CHAPTER 30
There is little argument that the young Shakespeare did indeed write most of Titus Andronicus, a stirring classical melodrama, a blood-and-thunder piece designed for the popular market of the public playhouse. The first act was almost certainly composed by George Peek and Shakespeare was brought in to finish the work, another example of early collaboration. It is just possible that Shakespeare wrote the entire play, having decided to imitate Peek’s ceremonial and processional style, although the motive for doing so is unclear.
Titus Andronicus is a play that attempts to beat Kyd and Marlowe at their own game, a revenge tragedy on a large and bloody scale. Shakespeare borrows structure and detail from Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and renders them more colourful and theatrical; already his sense of stagecraft is much more assured than that of his older contemporary. He took his stage villain, Aaron, from the model of Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta; but he made him much more wicked. He echoes Marlowe all the time, just as he had explicitly done in The Taming of a Shrew. The drama has lashings of Ovid and Virgil, as if to prove the point that Shakespeare had also been given a classical education. He quotes lines from Seneca in the approved fashion of the day, and at one point a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is brought on stage like some memorial to his schooldays. But in dramatising Ovid, as it were, he is engaged in quite a new enterprise. He is in a sense dramatising poetry itself. He was developing his own earliest gifts.
Titus Andronicus has violent deaths, and equally violent mutilations and amputations. The heroine, Lavinia, has her tongue cut out and her hands lopped off. She is then obliged to write down the name of her murderer with her remaining stumps, holding a stick in her mouth. The right hand of Titus is cut off on stage. The horror reaches a climax in the concluding scene when the wicked queen eats the flesh of her two sons, baked in a pie, before being stabbed to death by Titus, who is himself murdered. It is so extravagant a drama—and one still very shocking to a contemporary audience—that it has been supposed that Shakespeare was parodying the worst excesses of the genre. But there is no evidence at all for that assumption. It would also run against all the practice of the sixteenth-century stage, where the revenge tragedy was still too novel and exciting a form to be ridiculed in that self-reflecting manner. It is unlikely, for example, that an Elizabethan audience would have laughed at the sight of Lavinia with her hands chopped off; it was still a punishment deployed in public places. There is a case for saying that Shakespeare pushed the spectacle of bloodshed to its extremes precisely because he was writing for citizens inured to violent and painful deaths. He wished his audience to sup its full of horrors, and he entered the spirit of the proceedings with such gusto and relish that he forgot or abandoned any sense of theatrical decorum. It was a case of declamation rather than explanation. It may of course be doubted whether such a sense of decorum existed in public playhouses that could also be used for bear-baiting and bull-baiting. Everything was permitted at this early stage in public and professional drama; there were no rules and no conventions.
His is in any case the pure joy of invention, beyond the boundaries of comedy or tragedy. He is captured by the sheer enthusiasm for display and rhetoric and spectacle. That is why he wrote fluently and quickly, even borrowing a line verbatim from The Troublesome Raigne in the process. There were a few dramaturgical errors and inconsistencies, but we may recall the words of the German critic A.W. Schlegel when writing of Titus Andronicus. “It is even highly probable,” he suggested, “that he must have made several failures before he succeeded in getting into the right path. Genius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothing to learn; but art is to be learned, and must be acquired by practice and experience.”1
Titus Andronicus was in any case not seen as a “failure” at the time. A hugely popular play, still praised and performed thirty years after its first production, it conferred upon the young Shakespeare reputation and prestige. The actual date of the first production cannot now be verified; it might have been first performed under the title of tittus & vespacia before being revised three or four years later. It had music and spectacle. It required a large cast for the various ritual and processional scenes. It was so scenically interesting, in fact, that it inspired the first known drawing of a Shakespearian production; this was executed by Henry Peacham, the author of The Complete Gentleman, but it is not at all clear whether it is a record of a stage performance or of some idealised reconstruction. The action and the attitudes, however, can be taken as authentic of Elizabethan acting.
It is a curious fact that the earliest productions of writers and dramatists contain the seeds of their future works, as if in embryo, so that in Titus Andronicus we can see the first stirrings of Caliban and Coriolanus, Macbeth and Lear, all as it were vying for attention. On more than one occasion Shakespeare adverts to the “prophetic soul.” Great writers are much more likely to be inspired by their unknown future than by their known and constricted past. Expectation, rather than experience, fuelled his genius.
And then, as seems to have been his custom, he revised the play in later years for different actors or for different productions. He even added an entire scene that has very little relation to the plot but does bear upon the revelation of character. It seems likely that he had a ready and instinctive grasp of stagecraft before he turned his attention to expression. Unlike his contemporaries he was already possessed by a firm idea of characters in action and of characters in response to action. When they emerged from his pen they were already engaged in the game.
So from a possible early version of Hamlet to Titus Andronicus we have some six or seven plays which might have been composed by the young Shakespeare in the first two years after his arrival in London—among them The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The Taming of a Shrew, Edmund Ironside and The Troublesome Raigne of King John. It has been objected in the past that he could not possibly have written so many plays in so short a space of time—at any reckoning, some three or four a year. But that is completely to misapprehend the conditions of the sixteenth-century theatre. He was not a modern dramatist. The wonder is that he did not write more. Indeed other plays, or parts of plays, have been ascribed to him. Plays were composed,performed and discarded at an astonishingly rapid rate—with seven or eight new plays performed by each of the companies in any one season. Contemporaries like Robert Greene produced them on demand, and were lucky if their works had a dramatic life of a month or a week. They were not considered to be literature in any sense. In addition Shakespeare wished to make his name, and fortune, in the theatre. Comparisons with his later rate of production are not appropriate. He wrote quickly, and furiously, filled with the first momentum of his genius.
There is a portrait of a young man known as the Grafton Portrait, from its ownership by the Duke of Grafton in the 1700s. In this picture the age of the sitter is given as twenty-four, and the date of composition is 1588. On the back has been written “W + S.” Its association with Shakespeare might be easily dismissed as wishful thinking, except that the young man bears a striking resemblance to the engraving of the older Shakespeare in the First Folio. The mouth and jaw are the same, as are the ridge of the nose and the almond-shaped eyes. The whole set of the expression is the same. This young man is dark-haired, slim and good-looking (in no way precluding the image of the somewhat stout and bald gentleman of later years); he is dressed in fashionable doublet and collar, but his expression is alert if also somewhat pensive. He is one who could, if necessary, take on the romantic lead. It has been suggested that the young Shakespeare, at the age of twenty-four in 1588, could not possibly have afforded such fashionable and expensive clothing. And how could he or his father have paid the portraitist? But if he were already a successful dramatist, what then? It is in any case a glorious supposition.