Antony’s Ring: remediating Ancient Rhetoric on the Elizabethan Stage

From Identity, Otherness, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome, by Maria Del Sapio Garbero

The year the Globe was inaugurated, 1599, when anxiety for Queen Elizabeth’s impending death and uncertainty about her succession were spreading through the population of London, W. Shakespeare looked to ancient history for inspiration, choosing to put on stage an exemplary crissi from the past: the end of the Roman republic.
The contradictory relationship between Elizabethan culture and ancient Rome is epitomized (riassunto) in Shakespeare’s controversial way of presenting Caesar’s character: his heroic status, in fact, comes to be deeply questioned in the play that bears (porta) his name.
Caesar male virtus having already been turned into feminine weakness. But if the manly, glorious republican past is “shamed” by a debased feminized present who will be able to restore it, reviving its greatness and prestige? The question affects people both on and off stage: it is the core (nocciolo, essenza) of the narrative drive and it is the implicit query (domanda, riserva) of the Elizabeth audience.
Shakespeare not only finds a parallel to the historical situation of England, a kingdom whose boundaries (confini) were fast expanding throughout the globe, but brings to the fore the search for both new models of political leaders and new forms of public persuasion in an enlarging communication circuit.
The crucial conflict between Brutus and Antony is therefore seen as the enactment of a complex relationship of incorporation and distancing played between an older, authoritativeness, appealing both to the ear and the eye (theatre).
The fact (Caesar’s murder) can be questioned but it cannot be objectively and finally interpreted.
Antony dramatically performs his grief for Caesar’s death, arguing that he is no orator. Thus negating his masterful command of rhetoric, he erases the medium he is using.
Brutus and Antony speaks from the “pulpit” in the “market-place”. (Antony asks the consprators’ permission to produce Caesar’s body to the market-place, as becomes a friend, speak in the order of his funeral”). We can infer (dedurre) that in the performance at the Globe, the pulpit may have been set in the gallery, that multi-purpose space above the stage used sometimes by musicians, sometimes by spectators and often by the actors.
Brutus speech is like a syllogism.
Antony turns each man in the market-place into an eyewitness (testimone oculare) for his cause. Antony makes his audience believe him for what they saw with their own eyes. “tis certain he was not ambitious” is an undeniable sign that truth can no longer be granted

Pagliaro's project, Shakespeare's nel teatro Globe di Roma

Rome’s Wooden “O”, from Maria Del Sapio Garbero Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome

In the post-war years, Shakespeare and his opus became a fixed part of modern Italian culture.
There is a reciprocal long-standing tradition that also links Shakespeare to Italian culture. It started in the eighteenth century when the first complete translation of the Bard’s works began to appear.
Pagliaro’s project: by flanking (accostando) Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra with Titus Andronicus, Pagliaro’ s project gave Titus Andronicus comparable stature as a Roman play, no as a revenge play.
The project took on the structure of a tryptich, each segment constituting its own evening-long event, each bringing centre-stage a particular theme reflected in its title: 1 The lacerated Cloak (J.Caesar), 2 The Egyptian puppet (Antony and Cleopatra), 3 The performance of Madness (T.Andronicus)
1) It resolves around concepts of Roman identity that are defined here in terms of “Liberty” and “Freedom”. The discourses of the conspirators among themselves and exchanged with Mark Antony and then those of Brutus and Mark Antony delivered in the Forum all address the question, “What does it mean to be a Roman?”
2) It shifts (trasferisce) the historical, political and geographic landscape of the question of Roman identity, as it gives prominence to the substance of Empire. Expansionism, challenge self-identity in the face of cultural otherness. Can a Roman maintain his identity abroad?
The Egyptian queen must in the end defend herself from the conqueror who wants to violate her cultural, political and gender identity.
3) Titus Andronicus’s others are a far cry from Antony and Cleopatra’s civilized Egyptians. Here Romanness is suffering a severe identity crisis, much more severe that the one registered in Caesar’s Rome.
Who is responsible for the utter falling apart of dialogue, of cross-cultural exchange?

