SOURCE: "Titus Andronicus [1593?]," in Shakespeare's Early Tragedies, Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1968, pp. 13-47.

In the following excerpt, Brooke argues that Titus Andronicus displays a greater formal and thematic unity than has previously been perceived.

I

Titus Andronicus has for a long time been the most unpopular of all Shakespeare's plays: but its general execration dates only from the eighteenth century. In Shakespeare's lifetime it was very popular indeed. When it was at least twenty years old, in 1614, Ben Jonson commented ironically on its lasting reputation in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair:

He that will swear Jeronimo [i.e. The Spanish Tragedy] 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.

That is only the most considerable of many references attesting both to its popularity, and...