Titus Andronicus (1926) Yale/Appendix A
APPENDIX A
Sources of the Play
No single and direct source of the story of Titus Andronicus has ever been discovered. It is probable that the play as we have it was based on an older play, but there is no conclusive evidence of the existence of any version, English or foreign, prior to the text that we now have. The plot seems, however, to combine many themes and incidents found in other forms of literature. The story proper is apparently without any historical basis, and is curiously anachronistic in arrangement. A Roman emperor and a tribune are made contemporary; the emperor is engaged, as no Roman emperor ever was, in warring upon the Goths; and the Rome in which the scene is laid is, according to Aaron the Moor, the seat of 'Popish ceremonies.' As for the surname, Andronicus, no Roman emperor ever bore it, although there was a Byzantine emperor, Andronicus Comnenus, of the twelfth century A.D., and it is not without significance that he is represented by Nicetas Choniata as having shot arrows with certain devices attached in the siege of Prusa. It may be worth noting, too, that after the removal of the empire to Byzantium in the fourth century there were wars with the Goths, and thus a remote historical background for some of the incidents of the play may be postulated. Finally, the similarity of the name Tamora to that of Tomyris, the vengeful queen of the Getæ, has been pointed out.
Baildon (Arden ed.) suggests an Oriental origin for the story, in view of its peculiar cruelty and lavish bloodshed, and the presence in it of those two Bashibazouks, Chiron and Demetrius. But if the story came from the Orient, it has undergone many modifications in transit.
The different threads of the plot of Titus Andronicus bear striking resemblance to other well-known themes and legends. The author frequently likens Lavinia's fate to that of Philomela, which Ovid's Metamorphoses had made known to England. The cruelty and villainy of Aaron suggest at once the deeds of Barabas and Ithamore in Marlowe's Jew of Malta. There is, furthermore, in Evans's Old Ballads and in the Roxburghe Ballads, a poem of about 1570 entitled, 'Lamentable Ballad of the Tragical End of a Gallant Lord and of his Beautiful Lady, with the untimely death of their children, wickedly performed by a heathen Blackamore, their servant: The like seldom heard before.' The theme of the 'heathen blackamore' was very popular. Professor Koeppel (in Englische Studien, 16. 370) points out several other versions of it: a Latin version by Pontano, an adaptation by Bandello in the twenty-first novel of his third book, a French paraphrase by Belleforest in the second volume of his Histoires Tragiques. And there are other versions in other languages.
When Titus Andronicus was entered on the Stationers' Register on February 6, 1593–4, there was entered also 'by warrant from Mr. Woodcock, the ballad thereof.' It is now generally agreed that this ballad is the same as that reprinted in Percy's Reliques, entitled Titus Andronicus's Complaint,[1] and that it is not a source of the play but instead is based on the play. It cannot, according to Chappell, be earlier, in its extant form, than 1600.
In connection with the question of the sources of the play, several other facts now enter. Henslowe in his Diary records a play, 'tittus & vespacia' (which he calls elsewhere 'tittus') as having been performed by Strange's men on April 11, 1592, and frequently thereafter. No copy of this play now exists. There is, furthermore, a volume, Englische Comedien und Tragedien, 1620, which comprises the repertory of a group of English comedians acting in Germany in the early seventeenth century, and which contains a play entitled Eine sehr Klägliche Tragœdia von Tito Andronico und der hoffertigen Kayserin.[2] In this play Titus's son is called Vespasianus instead of Lucius. It has been assumed, therefore, in some quarters that Henslowe's 'tittus & vespacia' was the original of the German play and at the same time an earlier version of our English Titus Andronicus.[3] But such assumptions are more or less gratuitous. There may have been an earlier play than our Titus Andronicus on the same subject. But in all probability the 'tittus & vespacia' of Henslowe had nothing to do with the play recorded elsewhere by him as 'titus & ondronicus' (our Titus Andronicus), but dealt instead with the heroic theme of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian, the second of the Flavian emperors, and the hero of later tragedies by Corneille and Racine. The German play is quite certainly a translation, albeit a very free one, of our Titus Andronicus. The fact that Titus's son, Lucius, is given the name Vespasian in the German play can be easily explained, as Mr. R. Crompton Rhodes points out (Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 1924): Lucius is the son of Titus and an emperor of Rome, and the mental association of his name with Vespasian is explicable. The other changes of name in the German play have similarly associative reasons. Aaron the Moor becomes Morion, and Lavinia becomes Andronica.
About a quarter of a century ago there were numerous lengthy and learned discussions as to the existence of earlier versions and editions of Titus Andronicus, and the interrelations of the English, German, and Dutch versions of plays on similar themes. They were occasioned largely by the fact that until 1904 no copy of Titus Andronicus earlier than the Quarto of 1600 was known, and editors and commentators were much exercised to explain the identity of the 'titus & ondronicus' mentioned in Henslowe's Diary under date of January 23, 1594. Fortunately in 1904 a copy of the 1594 Quarto, the first edition of the play, came to light, settling many vexatious questions. It is now generally conceded that this 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus is the play recorded in Henslowe's Diary as 'titus & ondronicus' and that it is also identical with the 'Titus and Andronicus' and 'Tytus Andronicus' of the Stationers' Register.
- ↑ See Appendix F, page 143.
- ↑ Reprinted in Cohn's Shakespeare in Germany, 1865, pp. 156–235.
- ↑ There are extant also a Dutch play, Aran en Titus, by Jan Vos, printed first in 1642, and a. program of a German play acted at Linz in 1699 which agrees substantially with the Dutch play. The connections and relations between these two plays, and the whole question of the relationship of the Shakespearean Titus Andronicus to continental plays on similar themes, is discussed at length by H. de W. Fuller and G. P. Baker in Pub. Mod. Lang. Assn., 16. 1–76, 1901.