Re-editing Non-Shakespeare for the Modern Reader: The Murder of Mutius in<i>Titus Andronicus</i>

Loughnane, Rory

doi:10.1093/res/hgw078

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For the former, Shakespeare most likely took over an incomplete script by George Peele, and the two men probably never worked together collaboratively. 50 Peele is one of the aggrieved noted in Groats-worth. It is plausible to imagine that Shakespeare never gave Peele due credit for his share, whether financially or otherwise.…”

Section: The Idea Of Early Shakespearementioning

confidence: 99%

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This is an essay about early Shakespeare and loss. 1 It attempts to put some kind of order on a span of several years when Shakespeare is first writing plays, or parts of plays, in a commercial environment with fellow professionals. It discusses a period of time, the mid to late 1580s and early 1590s, for which much information about Shakespeare and other working dramatists is lost. It asks, how do you write about that kind of loss? And, what sort of data-sets do you hold up to the blank spaces of those years, knowing only the likelihood of Shakespeare's activity, to enable plausible deductions about his early working life? In what follows, I consider how the early canon has been categorized and written about, situate the documentary evidence for Shakespeare's first forays into writing in the context of surviving evidence about theatrical activity in the 1580s, contextualize Shakespeare's overall career in the light of those of his peers, and, finally, consider some of the defining features of Shakespeare's earliest writings. Shakespeare and JuveniliaThese IUVENILIA (or these youth-pastimes,) Set forth in homely and vnpolish't Rhimes, Let none despise: For, whatsoere they seeme They haue their fate, their vse, & esteeme. 2George Wither (1588-1667) is the first recorded English author to use 'juvenilia' as a title description for writings completed while still young. 3 Wither made his literary debut in 1612, at the age of twenty-four, composing an extravagant set of elegiac writings upon the death of Prince Henry. 4 By the time Wither published his Juvenilia (1622), he was in his midthirties. In the address to the reader, quoted above, Wither describes these writings or 'youth-pastimes' as sometimes 'childish' and declares them the product of 'what Nature could impart,/ E're he had Time, or Meanes, to

show abstract

Section: The Idea Of Early Shakespearementioning

confidence: 99%

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Building upon this realisation, most scholars now accept that Shakespeare's older contemporary George Peele was responsible for the writing of up to two of the play's scenes: Scene 1 (usually divided into 1.1 and 2.1 following the text presented in the First Folio (hereafter F1) of 1623), and possibly also Scene 6/4.1 (Vickers, 2002: 148-243). As with so much in the field of stylometric analysis, of course, debate continues regarding the exact details of the play's collaborative identity, including recent arguments that Shakespeare (rather than Peele) may actually have been responsible for the writing of 4.1 (Weber, 2014;Pruitt, 2017), and that Shakespeare's involvement in the play may have come about by him completing a tragedy which was left unfinished by Peele, an idea which may be signalled by the possibility that 1.1 shows some signs of Shakespearean revision (Loughnane, 2017). Recent scholarship, however, has served to further complicate the question of the play's authorship and textual integrity, particularly regarding 3.2.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

'Such Violent Hands'

Green

2020

EIRJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For many, 'Titus Andronicus' exemplifies the extreme visual horror which characterises the subgenre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Long recognised as a collaboration between William Shakespeare and GeorgePeele, the play's notorious denouement -in which a Gothic queen is tricked into eating her slaughtered sons -has often been interpreted as a satire upon the revenge genre itself. Yet the nature of the play has recently been complicated by the claim that an additional banquet scene, only present in the 1623 Folio, may be a later addition written by a third dramatist, probably Thomas Middleton, and incorporated into the play sometime after 1616. This article will consider the implications of this probability further. It will explore how the author was not simply adding new material to 'Titus Andronicus' in order to provide a new selling point for a later revival of the work, but was constructing a new sequence designed to mirror and complement the already infamous cannibalistic conclusion of the original text. Understanding this scene as a later addition, we can now better understand how this additional scene serves as an integral turning point in the drama's narrative, and is far less 'disposable' than previous critics have been equipped to realise.

show abstract

Re-editing Non-Shakespeare for the Modern Reader: The Murder of Mutius inTitus Andronicus

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594

'Such Violent Hands'

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About