1) Caesar’s assassination was mimed on a dimly lit stage (palcoscenico appena illuminato). The dominant signifier of the event was the music which rose in an anguishing crescendo.
2) Antony and his wound were figured onstage metonymically by his bloodied sword being taken by his friend.
3) The Titus episode opens with the verbal determining of the ritual murder of Tamora’s son. And these wounds (ferite) continue to haunt (tormentare) the stage in the blood red drapes that completed some of the costumes in each of the episodes.

Leggi anche gli appunti su Titus Andronicus, edizione di Jonathan Bate, qui

Acting the Roman: Coriolanus

From Identity, Otherness, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome, by Maria Del Sapio Garbero

Rome was an Elizabethan obsession. The classical Rome was split (lacerato) into two Romes, republican and imperial Rome. English humanists avidly (avidamente) studied and translated the classical historians of Rome, Suetonius, Tacitus, Livius or Plutarch.
Elizabethan England in particular came to consider itself as a second Roman Empire and its capital London is the “new Rome”.
Moral philosophers recommended Roman republicanism and Stoicism as norms for civic discipline and responsibility, patriotic pride.
Coriolanus is the most Roman of Shalespeare’sRoman plays. Shakespare in this play preserve Roman manners and customs and allusions.
Coriolanus is the creature of his mother. It was she who had instilled in him from earliest childhood the masculinist Roman codes of civic honour. She taught him to exorcise all unmanly, effeminate motions and emotions.
There lurks a fatal double-bind in the Coriolanus complex: on the one hand, this kind of grooming or identity formation makes sure that Coriolanus remains “the perennial mama’s boy”, incapable of liberating himself from the umbilical cord and achieving an adult autonomy of character; on the other, it is precisely autonomy of character that is at the centre of the code of romanitas instilled by his mother (virtus, pietas, constantia, fortitudo).
In Ancient Rome, one cannot not perform. The world in which its characters move is primarily a political, a public world focused on public spaces, the market-place, the Capitol, the battle field or theatre of war, and their mode of speaking is primarily the rhetoric of public address. Patricians constantly act in front of, and to, and for, an audience.
His self is primarily a public self, a self enacted in public, constantly aware of the image it is projecting. One has to act the Roman.
Coriolanus, as a man, his masculine control over his desires and emotions. As a politician, hiding his personal interests under a fine, discreetly calibrated show of disinterested virtus and constant service to Rome.
Only at moments of crisis, when Coriolanus’ internalized scripts clash with each other, he demonstrates an awareness (consapevolezza) of acting and articulates this awareness in metatheatrical metaphors. At such moments he appears as a man playing a part.
“Like a dull actor”
Volumnia performs the role of Roman matron in language and gesture to perfection, narcissistically identifying with Rome’s tutelary goddess Juno.
Coriolanus needs constant briefing in his performance, by Menenius, by Cominius and above all by his mother. She tries to make him aware of how over-acting can spoil a performance “ You might have been enough the man you are with striving less to be so”
Coriolanus, finally, feels he is an actor without his script: “like a dull actor now I have forgot my part and Ial out even to a full disgrace”
Shakespeare took Coriolanus for a historical character, fascinated like them by the paradox of the patriot turned traitor for his very patriotism and by the concomitant Ciceronean paradox of summum ius being summa iuria or summa virtus summum vitium.

