It is not easy to conjecture why Shakspeare should have introduced this ludicrous scroll, which answers no one purpose, either propulsive, or explicatory, unless as a joke on etymology.
TITUS ANDRONICUS.
Act I. sc. 1. Theobald's note:
I never heard it so much as intimated, that he (Shakspeare) had turned his genius to stage-writing, before he associated with the players, and became one of their body.
That Shakspeare never 'turned his genius to stage writing,' as Theobald most 'Theobaldice' phrases it, before he became an actor, is an assertion of about as much authority, as the precious story that he left Stratford for deerstealing, and that he lived by holding gentlemen's horses at the doors of the theatre, and other trash of that arch-gossip, old Aubrey. The metre is an argument against Titus Andronicus being Shakspeare's, worth a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in this play and in Jeronymo, Shakspeare wrote some passages, and that they are the earliest of his compositions.
Act v. sc. 2.
I think it not improbable that the lines from—
I am not mad; I know thee well enough;—
...
So thou destroy Rapine, and
Murder there.