Why fled you from the court? and whither? These, I know not how much more, should be demanded; Will serve our long intergatories. See, And she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye Cym. All o'erjoy'd Save these in bonds; let them be joyful too, For they shall taste our comfort. Imo. My good master, Happy be you! Cym. The forlorn soldier, that so nobly fought, He would have well becom'd this place, and grac'd The thankings of a king. Post. 1 Fierce is vehement, rapid. 2 i. e. which ought to be rendered distinct by an ample narrative. Post. Kneel not to me; The power that I have on you, is to spare you; The malice towards you, to forgive you: Live, And deal with others better. Cym. Nobly doom'd: We'll learn our freeness of a son-in-law; Pardon's the word to all. Arv. 3 Your three motives' means 'the motives of you three.' So in Romeo and Juliet, both our remedies' means 'the remedy for us both." 4 Intergatories was frequently used for interrogatories, and consequently as a word of only five syllables. In The Merchant of Venice, near the end, it is also thus used : 'And charge us there upon intergatories.' 5 Spritely shows are groups of sprites, ghostly appearances. You holp us, sir, As you did mean indeed to be our brother; Joy'd are we, that you are. 6 A collection is a corollary, a consequence deduced from premises. So in Davies's poem on The Immortality of the Soul: When she from sundry arts one skill doth draw; Gath'ring from divers sights one act of war; From many cases like one rule of law: These her collections, not the senses are." Post. Your servant, princes.-Good my lord of Rome, Call forth your soothsayer: As I slept, methought, Appear'd to me, with other spritely shows" Read, and declare the meaning. Sooth. [Reads.] When as a lion's whelp shall, to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches, which, being dead many years shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain be fortunate, and flourish in peace and plenty. Thou, Leonatus, art the lion's whelp; Which we call mollis aer; and mollis aer Cym. Well, Cym. So the Queen in Hamlet says:- Yet the unshaped use of it doth move Whose containing means the contents of which. 7 It should apparently be, By peace we will begin. The Soothsayer says, that the label promised to Britain 'peace and plenty. To which Cymbeline replies, 'We will begin with peace, to fulfil the prophecy. 8 i. e. have laid most heavy hand on. Many such elliptical passages are found in Shakspeare. Thus in The Rape of Lucrece : 'Only he hath an eye to gaze on beauty, And dotes on whom he looks [on] gainst law and duty.' So in The Winter's Tale : The queen is spotless In that which you accuse her [of ].' Sooth. The fingers of the powers above do tune Cym. Our peace we'll ratify: seal it with feasts.- THIS play has many just sentiments, some natural JOHNSON. * Johnson's remark on the gross incongruity of names and manners in this play is just, but it was the common error of the age; in The Wife for a Month, of Beaumont and Fletcher, we have Frederick and Alphonso among a host of Greek names, not to mention the firing of a pistol by Demetrius Poliocortes in The Humorous Lieutenant.-Pye. It is hardly necessary to point out the extreme injus A SONG, SUNG BY GUIDERIUS AND ARVIRAGUS OVER II- BY MR. WILLIAM COLLINS. To fair Fidele's grassy tomb, Soft maids and village hinds shall bring And melting mrgins own their love. Shall kindly lend his little aid, The tender thought on thee shall dwell. For thee the tear be duly shed; And mourn'd till pity's self be dead. tice of the unfounded severity of Johnson's animadver- TITUS ANDRONICUS. PRELIMINARY REMARKS. ΟΝ A booke, entitled A Noble Roman Historie of Titus Andronicus,' was entered at Stationers' Hall, by John Danter, Feb. 6, 1593-4. This was undoubtedly the play, as it was printed in that year (according to Lang. baine, who alone appears to have seen the first edition,) and acted by the servants of the Earls of Pembroke, Derby, and Sussex. It is observable that in the entry no author's name is mentioned, and that the play was originally performed by the same company of come. dians who exhibited the old draina, entitled The Con. tention of the Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, The old Taming of a Shrew, and Marlowe's King Edward II.; by whom not one of Shakspeare's plays is said to have been performed. From Ben Jonson's Induction to Bartholomew Fair, 1614, we learn that Andronicus had been exhibited twenty-five or thirty years before; that is, according to the lowest computation, in 1589; or, taking a middle period, which is perhaps more just, in 1587. To enter into a long disquisition to prove this piece not to have been written by Shakspeare would be an idle waste of time. To those who are not conversant with his writings, if particular passages were ex amined, more words would be necessary than the subject is worth; those who are well acquainted with his works cannot entertain a doubt on the question. I will, however, mention one mode by which it may be easily ascertained. Let the reader only peruse a few lines of Appius and Virginia, Tancred and Gismund, The Battle of Alcazar, Jeronimo, Selimus Emperor of the Turks, The Wounds of Civil War, The Wara of Cyrus, Locrine, Arden of Feversham, King Edward Í., The Spanish Tragedy, Solyman and Perseda, King Leir, the old King John, or any other of the pieces that were exhibited before the time of Shakspeare, and he will at once perceive that Titus Andronicus was coined in the same mint. The testimony of Meres, [who attributes it to Shakspeare in his Palladis Tamia, or the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth, 1598,] remains to be considered. His enumerating this among Shakspeare's plays may be accounted for in the same way in which we may ac count for its being printed by his fellow comedians in the first folio edition of his works. Meres was, in 1598, when his book first appeared, intimately connected with Drayton, and probably acquainted with some of the dramatic poets of the time, from some or other of whom he might have heard that Shakspeare interested himself about this tragedy, or had written a few lines for the author. The internal evidence furnished by the piece itself, and proving it not to have been the production of Shakspeare, greatly outweighs any single testimony on the other side. Meres might have been misinformed, or inconsiderately have given credit to the rumour of the day. In short, the high antiquity of the piece, its entry on the Stationers' books, and being afterwards printed without the name of Shakspeare, its being performed by the servants of Lord Pembroke, &c.; the stately march of the versification, the whole colour of the composition, its resemblance to several of our most ancient dramas, the dissimilitude of the style from our author's undoubted plays, and the tradition mentioned by Ravenscroft when some of his contem poraries had not long been dead (for Lowin and Taylor, two of his fellow comedians, were alive a few years before the Restoration, and Sir Wm. Davenant did not die till April, 1668;) all these circumstances combined, prove with irresistible force that the play of Titus Andronicus has been erroneously ascribed to Shakspeare.'Malone, "She has undone me, ev'n in mine own art, Outdone me in murder, kill'd her own child; Give it me, I'll eat it."" with the same spirit that it was written; but Titus An'It rarely happens that a dramatic piece is altered dronicus has undoubtedly fallen into the hands of one whose feelings and imagination were congenial with those of the author. 'Let it be likewise remembered that this piece was not published with the name of Shakspeare till after his death. The quartos [of 1600] and 1611 are anony 'It was evidently the work of one who was acquainted Mr. Malone, in the preceding note, has expressed with Greek and Roman literature. It is likewise dehis opinion that Shakspeare may have written a few ficient in such internal marks as distinguish the trage. lines in this play, or given some assistance to the audies of Shakspeare from those of other writers; I mean thor in revising it. Upon no other ground than this has that it presents no struggles to introduce the vein of any claim to a place among our poet's dramas: humour so constantly interwoven with the business of Those passages in which he supposed the hand of his serious dramas. It can neither boast of his striking Shakspeare may be traced, he marked with inverted excellencies, nor of his acknowledged defects; for it commas. This system of seizing upon every line pos- offers not a single interesting situation, a natural cha>essed of merit, as belonging of right to our great dra-racter, or a string of quibbles, from first to last. That matist, is scarcely doing justice to his contemporaries; Shakspeare should have written without commanding and resembles one of the arguments which Theobald our attention, moving our passions, or sporting with has used in his preface to The Double Falsehood:- words, appears to me as improbable as that he should "My partiality for Shakspeare makes me wish that have studiously avoided dissyllable and trisyllable ter every thing which is good or pleasing in our tongue minations in this play and in no other. had been owing to his pen." Many of the writers of that day were men of high poetical talent; and many individual speeches are found in plays, which, as plays, are of no value, which would not have been in any way unworthy of Shakspeare himself; of whom, Dr. Johnson has observed, that "his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of the fable and the tenour of his dialogue; and that he that tries to recommend him by select quotations will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his nouse to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen." Dr. Farmer has ascribed Titus Andronicus to Kyd, and placed it on a level with Locrine; but it appears to be much more in the style of Marlowe. His fondness for accumulating horrors upon other occasions, will account for the sanguinary character of this play; and it would not, I think, be difficult to show by extracts from his other performances, that there is not a line in it which he was not fully capable of writing.'