Among the horrors added by Shakespeare, there are two which deserve a moment's notice. The first is Titus's sudden and unpremeditated murder of his son, who ventures to oppose his will. Shocking as it seems to us to-day, such an incident did not surprise the sixteenth century public, but rather appealed to them as a touch of nature. Such lives as Benvenuto Cellini's show that even in highly cultivated natures, anger, passion, and revenge were apt to take instantaneous effect in sanguinary deeds. Men of action were in those days as ungovernable as they were barbarously cruel when a sudden fury possessed them. The other added trait is the murder of Tamora's son. We are reminded of the scene in _Henry VI_, in which the young Prince Edward is murdered in the presence of Queen Margaret; and Tamora's entreaties for her son are among those verses in the play which possess the true Shakespearian ring. Certain peculiar turns of phrase in _Titus Andronicus_ remind us of Peele and Marlowe.[1] But whole lines occur which Shakespeare repeats almost word for word. Thus the verses-- "She is a woman, therefore may be woo'd; She is a woman, therefore may be won," reappear very slightly altered in _Henry VI_., Part I.:-- "She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd; She is a woman, and therefore to be won;" while a similar turn of phrase is found in Sonnet XLI.:-- "Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won; Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;" and, finally, a closely related distich occurs in Richard the Third's famous soliloquy: "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd? Was ever woman in this humour won?" It is true that the phrase "She is a woman, therefore may be won," occurs several times in Greene's romances, of earlier date than _Titus Andronicus_, and this seems to have been a sort of catchword of the period. Although, on the whole, one may certainly say that this rough-hewn drama, with its piling-up of external effects, has very little in common with the tone or spirit of Shakespeare's mature tragedies, yet we find scattered through it lines in which the most diverse critics have professed to recognise Shakespeare's revising touch, and to catch the ring of his voice. Few will question that such a line as this, in the first scene of the play-- "Romans--friends, followers, favourers of my right!" comes from the pen which afterwards wrote _Julius Cæsar_. I may mention, for my own part, that lines which, as I read the play through before acquainting myself in detail with English criticism, had struck me as patently Shakespearian, proved to be precisely the lines which the best English critics attribute to Shakespeare. To one's own mind such coincidences of feeling naturally carry conviction. I may cite as an example Tamora's speech (iv. 4):--