Leggi anche Shakespeare's Romulun and Remo, here

Shakespeare's Romulus and Remo

From Identity, Otherness, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome, by Maria Del Sapio Garbero

(Coriolanus, 4.4.12-22)
Coriolanus tells us that he is going to join with Aufidius to make war upon his city because sometimes friends become enemies and sometimes enemies become friends, both for entirely trivial reasons. Why does he insist on the triviality of these quarrels?
Although Shakespeare never mentions the legendary founders of Rome by name, their story becomes decisive in the late Roman plays.
There are no literary brothers in Antony and Cleopatra or Coriolanus, but male rivalry here repeatedly takes on the metaphorical coloration of fratricide.
Shakespeare probably knew the legend of the twins. We know he consulted Ovid’s Fasti for “ The rape of Lucrece” and Ovid talks about Romolus and Remo.
Early on in the Aeneid, Jove reassures Venus that “ Ilia, a royal princess, shall bear to Mars her twin offspring. The Romulus, proud in the tawny hide of the she-wolf, his nurse, shall take up the line and found the walls of Mars and call the people Romans after his own name”.
Antony and Cleopatra is full of allusions to the Aeneid.
Plutarch repeats several versions of the twins’story in his life of Romulus, including Livy’s speculation that perhaps the story of the she-wolf arose from the loose morals of the woman who eventually raised Romulus.
Plutarch’s story ends as Livy’s ends, with suspect auguries and deadly rivalry among the brothers: “Romulus having nowe buried his brother… beganne then to build and laye the foundation of his cittie”
It is by now a commonplace to note that Shakespeare’s Roman plays are centrally concerned with the construction of masculinity. But as the author argued elsewhere (altrove), masculinity in Shakespeare is always constructed against the presence of the female and therefore (perciò, quindi) is compromised by too-close proximity to the figure of the mother, who can infect her son with her own femaleness (femminilità). The Romulus and Remus legend may have constituted one fantasy-solution to the problem of maternal origin for the Romans themselves.
Perhaps the twins are more fortunate because they are thus freed (liberati) from maternal contamination. Violently separated from their mother, Rome’s founding figures are conveniently nursed by a “mother” who is far from femininity.
Coriolanus, Volumnia: Shakespeare combines two different maternal elements of the Romulus and Remus legend in her, she is both the original exiler of her son and his wolvish nurturer (allevatrice con tratti da lupo).
We can see the elements of that Romulan legacy (eredità) in earlier Roman plays: in Julius Caesar’s entirely justified worry about the lean and hungry Cassius and especially in Octavius Caesar’s long encomium of Antony’s Roman hunger as the defining virtue of his Roman soldiership. Rivalry (rivalità) between Octavius and Antony like the famous twins.
Shakespare revises at least two founding legends of Rome in his British romance.
Cymbeline divides into two distinct plots: the first plot, in which a very Italianate Iachimo makes a wager (scommessa) with Posthumus about the chastity of his wife Imogen, deliberately returns to the material of “The Rape of Lucrece”. Like Tarquin, Iachimo praises (elogia) her husband to his victim in order to gain (ottenere) her trust. Posthumus’s capacity to repel (respingere) this new Tarquin simultaneously foregrounds Britain’s Trojan ancestry and goes Rome one better as it revises the origin story of republican Rome. This is an accommodation of the play’s two conflicting imperatives: the imperative to portray Britain as inviolable and intact (like Imogen, at the end of the play. She calls herself Fidele) and the imperative to portray (rappresentare) the translation of Roman virtue and Roman Empire into Britain.
Guiderius and Aviragus are forcibly (con la forza) removed from their lineare and the civilized centre of power. They are fed in this wilderness by a man who is twice identified as their nurse. Separated both from female influence and from the savage nursery of the she-wolf, the boys retain their heroic masculinity, but they are free of the fratricidal imperative that governs brotherly relations in Rome.
The British Posthumus who defeats the Traquinized Iachimo enacts (rappresenta) the beginning of the translation imperii from Rome to Britain.

