SOURCE: "Shakespeare and Euripides (I): Tragic Passion," in The Origins of Shakespeare, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1977, pp. 85-107.

In his book The Origins of Shakespeare, Jones studies the relationship between Shakespeare's Tudor plays and the cultural milieu in which they emerged. In the following excerpt, he presents evidence that several plays of Euripides were widely known and admired in sixteenth-century England, and notes structural and textual similarities between Titus Andronicus and Euripides' play Hecuba.

After being more or less denied Shakespearian authorship for two hundred years, Titus Andronicus is now firmly back within the canon. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, or regret, most scholars now accept it as Shakespearian. And for many playgoers the production in 1955 at Stratford and London helped to confirm the scholarly swing towards reinstating it: the play works in the theatre even today—or rather, if done with imagination and conviction (and preferably...