The Longleat Manuscript and Titus Andronicus

FOR MANY YEARS SHAKESPEAREANS HAVE ARGUED about the relationship between Titus Andronicus and a folio leaf that has come to be known as the Longleat manuscript. The manuscript, reproduced here as Figure 1, has at the top an ink drawing that seems to be based on the opening scene of Shakespeare's play. According to the usual interpretation, the man standing just left of center, wearing a wreath on his head and holding a ceremonial staff or spear, is Titus, just returned with his prisoners from his victory over the Goths, and the two men behind Titus are Roman soldiers, perhaps his sons. The crowned woman kneeling in front of him, her hands folded in supplication, is Tamora, Queen of the Goths, begging him not to sacrifice her oldest son, Alarbus; behind her are her two other sons, Demetrius and Chiron, bound and also kneeling. At the far right and slightly forward stands Aaron the Moor, holding a sword in his left hand and pointing with his right hand either at the sword or at Tamora's sons. Below the drawing is a line, beneath which appears a stage direction that is not in the play, "Enter Tamora pleadinge for her sonnes going to execution," followed by her speech in the play at lines 104-20. There is then a response by Titus combining two half-lines (ll. 121, 125) and adding two lines addressed to Aaron, telling him to prepare to die and to repent his "wicked life." Next comes Aaron's speech from 5.1.124-44 boasting of his villainies and, at the end, a speech prefix for Alarbus. ¹ Near the bottom and to the left is the signature "Henricus Peacham" and a puzzling date that has recently been deciphered as 1594. ² The major problem with this drawing is, of course, the role of Aaron, for while he is listed several times in the stage directions for 1.1 (following lines 69, 295, 398, and 495), he does not speak a word. Moreover, since he is one of the prisoners himself, he would not have a sword; nor could he have one when he delivers his speech in 5.1, as he is again a prisoner and is on a ladder about to be hanged.

I want to examine some of the recent attempts to solve this problem and to propose a solution. But before doing this, I must confront—as must everyone else who now deals with the Longleat manuscript—an essay by June Schlueter that asserts that all these attempts are misguided because the drawing is not related to Shakespeare's play but reproduces the end of the first act in Eine sehr klägliche Tragædia [Begin Page 325] von Tito Andronico und der hoffertigen Käyserin (A Very Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus and the Haughty Empress). ³ The play was published in Leipzig in 1620 in Engelische Comedien und Tragedien, a book that collects a number of plays performed in Germany by English actors. According to Schlueter, the man holding the staff is the unnamed and newly crowned Roman emperor (Shakespeare's Saturninus), while the two soldiers behind him are Titus and Titus's son Vespasian (Shakespeare's Lucius). The kneeling woman is Aetiopissa, Queen of Ethiopia (Shakespeare's Tamora), who is not pleading for the life of her son (since there is no sacrifice in this play) but simply submitting to the emperor as his prisoner; the men kneeling behind her are her sons, Helicates and Saphonus (Shakespeare's Chiron and Demetrius). The man at the far right is Morian (Shakespeare's Aaron), who at the end of this actdelivers a long soliloquy boasting of his secret liaison with Aetiopissa and of his past crimes. ⁴ Schlueter concludes that the lines from Shakespeare's play are "independent" of the drawing and were added later not by the artist but "by someone whose assumption about the drawing confused and misled generations of scholars." ^5...