INTRODUCTION. AN ESSAY IN LITERARY DETECTION

Summary

Two substantive editions of Titus Andronicus have come down to us. One is a quarto printed in 1594, which passed out of ken between 1691, when Gerald Langbaine mentioned it in his Account of the English Dramatick Poets, and 1904, when a copy of it was discovered in Sweden at the house of a post-office clerk, and was purchased for ℒ2000 by the American millionaire H. C. Folger, in whose Shakespeare Library at Washington it now lies. A photographic facsimile of this copy, published in 1936 with an informative introduction by J. Q. Adams, forms the basis of the present text. The other original is, of course, that printed in the First Folio of 1623. Set up from a copy of the third edition (1611) of the quarto, this exhibits clear traces of prompt-book influence, and must have derived from the theatre a whole scene (3. 2), of nearly ninety lines, not found in any of the three quarto editions. Some conjectures as to the kind of manuscript used in 1594 and the exact nature of the copy in 1623 will be found in the Note on the Copy, while what is known, or can be inferred, about the origins of the play and its early productions will be dealt with in § IV of this Introduction; such matters being more easily approached after the problem of authorship, which is here my main concern, has found at any rate a tentative solution.