, Identity, Otherness, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome: introduction

Maria Del Sapio Garbero , Identity, Otherness (essenza dell’Altro), and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome

Introduction

The transference of the Roman imperium to the western territories of Britain is sanctioned by the favour of the Roman gods in the last lines of Cymbeline, Shakespeare’s last Roman play; a favour expressed by the flight of birds. The transference is achieved through sweat and blood, resulting in a hard-won honourable peace with Rome, but it is licensed by vision and divination.
Transference as it is handled in Cymbeline works overtly as both an event and a signifying practice, a cultural field of contentious metaphorical signification.
We are presented here with “the problem of the ambivalence of cultural authorithy: the attempt to dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in the moment of differentiation”.
Shakespeare must have been aware that the mythmaking flight of birds was decisive in the story of the foundation of Rome, the fratricidal legend of Romulus and Remus.
Latin source: Ovid’s Fasti.
I would like to put forward that in conceiving his prophetic finale of for Cymbeline, Shakespeare may have had precisely Ovid’s Fasti in mind, where the augural vision of birds intervenes with a similar function to underline a sense of expectancy (aspettativa) and undecidability before decreeing Romulus’ control of the city.
Significantly, divination is eventually relocated to the court of Britain.
The ending of Cymbeline is framed by images of transference of cultural authority.
Indeed, shortly before the closure of the play, Philarmonus is called to interpret the meaning of Jupiter’s oracle which Postumus Leonatus, on his awakening from the torpor induced by his fierce patriotic pugnacity against the Roman legions at Milford Haven, has found on a tablet on his bosom.
Cymbeline allows us to foreground the combative-emulative intention in respect to “the Roman host” which we can see at work in the rest of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Cymbeline also clearly evokes the related complex gamut (gamma) of ideological concerns which were at stake in the confrontation with Rome in Tudor and Jacobean England.
Rome is also seen as serving to prospect an altogether revolutionary concept of space, a post-Copernican infinite universe – as in Antony and Cleopatra – where it permeates the worldwide imperial geography of the play.
I think the year of production for Cymbeline may be particularly relevant in this context, for in the same year, 1611, Speed’s atlas of “Great Britaine” was issued. And what we find on Speed’s opening map of Britain and Ireland are the images of two coins: Cymbeline and the female figure of Britannia Imperatrix sitting on a globe. Cymbeline, the king who opposed but helps made peace with Augustus, that he enjoyed high currency in Jacobean times as the forefather of a proud and pacified “Great Britain”.
In the theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine , the frontispiece is designed as an Augustan triumphal arch, with two levels of columns and niches (nicchie) for statuary.
Theatre and cartography are linked. The world is like a stage.
Rome was appropriated as both a script for the triumphs of a nascent empire and a setting for problematically staging questions of ancestry (lignaggio), influence, identity and location.

Titus Andronicus, edizione di Jonathan Bate

Appunti sul dramma di “Titus Andronicus” di William Shakespeare, edizione di Jonathan Bate, the Arden Shakespeare

Titus Andronicus was hugely successful in its own time but it has been reviled by critics and revived infrequently.
Several eighteenth-century editors denied (negarono) that Shakespeare wrote the “Titus Andornicus”; there has been a persistent argument that he was merely touching up someone else’s play or that it was a patched-together collaborative effort; the discovery of an eighteenth-century chapbook narrating the story allowed much of the violence do be palmed off (affibbiato) on Shakespeare’s “source”.
Jonathan Bate believe that Titus is an important play and a living one, performed for the first time as a showpiece in January 1594.

