The example set by Marlowe in Tamburlaine was no doubt in some measure to blame for the lavish effusion of blood in the play adapted by Shakespeare, which may in this respect be bracketed with two other contemporary dramas conceived under the influence of Tamburlaine, Robert Greene's Alphonsus King of Arragon and George Peele's Battle of Alcazar. Peele's tragedy has also its barbarous Moor, Muley Hamet, who, like Aaron, is probably the offspring of Marlowe's malignant Jew of Malta and his henchman, the sensual Ithamore.
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: