ALTHOUGH SEVERAL OF SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY PLAYS CANNOT BE dated with complete certainty, we can confidently assume that his first two tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, along with two of the histories that come closest to tragedy, Richard III and Richard II, are separated from the later tragedies by an interval of a few years. After that, it seems hardly possible to group the tragedies chronologically. At the beginning of his career as a dramatist, however, Shakespeare evidently experimented with various forms of tragedy available at the time, wrote his cycle of history plays and then turned to comedy. With Julius Caesar and Hamlet he returned to tragedy and these two plays show very clearly how much Shakespeare' own style and, presumably, the tastes of his audience had changed in that short space of time.

Both Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet appeared in print fairly soon after their first performance and must have been very successful. Romeo and Juliet has always been one of the best-loved and most frequently performed of Shakespeare' plays while Titus Andronicus is, by and large, appreciated only by specialists and is rarely seen on stage. This is not necessarily an absolute indication of artistic inferiority, but, if anything, evidence of striking differences in the longevity of literary conventions and of unpredictable changes in taste.

TITUS ANDRONICUS

Shakespeare's first tragedy, it seems, is based on conventions that were out of fashion less than a generation after its first performance. We may deduce this from the often quoted allusion to the play in the ‘Induction’ to Ben Jonson' comedy Bartholomew Fair of 1614, where the individual playgoers’ judgements and tastes are satirically discussed.