Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus? (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... Chapter V. THE PROBLEM INDUCTIVELY CONSIDERED The alleged external and internal evidences for the Shakespearean authorship of Titus having thus alike collapsed on examination, it behoves us, not to give judgment by default, but to make an independent survey of the whole case in order to have a right to a final judgment. In forming our opinion it is well to face at the outset the main issue. By common consent Titus is the most horrible play in the whole Elizabethan drama. Besides a string of assassinations, it includes a human sacrifice; the slaying of a son by his father; a brutish rape committed by two princes with the consent of their mother; the cutting-out of the tongue and lopping-off of the hands of the victim, who appears on the stage immediately with her violators; the cutting off, by a trick, of one hand of her father, the central character; who in turn, having caused the violators to be bound and gagged, cuts their throats (their victim holding with her arms the basin for their blood); whereafter their heads are baked by him and his daughter in pies, of which their guilty mother partakes. To complete the odious circle, the ravished heroine had beforehand found the other woman, the Empress of Rome, in the company of a Moor, and had commented on the situation in the language of the pot-house; whence the manner of the revenge. If this play be the first work of Shakespeare, we are shut up to the conclusion that he who of all the dramatists of his age developed the most exquisite taste, began by exhibiting the very worst; that he who most profoundly spiritualised tragedy began by brutalising it beyond the utmost measure of his competitors. Is it probable? I. Preliminary Scientific Tests. Certainly the a priori improbability...