The publication of the text
I’d like to start these Footnotes with a few points that I gleaned in my research about the authorship and original publication of the text of the play. Although there are some minor variations between scholars on the exact dates, the best guess is that Titus Andronicus was probably written in late 1593, and first performed in January 1594 at the Rose theatre. The theatres had been closed for much of the previous eighteen months because of the plague, and sadly they were shut down again in February 1594, Titus having had only a few performances. The first edition of the text of the play was published in a Quarto edition remarkably soon after the play was first performed.  It may have been published so quickly because the theatre having been closed, the producers thought that they might earn some remuneration at least from selling the rights to publish it. The imperative for the theatre to find some income reminds me of the plight facing theatres in our own time, when they were closed because of our 21st century plague.

The modern Arden edition of the play suggests that the first Quarto was printed from Shakespeare’s manuscript, so that it was unusually close to the play as Shakespeare wrote it and as it was performed. First manuscripts are known by the wonderfully evocative term as “foul papers”, because they contain blottings and corrections, as well as inconsistencies in speech prefixes and short cuts in stage directions, for example.

It is a mark of the popularity of the play at the time that it was published singly in three Quarto editions within Shakespeare’s lifetime, before being included in the collection of the famous First Folio after his death in 1623. Inevitably all these versions differ in some ways – as the Arden edition says diplomatically, each edition “made some corrections and introduced some new errors”, so perhaps there is no definitive version.

Interestingly, the killing of the fly scene appears for the first time in the First Folio. It is not in any of the first three quartos. So, was it not part of the play as performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime? Perhaps he did not even write it.

As we touched on in the podcast, it is now generally accepted based on close textual analysis, that parts of the play we now have were written by George Peele, although Shakespearean critic Stanley Wells reminds us that “there is no documentary evidence that Peele ever collaborated with anyone.” The first published version of the text of the play gives us no clues about its authorship. As was common practice at the time, the title page of the first Quarto text advertises the playing companies who had performed the play, not who actually wrote it.

Wells also points out more generally in his book about Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Shakespeare & Co, that the Elizabethan London theatre world was a small one, where demand for new plays was constant, and producers and playwrights not only competed with each other, but also collaborated with, and even copied, each other. As we noted in the podcast, Shakespeare was specifically inspired in writing Titus Andronicus by the success of Thomas Kyd’s earlier play The Spanish Tragedy, even copying elements of its plot.

Whatever the inspirations or contingencies of its authorship, it is safe to define Titus Andronicus as Shakespeare’s first tragedy. It was followed in 1594 by Richard III, and Jonathan Bate says in his introduction to the Arden third-series text, that Titus Andronicus “emerges as the pivotal play in Shakespeare’s early career. With Titus he cut his teeth both structurally and rhetorically, in the writing of tragedy; he was then able to go back to English history, but with a new tragic intensity…It paves the way for his later achievements in tragedy.” This is a point that Max also made during our conversation: that in Titus we can see fore-shadowing of later plays, including particularly Hamlet and King Lear, where political succession, revenge and madness are all elaborated upon.

Roman mosaic in the Capitoline museum