other Part; or that, at any rate, Greene had some
share in these dramas. This was the theory propagated by Malone in his
'Dissertation'; and it rests not upon the slightest examination of these
writers, but solely on the far-famed passage in Greene's posthumous
pamphlet, the 'Groat's Worth of Wit,' in which he points out Shakspere
as 'a crow beautified with our feathers.' The hypothesis seems to us to
be little less than absurd.... He parodies a line from one of the
productions of which he had been so plundered, to carry the point home,
to leave no doubt as to the sting of his allusion. But, as has been most
justly observed, the epigram would have wanted its sting if the line
parodied had not been that of the very writer attacked."

"Titus Andronicus" is a "tragedy of blood" written by Shakspere,
according to the highest authority, when he was twenty-three or
twenty-four years of age. Ben Johnson says, in his "Bartholomew Fair"
(1614), that it had been on the stage for twenty-five or thirty years.
It was doubtless a very early work, but whether "much in the manner of
Kyd," as Professor Wendell asserts, can be best determined by reference
to Kyd's works. The claim has been made by other critics that "Titus"
was "collaborative," but Professor Wendell's is that it was an
"imitation."

"The Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda," first printed in 1599, is of
doubtful authorship, but has sometimes been credited to Kyd. "The piece
still bears a striking resemblance to the old Moral Plays and thereby
proves its relatively early origin. A chorus consisting of the
allegorical figures Love, Happiness, and Death opens the play and each
separate act, and ends it with a controversy in which all the
personified powers boast of their deeds and triumphs over the others,
till at the end of the fifth act Death remains the victor, and the whole
concludes with a eulogy of Queen Elizabeth, the only mortal whom Death
does not venture to approach." "Titus Andronicus" will be searched in
vain for "much" or little of this "manner of Kyd."

"The First Part of Jeronimo, with the Warres of Portugal and the Life
and Death of Don Andrea," not published till 1605, is not an authentic
work of Kyd, but is attributed to him by some because, judging from the
subject, it belongs to "The Spanish Tragedy" and is regarded by Henslowe
as the first part of it. A. W. Schlegel says that "both of these parts
are full of absurdities, that the author had ventured upon d