Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1591–94) stages both the proliferating texts and the religious violence of the early 1590s. These years saw a spate of sectarian libels from persecuted Puritans and Catholics alike. In Titus, the marginalized Andronici likewise launch ephemeral scraps of writing into the sky, texts that join appeals for redress with violent threats. These libels bear an especially close resemblance to those scattered in the streets by the Puritan extremist William Hacket and his accomplices in 1591. But the echoes are also cross-confessional, indicating a broader interest in the “manner” of religiopolitical speech. The play folds its topical allegory into a Tacitean-humanist history of political communication: the rise of the emperor, Saturninus, brings about the end of public oratory. Their speech silenced, the Andronici unleash a flurry of texts that takes the Tacitean story of rhetorical decline into its early modern future. By yoking libels not just to the pursuit of justice but also to factionalism and violence, Titus takes a hard look at the viral and virulent media of the late Elizabethan public sphere.

Standard theatre history accounts tend to assume that plays were received in the order in which they were first performed, but playgoers were not bound to watch plays chronologically. Considering Marlowe’s influential Tamburlaine plays, the chapter asks what happens when playgoers watch plays out of the expected order. While there is clear evidence that Tamburlaine had cultural cachet at this time, it does not follow, as is generally assumed, that all audience members would have encountered Tamburlaine before other, related plays.

Numerous Elizabethan philosophical and theological treatises deplored the duplicity, waywardness, and treachery of the imagination. Even Spenser participated in this, filling the chamber of Phantastes with freaks, monsters, and dangerous deceptions. Yet in the new commercial playhouses, from the late 1580s onwards, audiences were increasingly exhorted to ‘imagine’ or ‘suppose’, in a type of speech that we can dub the ‘imagine’ chorus. Originally a device to cover time and space in history plays and travel plays, the ‘imagine’ chorus began to be used not only to conjure unseen spectacles in the mind, but also to celebrate the powers of the imagination. This essay argues that it arose from the unprecedented experience of collective imagining in the new playhouses, and produced new thinking about the imagination as a magical and exhilarating creative force, as explored with particular sophistication by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V.

Senecan tragedy is also imperial in that it often locates its characters in relation to the disorientation of global empire. Hercules Furens places its hero’s violent madness at the very moment of world conquest, for instance, and Medea, which features a very famous choral ode about how sea-voyaging rewrites the world, is about the global reach of Roman ambition and desire. Several of Seneca’s philosophical writings (and especially his De Consolatione ad Helviam) likewise examine the tension between stoic self-command and the expansive restlessness of imperial desire. This chapter reads Titus Andronicus as a Senecan exploration of a late-imperial Roman moment in which the Roman scepter commands the whole world and in which racially heterogeneous people and competing modes of imaging civic life are all uneasily incorporated at once. It understands Senecan tragedy as a literary resource for imagining the resulting disorientation. The last section of the chapter examines Titus together with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and argues that Senecan tragedy provides a model of psychological interiority that is paired with blackface to create the emergent stage stereotype of the wicked Moor.

Senecan tragedy is also imperial in that it often locates its characters in relation to the disorientation of global empire. Hercules Furens places its hero’s violent madness at the very moment of world conquest, for instance, and Medea, which features a very famous choral ode about how sea-voyaging rewrites the world, is about the global reach of Roman ambition and desire. Several of Seneca’s philosophical writings (and especially his De Consolatione ad Helviam) likewise examine the tension between stoic self-command and the expansive restlessness of imperial desire. This chapter reads Titus Andronicus as a Senecan exploration of a late-imperial Roman moment in which the Roman scepter commands the whole world and in which racially heterogeneous people and competing modes of imaging civic life are all uneasily incorporated at once. It understands Senecan tragedy as a literary resource for imagining the resulting disorientation. The last section of the chapter examines Titus together with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and argues that Senecan tragedy provides a model of psychological interiority that is paired with blackface to create the emergent stage stereotype of the wicked Moor.

Randall Martin and others have argued that Shakespeare revised 3 Henry VI after his composition of Richard III to consolidate the early history plays as a sequence. Meanwhile, recent attribution studies argue that Shakespeare originally wrote 3 Henry VI in collaboration with one or more other dramatists, making little or no contribution to Acts 1 and 4. If these arguments are correct, the older hypothesis that the first edition issued in 1595 as The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York is a memorial reconstruction begins to look vulnerable. If it is shorter and less Shakespearean, some possible reasons for these characteristics other than derivative reconstruction are now evident. This chapter will agree with the arguments for collaboration in both versions, and for revision in one. But it will reassert the necessity of regarding Richard Duke of York as a derivative text with a tenuous line of transmission from an authorial script.