Space and structure
The use of opposite doors dramatizes the brothers’opposition in terms of the stage space.
When Titus “enter” in the story, his first task is to give a proper burial to his sons who have died in combat, “They open the tomb” and the nether world is invoked for the first time. Once buried, the dead sons would be free to cross the Styx into the underworld. The city prided itself on not being barbaric: the world civilized comes from civilis, which means “of citizens, of the city” and Rome was the city.
Into Roman acts there is, as Tamora says, a “cruel, irreligious piety”.
Titus’sons enter with their swords bloody from the sacrifice of Alarbus, their dead brothers are laid to rest and then their sister comes on. Her entrance is perfectly timed to draw her into the spiral of retribution. It also serves to link the domestic political plot with the opposition between Titus and Tamora. The opposite doors come into play again when Saturninus and the Goths take off for the upper stage just as the Andronicus boys help Bassianus bear Lavinia away through the other door.
Hunting for sport is “civilized” society’s way of getting back in touch with the wild.
The forest is a place where desire can be acted out: Tamora comes to make love to Aaron, Chiron and Demetrius rape Lavinia.
The “mouth” of the pit (fossa) becomes crucial when we realize that Lavinia is not only being raped but also having her tongue cut out; throughout the play, the action turns on mouths that speak, mouths that abuse and are abused, mouths that devour (divorano).
The first reaction to the rape is a series of jokes: Chiron and Demetrius become a sick comedy team, offering feed line and punch line.
Titus’ first words to his mutilate daughter are “what accursed hand/hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?”
Titus certainly gets the last laugh against his enemies. There is a kind of comic satisfaction in the gagging of Chiron and Demetrius and the slitting of their throats: it answers exactly to their gagging of lavinia and cutting of her tongue.

Titus and Coriolanus:
As Coriolanus, Titus’ son, the successful Roman warrior, is sent into exile, where he joins up with his former enemies and then marches with them against the city which has cast him out.
Titus Andronicus differs from Coriolanus in that there is no turning back outside the city gates.
Andronicus refused the crown at the beginning of the play an Andronicus takes it at the end.
The troubles of the Andronici began with the question of proper burial rites and the sacrifice of Alarbus; the play ends with the living burial of Aaron and the refusal of proper burial rites for Tamora.

The themes
The most urgent question facing England in 1590s was the succession to the unmarried and childless Elizabeth, and in particular the preservation of the Protestant nation against the possibility of another counter-Reformation.
The emperor Saturninus is very worried about the popular will slipping away from him. That suggests that Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy may be shot through with an unexpected vein of republicanism.
Revenge
The gods are frequently invoked but never reply.
The audience that shares the protagonist’s troubled inquiries as to whether they should take vengeance into their own hands or leave it to God is in a position to reflect upon the insufficiencies and inequalities of the law.
In Shakespeare, important people have their revenge: Hamlet is a prince, Titus is a champion.
The play vividly dramatizes Justice’s absence when Titus shoots arrows into the air to try to bring Astraea down.
Passionating grief
Titus resorts (fa ricorso a) to laughter, ritual or self-conscious performance when his ability to express emotion in language is stretched to breaking point.
Renaissance man is rhetorical man, whose repertoire of formal linguistic structures and accompanying physical gestures is a way of ordering the chaos of experience.
When language no longer works for Titus, he takes to literalizing metaphor: instead of crying to the elements and the gods, he writes his message down on arrows and shoots them in the air; instead of talking about “consuming sorrow”, he makes Tamora consume her own children.

Chapbook: (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) Chapbook is a generic term to cover a particular genre of pocket-sized booklet, popular from the sixteenth through to the later part of the nineteenth century. No exact definition can be applied.

Read the Synopsis of Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus ( Wikipedia )

