II. i. 126. house of Fame. An obvious allusion to Chaucer's Hous of Fame, III. 291–300. A still earlier version, of course, is that of Vergil; cf. Æneid, IV. 183 ff.
II. i. 135. Per Styga, etc. The poet is apparently quoting from memory a line from Seneca, with whose tragedies he was undoubtedly familiar. In this connection, cf. Seneca's Hippolytus, 1180:
'Per Styga, per amnes igneos amens sequar,'
and Hercules Furens, 90, 91:
'Iam Styga et manes feros
Fugisse credis?'
II. ii. 1. the morn is bright and grey. Much pedantic discussion has taken place as to the precise meaning of the term grey, which Shakespeare uses constantly in describing the morning sky. But from the context here and elsewhere, there seems no reason for thinking that it means anything but bright, and that in the expression in our text, as in the other cases, it is not synonymous with the word bright. Cf. Much Ado About Nothing, V. iii. 25 ff.:
'the gentle day . . .
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of grey.'
By the same token, the grey-ey'd morn of Romeo and Juliet, II. iii. 1, is the bright-eyed morn.
II. ii. 3. Uncouple here. Loose the hounds. This passage with its reference to hunting and the joy of being in the open is strikingly suggestive of the descriptions of the hunt in Venus and Adonis. The latter was printed in 1593, one year before the publication of Titus Andronicus, and a date not so far removed from Shakespeare's own hunting days in Warwickshire. Cf. below, II. iii. 17–19.
II. ii. 9. I have been troubled. There is nothing more suggestive of the Shakespearean authorship of
