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The external evidence for the genesis of Titus Andronicus is meagre, and has become even smaller of late. T. M. Parrott's essay of 1919 may stand as the first attempt to establish the authenticity of Titus Andronicus by using the methods of modern authorship studies, combining quantitative analysis of the play's verse styles with the citation of enough close parallel passages to make the case for the separate presence of George Peele and Shakespeare beyond the possibility of coincidence or imitation. Specifically discussed is the detailed evaluation of Peele's share in Titus Andronicus. The case for Peele's co-authorship can be made even stronger by examining other aspects of the play's style: three new tests have been devised. It can be stated that Peele is recognized as co-author of ‘The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedy of Titus Andronicus’.

This chapter demonstrates that co-authorship can be seen just as clearly in the treatment of character and motive as in language. In considering Shakespeare's co-authorship of the five plays presented, namely Titus Andronicus with George Peele, Timon of Athens with Thomas Middleton, Pericles with George Wilkins, and King Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher, it concentrates on their language, and the many ways in which his style can be differentiated from that of his collaborators. Specifically discussed are the plot and character in these co-authored plays.

The young Edmund Spenser had been connected with, and perhaps influenced by, the pageants which had greeted Elizabeth Tudor when she made her official ‘coronation’ entry into London in January 1559, through his teacher and mentor Richard Mulcaster. Some thirty years later, Spenser's own The Faerie Queene clearly influenced another pageant writer, George Peele. In Descensus Astraeae, Peele staged the fountain as an emblem of the realm and of the Protestant religion, and he appears in general to have had something of a fascination with fountains as theatrical settings, for three of his seven extant plays and pageants feature the device in some form. It is this chapter's contention that Peele's staged fountains in turn significantly influenced Ben Jonson's The Fountaine of Selfe-Love.

This chapter discusses five plays by Shakespeare, namely Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, King Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It is a curious fact that the theatrical and publishing tradition which established the authenticity of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare also managed to suppress — or perhaps just obscure — any sign that he ever worked together with other dramatists. It is argued that one of the quartos reprinted in the folio, Titus Andronicus, was a joint work with George Peele, and that two of the plays published for the first time in the folio, Timon of Athens and Henry VIII, were jointly written with Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher, respectively. The chapter also reconstructs something of the material context within which collaboration took place.

In the 1580s John Lyly and other writers for children’s companies created novel plays featuring a keen-witted, hot-blooded, virtuosic innamorata, relying on the beauty and skills of the cross-dressed boy player. Plays aimed at a worldly elite audience exoticize and eroticize the “boy actress,” painting him as extravagantly Italianate in ways that shadow the foreign diva, evidence of her transnational impact on plays and playing. Lyly’s Gallathea, Sapho and Phao, and The Woman in the Moone; Peele’s Arraignment of Paris; and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage show how the English contained the threat of the actress by appropriating and adapting her trademark playing and star scenes, such as solo song and madness. As a result, the skilled labor of both divas and boys left its mark on these innovative works.

Chapter 2 investigates the importance of King Solomon to visual conceptions of monarchical authority after the break with Rome. Although popular, figurations of England’s monarchs as antitypes of Solomon were complex and exegetically demanding, not least because Solomon ended his life as an idolater. Unsurprisingly, contemporary applications of Solomon’s narrative use this biblical text selectively. Yet, when scrutinized more closely, many such readings struggle to occlude fully the unhappy death of scripture’s famously wise king. This chapter considers the anonymous Latin play Sapientia Solomonis (1565/6), George Peele’s The Love of King David (1594), and John Williams’ funeral sermon for King James I (1625) to argue that the biblical narrative of scripture’s famously wise king became a popular, yet problematic, means of responding to the relocation of sacred authority after the Reformation.