Synopsis

The Emperor of Rome has died and his sons Saturninus and Bassianus are squabbling over (Bisticciando su) who will succeed him. The Tribune of the People, Marcus Andronicus, announces that the people's choice for new emperor is his brother, Titus Andronicus, a Roman general newly returned from ten years' campaigning against the empire's foes (Nemici), the Goths. Titus enters Rome to much fanfare, bearing (conducendo) with him Tamora, Queen of the Goths, her sons, and Aaron the Moor. Titus feels a religious duty to sacrifice Tamora’s eldest son, Alarbus, in order to avenge (vendicare) his sons, dead from the war, and allow them to rest in peace. Tamora begs for the life of Alarbus, but Titus refuses her pleas. Tamora secretly plans a horrible revenge for Titus and all of his remaining sons.
Titus Andronicus refuses the throne in favour of the late emperor's eldest son Saturninus, much to Saturninus' delight. The two agree that Saturninus will marry Titus' daughter Lavinia. However, Bassianus was previously betrothed (fidanzato) to the girl. Titus' surviving sons help them escape the marriage. In the fighting, Titus kills his son Mutius. Titus is angry with his sons because in his eyes they are disloyal (sleali) to Rome. The new emperor, Saturninus, marries Tamora instead.
During a hunting party the next day, Tamora's lover, Aaron the Moor, meets Tamora's sons Chiron and Demetrius. The two are arguing over which should take sexual advantage of the newlywed Lavinia. They are easily persuaded by Aaron to ambush ( tendere un’imboscata a) Bassianus and kill him in the presence of Tamora and Lavinia, in order to have their way with her. Lavinia begs Tamora to stop her sons, but Tamora refuses. Chiron and Demetrius throw Bassianus' body in a pit, as Aaron had directed them, then they take Lavinia away and rape her. To keep her from revealing what she has seen and endured, they cut out her tongue and her hands. This mutilation provides a source for black comedy throughout the play.
Aaron brings Titus' sons Martius and Quintus to the scene and frames them for the murder of Bassianus with a forged (falsificata) letter outlining their plan to kill him. Angry, the Emperor arrests them. Marcus then discovers Lavinia and takes her to her father. When she and Titus are reunited, he is overcome with grief. He and his remaining son Lucius have begged for the lives of Martius and Quintus, but the two are found guilty and are marched off to execution. Aaron enters, and falsely tells Titus, Lucius, and Marcus that the emperor will spare (risparmiare) the prisoners if one of the three sacrifices a hand. Each demands the right to do so, but it is Titus who has Aaron cut off his (Titus') hand and take it to the emperor. In return, a messenger brings Titus the heads of his sons and his own severed (tagliata) hand. Desperate for revenge, Titus orders Lucius to flee (abbandonare) Rome and raise an army among their former enemy, the Goths.
Later, Titus' grandson (Lucius' son), who has been helping Titus read to Lavinia, complains that she will not leave his book alone. In the book, she indicates to Titus and Marcus the story of Philomela, in which a similarly mute victim "wrote" the name of her wrongdoer (malfattori). Marcus gives her a stick to hold with her mouth and stumps (moncherini) and she writes the names of her attackers in the dirt. Titus vows revenge. Feigning madness, he ties written prayers for justice to arrows and commands his kinsmen to aim them at the sky. Marcus directs the arrows to land inside the palace of Saturninus, who is enraged by this. He confronts the Andronici and orders the execution of a Clown who had delivered a further supplication from Titus.
Tamora delivers a mixed-race child, and the nurse can tell it must have been fathered by Aaron. Aaron kills the nurse and flees with the baby to save it from the Emperor's inevitable wrath (collera). Later, Lucius, marching on Rome with an army, captures Aaron and threatens to hang the infant. To save the baby, Aaron reveals the entire plot to Lucius, relishing his retelling of every murder, rape, and dismemberment.
Tamora, convinced of Titus' madness, approaches him along with her two sons, dressed as the spirits of Revenge, Murder, and Rape. She tells Titus that she (as a supernatural spirit) will grant him revenge if he will convince Lucius to stop attacking Rome. Titus agrees, sending Marcus to invite Lucius to a feast. "Revenge" (Tamora) offers to invite the Emperor and Tamora, and is about to leave, but Titus insists that "Rape" and "Murder" (Chiron and Demetrius) stay with him. She agrees. When she is gone Titus' servants bind (legano) Chiron and Demetrius, and Titus cuts their throats, while Lavinia holds a basin in her stumps to catch their blood. He plans to cook them into a pie for their mother. This is the same revenge Procne took for the rape of her sister Philomela.
The next day, during the feast at his house, Titus asks Saturninus whether a father should kill his daughter if she has been raped.[1] When the Emperor agrees, Titus then kills Lavinia and tells Saturninus what Tamora's sons had done. When the Emperor asks for Chiron and Demetrius, Titus reveals that they were in the pie Tamora has just been enjoying, and then kills Tamora. Saturninus kills Titus just as Lucius arrives, and Lucius kills Saturninus to avenge his father's death.
Lucius tells his family's story to the people and is proclaimed Emperor. He orders that Saturninus be given a proper burial, that Tamora's body be thrown to the wild beasts, and that Aaron be buried chest-deep and left to die of thirst and starvation. Aaron, however, is unrepentant to the end, proclaiming:
"If one good Deed in all my life I did,I do repent it from my very Soule."

