SOURCE: “Sources and Meanings in Titus Andronicus,” in Mirror Up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of G. R. Hibbard, University of Toronto Press, 1984, pp. 171-88.

In the following essay, Hunter finds that despite the lack of indisputable evidence regarding the sources for Titus Andronicus, the influences of Livy and Herodian can clearly be seen in the play.

The belief that Shakespeare preferred to ‘borrow’ his plots instead of ‘inventing’ them (both words are highly culture-determined) might seem difficult to sustain today in the face of the complex picture of adaptation and refashioning we find, for example, in Kenneth Muir's Shakespeare's Sources or in more detailed studies of the kind of C. T. Prouty's The Sources of ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’ But mere details have little power to deflect our necessary myths; and the myth of Shakespeare the ‘all-natural’ bard, though unfashionable in its explicit form, clearly continues to...