"And yet a belief has been long entertained in England, to which some wise and judicious still cling, that Greene and Peele either wrote the Two Parts of the 'Contention' in conjunction; or that Greene wrote one Part and Peele the other Part; or that, at any rate, Greene had some share in these dramas. This was the theory propagated by Malone in his 'Dissertation'; and it rests not upon the slightest examination of these writers, but solely on the far-famed passage in Greene's posthumous pamphlet, the 'Groat's Worth of Wit,' in which he points out Shakspere as 'a crow beautified with our feathers.' The hypothesis seems to us to be little less than absurd.... He parodies a line from one of the productions of which he had been so plundered, to carry the point home, to leave no doubt as to the sting of his allusion. But, as has been most justly observed, the epigram would have wanted its sting if the line parodied had not been that of the very writer attacked."
"Titus Andronicus" is a "tragedy of blood" written by Shakspere, according to the highest authority, when he was twenty-three or twenty-four years of age. Ben Johnson says, in his "Bartholomew Fair" (1614), that it had been on the stage for twenty-five or thirty years. It was doubtless a very early work, but whether "much in the manner of Kyd," as Professor Wendell asserts, can be best determined by reference to Kyd's works. The claim has been made by other critics that "Titus" was "collaborative," but Professor Wendell's is that it was an "imitation."
"The Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda," first printed in 1599, is of doubtful authorship, but has sometimes been credited to Kyd. "The piece still bears a striking resemblance to the old Moral Plays and thereby proves its relatively early origin. A chorus consisting of the allegorical figures Love, Happiness, and Death opens the play and each separate act, and ends it with a controversy in which all the personified powers boast of their deeds and triumphs over the others, till at the end of the fifth act Death remains the victor, and the whole concludes with a eulogy of Queen Elizabeth, the only mortal whom Death does not venture to approach." "Titus Andronicus" will be searched in vain for "much" or little of this "manner of Kyd."