When...

Most scholars date the play to the early 1590s. In his Arden edition, Jonathan Bate proposes that the play was written in late 1593, pointing out that on 24 January 1594 it was apparently listed as a new play in Philip Henslowe's diary. Another school of opinion has doubted the play's newness in 1594, given that the induction of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614) seems to suggest that Titus Andronicus was then about 25 years old, which would date it to ca. 1589.[2] The Norton/Sackville play Gorboduc, originally a play from the 1560's, was published again in 1590. Its many similarities with Titus Andronicus favor an earlier date for the composition of Titus Andronicus because plays were not published unless there was some interest in them, and therefore there may have been a revival of Gorboduc just prior to 1590. Shakespeare may have acted in a performance of Gorboduc just prior to 1590 or read it in or just after 1590.
The play was published in three separate quarto editions prior to the First Folio of 1623, which are referred to as Q1, Q2, and Q3 by Shakespeare scholars. The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 6 February 1594, by the printer John Danter. Danter sold the rights to the booksellers Thomas Millington and Edward White; they issued the first quarto edition (Q1) later that year, with printing done by Danter. The title page is unusual in that it assigns the play to three different companies of actors—Pembroke's Men, Derby's Men, and Sussex's Men. White published Q2 in 1600 (printed by James Roberts), and Q3 in 1611 (printed by Edward Allde). The First Folio text (1623) was printed from Q3 with an additional scene, III, ii.
None of the three quarto editions name the author (as was normal in the publication of playtexts in the early 1590s). However, Francis Meres lists the play as one of Shakespeare's tragedies in a publication of 1598, and the editors of the First Folio included it among his works. Despite this, Shakespeare's full authorship has been doubted. In the introduction to his 1678 adaptation of the play (printed nine years later, in 1687), Edward Ravenscroft states: "I have been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not Originally his, but brought by a private Author to be Acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two Principal Parts or Characters".[4] There are problems with Ravenscroft's statement: the old men "conversant with the Stage" could not have been more than children whenTitus was written, and Ravenscroft may be biased, since he uses the story to justify his alterations of Shakespeare's play. However, the story has been used to bolster arguments that another author was partly responsible.
Although Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, it is hard to say exactly how early it is. The anonymous play A Knack to Know a Knave, acted in 1592, alludes to Titus and the Goths, which clearly indicates Shakespeare's play, since other versions of the Titus story involve Moors, not Goths.
Philip Henslowe's diary records performances of a Titus and Vespasian in 1592–93, and some critics have identified this with Shakespeare's play.[9]
In January and February of 1594, Sussex's Men gave three performances of Titus Andronicus; two more performances followed in June of the same year, at the Newington Butts theatre, by either the Admiral's Men or the Lord Chamberlain's Men. A private performance occurred in 1596 at Sir John Harington's house in Rutland.
In the Restoration, the play was performed in 1678 at Drury Lane, in an adaptation by Edward Ravenscroft. The eighteenth-century actor James Quin considered Aaron, the villain in Titus, one of his favourite roles.
In 2005 the play was staged at Shakespeare's Globe in London.