+Date+.--Marlowe's _Edward II_ is usually dated 1593; and Shakespeare's _Richard II_ is dated the year following, in order to accommodate facts to theory. The frequency of rime points to an earlier date, the absence of prose to a later date. Our only certain date is 1597, when a quarto appeared. Others followed in 1598, 1608, and 1615. A play "of the deposing of Richard II" was performed by wish of the Earl of Essex in London streets in 1601, on the eve of his attempted revolt against the queen. If this was our play, then Essex failed as signally in understanding the real theme of the play as he did in interpreting the attitude of Englishmen toward him. Both the one and the other condemned usurpation in the strongest terms. +Source+.--Holinshed's _Chronicles_ furnished Shakespeare with but the bare historical outline. It is usual to suggest that Marlowe's portrayal of a similarly weak figure with a similarly tragic end suggested Shakespeare's play; and this may be, though there is nothing to indicate direct influence. {141} +Titus Andronicus+ has a plot so revolting to modern readers that many critics like to follow the seventeenth-century tradition, which tells, according to a writer who wanted to justify his own tinkering, that Shakespeare added "some master-touches to one or two of the principal characters," and nothing more. But unfortunately not only the phraseology and the meter, but the more important external evidences point to Shakespeare, and, however we might wish it, we cannot find grounds to dismiss the theory that Shakespeare was at least responsible for the rewriting of an older play. No play better deserves the type name of 'tragedy of blood.' The crimes which disfigure its scenes seem to us unnecessarily wanton. Briefly, the struggle is between Titus, conqueror of the Goths, and Tamora, their captive queen, who marries the Roman emperor, and who would revenge Titus's sacrifice of her son to the shades of his own slain sons. From the first five minutes, during which a noble Goth is hacked to pieces--off stage, mercifully--to the last minute of carnage, when the entire company go hands all round in murder, fifteen persons are slain, and other crimes no less horrible perpetrated. Every one at some time gets his revenge; and the play is entirely made up of plotting, killing, gloating, and counterplotting. The inhumanly brutal Aaron, the blackamoor lover of Tamora, is arch villain in all this; but the ungovernable passions of Titus render him scarcely more attractive.