'Such Violent Hands'

For many, ‘Titus Andronicus’ exemplifies the extreme visual horror which characterises the subgenre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Long recognised as a collaboration between William Shakespeare and George Peele, the play’s notorious denouement – in which a Gothic queen is tricked into eating her slaughtered sons – has often been interpreted as a satire upon the revenge genre itself. Yet the nature of the play has recently been complicated by the claim that an additional banquet scene, only present in the 1623 Folio, may be a later addition written by a third dramatist, probably Thomas Middleton, and incorporated into the play sometime after 1616. This article will consider the implications of this probability further. It will explore how the author was not simply adding new material to ‘Titus Andronicus’ in order to provide a new selling point for a later revival of the work, but was constructing a new sequence designed to mirror and complement the already infamous cannibalistic conclusion of the original text. Understanding this scene as a later addition, we can now better understand how this additional scene serves as an integral turning point in the drama’s narrative, and is far less ‘disposable’ than previous critics have been equipped to realise.

The Dating and Attribution of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany

Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany is usually considered to be an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, with 1594 often suggested as a likely date of composition; some scholars have attributed the play to George Peele. Martin Wiggins has, however, recently contested the traditional date in British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue, giving 1630 as his own ‘best guess'. This note questions the premises behind Wiggins’s decision while putting forward new arguments in support of the traditional dating on dramaturgical grounds — arguments that perhaps lend weight to the idea that Peele had a hand in the play.

Immunities and Monasticism

Over the course of the sixteenth century, numerous playwrights composed plays about King John of England (r. 1199–1216). While representing the king’s failed attempt to assert national sovereignty over papal control, the plays explore an even more subtle problem: the legal threat that monastic immunity poses to papal and monarchical power. The chapter examines how plays written by John Bale, George Peele, and William Shakespeare used their representations of King John to attend, in a post-Reformation context, to the legal complexities of monasticism as a social practice. In articulating the difficulties that communal formations and monasticism as a social practice create for post-Reformation politics and law, sixteenth-century dramatists—this chapter argues—shape a new version of legal history.