-Boswell. The author, whoever he was, might have borrowed the story, &c. from an old ballad which is entered in the books of the Stationers' Company immediately after the play to John Danter, Feb. 6, 1593: and again entered to Tho. Pavyer, April 19, 1602. The reader will find it in Dr. Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, vol. i. Painter, in his Palace of Pleasure, tom. ii. speaks of the story of Titus as well known, and particularly mentions the cruelty of Tamora. And there is an allusion to it in A Knack to Know a Knave, 1594. I have given the reader a specimen (in the notes) of the changes made in this play by Ravenscroft; and may add, that when the Empress stabs her child, he has supplied the Moor with the following lines: mous. Could the use of particular terms, employed in no other of his pieces, be admitted as an argument that he found; among which is palliament for robe, a Latinism, was not its author, more than one of these might be which I have not met with elsewhere in any English writer, whether ancient or modern; though it must have originated from the mint of a scholar. I may add, that Titus Andronicus will be found on examination to contain a greater number of classical allusions, &c. than are scattered over all the rest of the performances on which the seal of Shakspeare is indubitably fixed.Not to write any more about and about this suspected thing, let me observe, that the glitter of a few passages in it has, perhaps, misled the judgment of those who ought to have known that both sentiment and descripfabric of a tragedy. Without these advantages many tion are more easily produced than the interesting plays have succeeded; and many have failed, in which they have been dealt about with lavish profusion. It does not follow that he who can carve a frieze with minuteness, elegance, and ease, has a conception equal to the extent, propriety, and grandeur of a temple. "Whatever were the motives of Heming and Condell for admitting this tragedy among those of Shakspeare, all it has gained by their favour is, to be delivered down to posterity with repeated remarks of contempt-a to be derided.'-Steevens. Thersites babbling among heroes, and introduced only PERSONS REPRESENTED. SATURNINUS, Son to the late Emperor of Rome, and | ALARBUS, vinia. CHIRON, } Sons to Tamora. AARON, a Moor, beloved by Tamora. A Captain, Tribune, Messenger, and Clown; Ro- mans. TAMORA, Queen of the Goths. LAVINIA, Daughter to Titus Andronicus. Kinsmen of Titus, Senators, Tribunes, Officers, SCENE-Rome; and the Country near it. And, countrymen, my loving followers, 1 i. e. my title to the succession. The empire being elective and not successive, the emperors in being made profit of their own times.'-Raleigh. 2 Saturninus means his seniority in point of age. In Bas. Romans,-friends, followers, favourers off If ever Bassianus, Cæsar's son, Ambitiously for rule and empery, MORA, with ALARBUS, CHIRON, DEMETRIUS, Tit. Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning Lo, as the bark that hath discharg'd her fraught, Know, that the people of Rome, for whom we stand Romans, of five and twenty valiant sons, A special party, have, by common voice, In election for the Roman empery, For many good and great deserts to Rome; And now at last, laden with honour's spoils, Bas. Marcus Andronicus, so I do affy And so I love and honour thee and thine, And her to whom my thoughts are humbled all, I thank you all, and here dismiss you all; [Exeunt the Followers of SATURNINUS. Bas. Tribunes! and me, a poor competitor. others. Enter a Captain, and Cap. Romans, make way; the good Andronicus, a subsequent passage Tamora speaks of him as a very young man. 1 Summoned. 2 Jupiter, to whom the Capitol was sacred. 3 Earthy. Ed 1600. Half of the number that king Priam had, Here Goths have given me leave to sheath my Titus, unkind, and careless of thine own, [The Tomb is opened. There greet in silence, as the dead are wont, Sweet cell of virtue and nobility, How many sons of mine hast thou in store, Luc. Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths, Tit. Patients yourself, madam, and pardon me. To this your son is mark'd; and die he must, [Exeunt LUCIUS, QUINTUS, MARTIUS, and 4 It was supposed that the ghosts of unburied people 6 This verb is used by other old dramatic writers. Thus in Arden of Feversham, 1592: 'Patient yourself, we cannot help it now.' TITUS ANDRONICUS. With opportunity of sharp revenge Luc. See, lord and father, how we have perform'd Whose smoke, like incense, doth perfume the sky. 845 Mar. Titus, thou shalt obtain and ask the empery. Sat. Proud and ambitious tribune, canst thou tell? Tit. Patience, Prince Saturnine. -- Patricians, draw your swords, and sheath them not Luc. Proud Saturnine, interrupter of the good Tit. Content thee, prince; I will restore to thee The people's hearts, and wean them from themselves. Bas. Andronicus, I do not flatter thee, But honour thee, and will do till I die; [Trumpets sounded, and the Coffins laid in My faction if thou strengthen with thy friends, the Tomb. In peace and honour rest you here, my sons; Enter LAVINIA. In prace and honour rest you here, my sons! I will most thankful be: and thanks, to men I ask your voices, and your suffrages; Tit. Tribunes, I thank you: and this suit I make, bless me here with thy victorious hand, SIANUS, and others. Mar. Long live Lord Titus, my beloved brother, cus. Mar. And welcome, nephews, from successful wars You that survive, and you that sleep in fame. Fair lords, your fortunes are alike in all, That in your country's service drew your swords : But safer triumph is this funeral pomp, That hath aspir'd to Solon's happiness,3 And triumphs over chance, in honour's bed.Titus Andronicus, the people of Rome, Whose friend in justice thou hast ever been, Send thee by me, their tribune, and their trust, This palliament of white and spotless hue; And name thee in election for the empire," With these our late deceased emperor's sons: Be candidatus then, and put it on, And help to set a head on headless Rome. Tit. A better head her glorious body fits, Than his, that shakes for age and feebleness: What? should I don' this robe, and trouble you? Be chosen with proclamations to-day; To-morrow, yield up rule, resign my life, And set abroad new business for you all? Rome, I have been thy soldier forty years, And buried one and twenty valiant sons, Knighted in field, slain manfully in arms, In right and service of their noble country: Give me a staff of honour for mine age, But not a sceptre to control the world: Upright he held it, lords, that held it last. Sat. Titus Andronicus, for thy favours done. [A long Flourish. To us in our election this day, give thee thanks in part of thy deserts, And will with deeds requite thy gentleness: Thy name, and honourable family, And, for an onset, Titus, to advance Rome's royal mistress, mistress of my heart Lavinia will I make my emperess, Tell me, Andronicus, doth this motion please thee? And in the sacred Pantheon her espouse: Tit. It doth, my worthy lord; and, in this match, I hold me highly honour'd of your grace: And here, in sight of Rome, to Saturnine,King and commander of our commonweal, The wide world's emperor,-do I consecrate My sword, my chariot, and my prisoners; Presents well worthy Rome's imperial lord: Receive them, then, the tribute that I owe, Mine honour's ensigns humbled at thy feet. Sat. Thanks, noble Titus, father of my life! How proud I am of thee, and of thy gifts, Rome shall record; and, when I do forget The least of these unspeakable deserts, Romans, forget your fealty to me. peror; T Tit. Now, madam, are you prisoner to an emTo him, that for your honour and your state, [To TAMORA. Will use you nobly, and your followers. Sat. A goodly lady, trust me; of the hue That I would choose, were I to choose anew.Clear up, fair queen, that cloudy countenance; Though chance of war hath wrought this change of cheer, Thou com'st not to be made a scorn in Rome : 1 Theobald says that we should read, in her tent; allusion to the Ajax of Sophocles, of which no transla other occasion he observes, that the writer has a plain i. e. in the tent where she and the other Trojan women tion was extant in the time of Shakspeare.' were kept; for thither Hecuba by a wile had decoyed Polymnestor, in order to perpetrate her revenge. Stee-phical, yet poetical sense. 2 Tooutlive an eternal date' is, though not philoso vens objects to Theobald's conclusion, that the writer be longer than his, and her praise longer than fame to gleaned this circumstance from the Hecuba of EuriHe wishes that her life may pides, and says, he may have been misled by the pas-nounced happy before his death. 3 The maxim alluded to is, that no man can be prosage in Ovid—“vadit ad artificem ;" and therefore took is for granted she found him in his tent.' 4 A robe. Yet on an. 5 i. e. do on, put it on. ja |