page_title: Titus Andronicus
section_title: Date
hierarchical_section_title: Titus Andronicus / Date and text / Date
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare, published 1594 (darkness of image accurately reflects the color of the artifact)
context_page_description: Titus Andronicus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593, probably in collaboration with George Peele. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were extremely popular with audiences throughout the 16th century.
  The play is set during the latter days of the Roman Empire and tells the fictional story of Titus, a general in the Roman army, who is engaged in a cycle of revenge with Tamora, Queen of the Goths. It is Shakespeare's bloodiest and most violent work. It has traditionally been one of his least respected plays. Though extremely popular in its day, it had fallen out of favor by the later 17th century. The Victorian era disapproved of it largely because of what was regarded as its distasteful graphic violence. However, beginning around the middle of the 20th century, its reputation began to improve.
context_section_description: The earliest known record of Titus Andronicus is found in Philip Henslowe's diary on 24 January 1594, where Henslowe recorded a performance by Sussex's Men of "Titus & ondronicus", probably at The Rose. Henslowe marked the play as "ne", which most critics take to mean "new". There were subsequent performances on 29 January and 6 February. Also on 6 February, the printer John Danter entered into the Stationers' Register "A booke intitled a Noble Roman Historye of Tytus Andronicus". Later in 1594, Danter published the play in quarto under the title The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus (referred to by scholars as Q1) for the booksellers Edward White and Thomas Millington, making it the first of Shakespeare's plays to be printed. This evidence establishes that the latest possible date of composition is late 1593.
  There is evidence, however, that the play may have been written some years earlier than this. Perhaps the most famous such evidence relates to a comment made in 1614 by Ben Jonson in Bartholomew Fair. In the preface, Jonson wrote "He that will swear, Jeronimo or Andronicus are the best plays, yet shall pass unexcepted at, here, as a man whose judgement shows it is constant, and hath stood still these five and twenty, or thirty years." The success and popularity of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, to which Jonson alludes, is attested by many contemporary documents, so by placing Titus alongside it, Jonson is saying that Titus too must have been extremely popular in its day, but by 1614, both plays had come to be seen as old fashioned. If Jonson is taken literally, for the play to have been between 25 and 30 years old in 1614, it must have been written between 1584 and 1589, a theory which not all scholars reject out of hand. For example, in his 1953 edition of the play for the Arden Shakespeare 2nd Series, J.C. Maxwell argues for a date of late 1589. Similarly, E.A.J. Honigmann, in his 'early start' theory of 1982, suggests that Shakespeare wrote the play several years before coming to London c. 1590, and that Titus was actually his first play, written c. 1586. In his Cambridge Shakespeare edition of 1994 and again in 2006, Alan Hughes makes a similar argument, believing the play was written very early in Shakespeare's career, before he came to London, possibly c. 1588.
  However, the majority of scholars tend to favour a post-1590 date, and one of the primary arguments for this is that the title page of Q1 assigns the play to three different playing companies; Derby's Men, Pembroke's Men and Sussex's Men ("As it was Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Suſſex their Seruants"). This is highly unusual in copies of Elizabethan plays, which usually refer to one company only, if any. If the order of the listing is chronological, as Eugene M. Waith and Jacques Berthoud, for example, believe it is, it means that Sussex's Men were the last to perform the play, suggesting it had been on stage quite some time prior to 24 January 1594. Waith hypothesises that the play originally belonged to Derby's Men, but after the closure of the London theatres on 23 June 1592 due to an outbreak of plague, Derby's Men sold the play to Pembroke's Men, who were going on a regional tour to Bath and Ludlow. The tour was a financial failure, and the company returned to London on 28 September, financially ruined. At that point, they sold the play to Sussex's Men, who would go on to perform it on 24 January 1594 at The Rose. If one accepts this theory, it suggests a date of composition as some time in early to mid-1592. However, Jonathan Bate and Alan Hughes have argued that there is no evidence that the listing is chronological, and no precedent on other title pages for making that assumption. Additionally, a later edition of the play gives a different order of acting companies – Pembroke's Men, Derby's Men, Sussex' Men and Lord Chamberlain's Men, suggesting the order is random and cannot be used to help date the play.
  As such, even amongst scholars who favour a post-1590 date, 15
caption: Title page of the first quarto (1594)
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