page_title: Authorship of Titus Andronicus
section_title: Solid evidence
hierarchical_section_title: Authorship of Titus Andronicus / Solid evidence
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: The authorship of Titus Andronicus has been debated since the late 17th century. Titus Andronicus, probably written between 1588 and 1593, appeared in three quarto editions from 1594 to 1601 with no named author. It was first published under William Shakespeare's name in the 1623 First Folio of his plays. However, as with some of his early and late plays, scholars have long surmised that Shakespeare might have collaborated with another playwright. Other plays have also been examined for evidence of co-authorship, but none has been as closely scrutinised or as consistently questioned than Titus. The principal contender for the co-authorship is George Peele.
  The fact that Titus traditionally has the reputation of being Shakespeare's worst play is not unconnected to the in-depth examination of the play's authorship; and in fact many of the scholars who initially attempted to prove he had nothing to do with it did so in an effort to 'save' his reputation because they considered the play to be so badly written.
context_section_description: Very little external evidence is extant regarding the question of authorship. None of the three quarto editions of Titus (1594, 1600 and 1611) name the author, normal practice for Elizabethan plays. Francis Meres lists Titus as one of Shakespeare's tragedies in Palladis Tamia in 1598, and John Heminges and Henry Condell included it in the First Folio in 1623. While this supports Shakespeare's authorship of the play, questions have tended to focus on the perceived lack of quality in the writing, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the play's stylistic similarities to the work of contemporaneous dramatists.
caption: Title page of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus (1594)
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