  Act i. sc. 1. Theobald's note:— “I never heard it so much as intimated, that he (Shakespeare) had turned his genius to stage-writing, before he associated with the players, and became one of their body.” That Shakespeare never “turned his genius to stage-writing,” as Theobald most Theobaldice phrases it, before he became an actor, is an assertion of about as much authority as the precious story that he left Stratford for deer-stealing, and that he lived by holding gentlemen's horses at the doors of the theatre, and other trash of that arch-gossip, old Aubrey. The metre is an argument against Titus Andronicus being Shakespeare's, worth a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in this play and in Jeronymo, Shakespeare wrote some passages, and that they are the earliest of his compositions. Act v. sc. 2. I think it not improbable that the lines from— “I am not mad; I know thee well enough; to So thou destroy Rapine, and Murder there”— were written by Shakespeare in his earliest period. But instead of the text— “Revenge, which makes the foul offenders quake. Tit. Art thou Revenge? and art thou sent to me?”— the words in italics ought to be omitted. |
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