse,

Wherein I did not some notorious ill."

But this is mere bombast, so far as the dramatic action of the play itself is concerned. So far as action goes, the hero of the piece, old Titus himself, is far the gorier of the two, and is directly responsible for exactly twelve times as much bloodshed! And the inexactness of the dramatic movement is constantly irregular according to every rule which Shakespeare ever laid down, or ever followed. By every rule, not only of tragedy, but of nature, it is Saturninus, not Titus, who had injured Aaron, and whom Aaron should have sought to remove-Saturninus, who was his rival in the love and enjoyment of Tamora! But Saturnius is a lay figure who hardly has a part in the piece at all!

To rapidly enumerate other signs of dramatic feebleness: The movements, speeches, entrances, and exits of the crowned heads of the play show that Shakespeare was yet to become familiar with the movements of royal and imperial personages. (His head, indeed, was to be somewhat turned that way. He was to rest his title to immortality upon a purchased grant of Arms rather than upon his deathless works. And the whirligig of time was to be revenged by giving him no heir to his Arms, but a world of worshippers for his works!) It is pretty safe, for instance, to say that, a few years later, Shakespeare would not have risked the expedient of an emperor of Rome saving himself from destruction at the hands of an invading army by the simple expedient of inviting his enemy's commander-in-chief to dinner! or make a queen accept an emperor's proposition of marriage by promising to be an obedient wife and a good stepmother to his children, as a Warwickshire wench might respond to the overtures of her yokel!

Again, there is nothing comic in the play, none of that respite to strained and tired sympathies, like the episode of the drunken porter between the attempt and the deed in Macbeth;

or the chop logic of the grave-diggers in the interval of Ophelia's suicide and the agony of her burial. No puns, with which Shakespeare's other plays are loaded.*

This lack of the consummate dramatic power of touching alike, and at once the font of laughter and of tears, this alone would lead me to reject the theory that Marlowe wrote the play and Shakespeare "touched it up." Why should Marlowe, the veteran, ask a green boy, a tyro and a beginner, to "touch up " his work? And so. again, I dispose of Ravenscroft.

Mr. Edward Ravenscroft's tragedy was entitled "Titus. Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia," and in his preface to an edition of it printed in 1686 he says: "I think it a greater theft to rob the dead of their praise than the living of their money. That I may not appear guilty of such a crime, I should acquaint you that there is a play in Mr. Shakespeare's volume under the name of Titus Andronicus, from whence I drew part of this. I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage, that it was not originally his, but brought by a private Author to be acted, and that he only gave some mastertouches to one or two of the principal parts or characters; this I am apt to believe, because, 'tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his works. It seems rather a heap of rubbish than a structure."

This seems to me to infer that Mr. Ravenscroft rather proposed to palliate his own piracy by depreciating Shakespeare's. claim to the stolen goods than that he had reliable authority for his statement behind him. Certainly this young man Shakespeare would not have been invited just at present to

* Unless in Aaron's speech,

"Indeed, I was their tutor to instruct them

That codding spirit had they from their mother,
As sure a card as ever won the set,"

the word card may be a pun on the syllable cod in codding. Otherwise I can see no use of the line, "As sure a card as ever won the set," as spoken, as it surely is unnecessary to the sense of Aaron's speech. Aaron is. saying simply that Chiron and Demetrius had their libidinous appetites directly from their mother, and that he had tutored and pampered those appetites.

"touch up" somebody else's play. Better wait until he had been some years a playwright himself; long enough to make his "touching up valuable for stage purposes. It is rather impossible to suppose, even of a Shakespeare, that he was employed to impart to the works of his predecessors those acting qualities of which he was himself ignorant. And it is quite equally impossible to suppose that after experience had made him a master of stage effect he would "touch up" somebody else's play merely as to its rhetoric, and leave it lacking in that very stage effect which it wanted for acting purposes, to supply which it must have been brought him, if brought to him at all. Shakespeare did not work for fun or to exercise his talents. And the play as it stands to-day shows very clearly that it never was "touched up" by anybody, in the very elements it lacks: even if we can imagine Mr. Ravenscroft as carefully concealing an authority for the statement he made.

No, the touches " in Titus Andronicus which reveal the hand of Shakespeare are not those which, in his practical days, he would have put into another man's play in order to make it lucrative on the boards, but the insensible and revealing "touches" of his own genius, even then seething within him. Sometimes a speech here suggests its more eloquent appearance later. As Aaron's

"For all the water in the ocean

Can never turn the swan's black legs to white,"

might have become the

"Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off an annointed king "

of Richard II., or the pathos of Lady Macbeth's cry:
"Cannot all Neptune's ocean wash white this little hand?"
But mainly the "touches" are Shakespeare himself :
"In peace and honor rest you here, my sons,"

says the returned Titus, as he lays his dead sons in the grave; "Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,

Here grow no damned grudges, here are no storms,

No noise, but silence and eternal sleep.”