Titus Andronicus on the Stage in 1595

Summary

In The Library for March 1925 Sir Edmund Chambers drew the attention of scholars, virtually for the first time, to the presence among the manuscripts in the library of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat (Harley Papers, vol. 1, f. 159 v.) of a contemporary drawing illustrating an incident in the opening scene of Titus Andronicus. The drawing in question was originally on p. 1 of a folded paper giving two leaves. Beneath it stand forty lines of text in manuscript, with what appears to be a dated signature near the foot of the left-hand margin; and on p. 4 is found an endorsement “Henrye Peachams Hande 1595”. Sir Edmund published a collotype facsimile of the whole recto of the first leaf in The Library, together with a descriptive note entitled “The First Illustration to ‘Shakespeare’”. But he reproduced the drawing without the text in his William Shakespeare (1930), and again when he reprinted The Library article in his Shakespearean Gleanings (1944). This was somewhat unfortunate, inasmuch as the document is of first-class importance, The Library is a specialist journal not so well known as it should be to the ordinary student of Shakespeare, and the drawing presents several puzzling features which can be solved only in relation to the text that accompanies it. Some of these features have been noted by Sir Edmund, and others were first observed by the late J. Quincy Adams, in a valuable note on the document towards the end of his Introduction to a facsimile of the only extant copy of the First Quarto of Titus Andronicus, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Neither scholar has, however, been able to decide what is the exact incident the drawing attempts to depict, or to determine its date.