ABOUT THE AUTHORS: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) & GEORGE PEELE (1556-1596)

by Ayanna Thompson

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Early critics of Titus Andronicus speculated that the play could not have been the invention of William Shakespeare’s or at least of William Shakespeare’s alone. While their subjective objections were based on the horrific contents of the play, later critics who were less concerned with the play’s taste, realized that there were stylistic elements that indicated the presence of two hands, George Peele’s and William Shakespeare’s. There is now widespread scholarly consensus that George Peele (1556-1596) wrote the first act (1.1) and the beginning of the second act (2.1) with Shakespeare writing most of the rest of the play. There is some scholarly debate about who authored 4.1 (the Ovid book scene), but it now appears that Peele is the primary author of that scene too. 

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If Peele and Shakespeare were hired by a theatre to write Titus Andronicus together, then Peele would have been the more senior and experienced writer. The son of James Peele who had written London civic pageants and who had also written the earliest book in English on double-entry bookkeeping, George Peele was well educated, earning his BA and MA at Oxford, and well versed in the contemporary London theatre scene. George wrote several popular plays in the 1580s, including The Battle of Alcazar (1588), which has several resonances with Titus Andronicus: Senecan revenge motifs, a cannibalistic banquet, and a scheming, funny, and villainous dark-skinned Moor named Muly Mahamet. 

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It would be a mistake, however, to think that Peele started the play and that Shakespeare simply finished it. The cohesiveness of the thematic, allusive, and rhetorical threads in Titus Andronicus points to a closer type of co-authorship. Afterall, in 1592 Shakespeare would have been relatively new to London. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, Shakespeare probably had a solid grammar school education, but there is no indication that he attended university. Although we don’t have firm and clear dates, most scholars think that Shakespeare moved to London around 1585. Past scholars have wondered how Shakespeare would have known and read Euripides’ Hecuba, which is alluded to in the first act of Titus Andronicus, but it now seems clear that those passages were written by Peele and that Shakespeare learned them from Peele who had done English translations of Greek plays previously. 

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Shakespeare clearly carried forward a lot of what he learned and experienced co-authoring Titus Andronicus. First, he returned to the humorous, crafty, and intelligent villain in Richard III. He revisited to the revenge tragedy genre in Hamlet. And finally, he reexamined the Moor in Othello, although he brilliantly separated out the crafty villain, Iago, from the valiant Moor, Othello. Although Titus was Shakespeare’s first tragedy, many facets of the play remained with him throughout his career onstage.