Shakespeare's brothers and Peele's brethren: Titus Andronicus again. (George Peele)

Brian Boyd's recent argument for Peele's involvement in Titus Andronicus depended mainly on quantification and analysis of the tendency, especially within Act I of the play, towards 'the lazy repetition of a few common words the author has retrieved from his word-box and keeps on reshuffling'.(1) But he also noticed that, in a tragedy involving many brothers, the suspect scenes are inclined to use the plural brethren, which Peele favoured for his The Battle of Alcazar, marked by fratricide.(2) His figures are not quite accurate, however, and a wider range of data shows that Boyd's point about the alternative plurals is even more telling than he himself recognized.

The Chadwyck-Healey 'Literature on Line' electronic database is now available on the World Wide Web to institutions willing to pay the annual subscription. It allows one to search some 4,000 English plays, from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. The textual bases for Renaissance dramatists are mainly the original quartos or …