Shakespeare's brothers and Peele's brethren: Titus Andronicus again

Notes and Queries

Volumn 44, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 494-495

  Jackson, MacD P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79956881931     PISSN: 00293970     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/notesj/44.4.494     Document Type: Short Survey

References (7)

1. Brian Boyd, 'Common Words in Titus Andronicus: The Presence of Peele', N&Q, ccxxx (1995), 300-7, at 301.
2. A case for Peek's involvement in Titus Andronicus is also made by MacD. P. Jackson, 'Stage Directions and Speech Headings in Act 1 of Titus Andronicus Q (1594): Shakespeare or Peele?', Studies in Bibliography, xlix (1996), 134 48.
3. Marvin Spevack's A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (Hildersheim, 1968 80) has provided my figures for Titus Andronicus and for other Shakespeare plays. The Titus references (from Spevack, Riverside numbering) are: brethren I.i.89, 104, 122, 123, 146, 160 (brethren's), 348, 357, V.i.104; brothers I.i.287, III.1.30, 49, 109, 111, 166 (brothers'), 180, V.ii.173, V.iii.100. Three examples of the spelling variant bretheren have been retained in the Riverside Shakespeare, on which Spevack's concordance is based, and he lists these forms separately, but naturally I have included both spellings in the tally.
4. Boyd, 301, 307; Jackson, 'Stage Directions', 142 8;
5. MacD. P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg, 1979), 151-4.
6. The counts are from the Chadwyck-Healey 'Literature on Line' database, and include The Battle of Alcazar (8/0), The Arraignment of Paris, David and Bethsabe (1/1), Edward I, and The Old Wives' Tale, the last of these falling within the 'Jacobean and Caroline' section. Since the texts are in old spelling, it is necessary to visit the various contexts in order to distinguish between brothers as a plural and brothers as a singular possessive without the modern apostrophe.
7. S. Schoenbaum, Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship (Evanston, 1966), xvii-xviii. Again, the counts for the anonymous plays exclude instances of brothers as singular possessive; the Literature on Line' tallies have to be corrected through scrutiny of contexts, which the search functions facilitate.