The authorship of Titus Andronicus has been debated since the late 17th century. Titus Andronicus, probably written between 1588 and 1593, appeared in three quarto editions from 1594 to 1601 with no named author. It was first published under William Shakespeare's name in the 1623 First Folio of his plays. However, as with some of his early and late plays, scholars have long surmised that Shakespeare might have collaborated with another playwright. Other plays have also been examined for evidence of co-authorship, but none has been as closely scrutinised or as consistently questioned as Titus. The principal contender for the co-authorship is George Peele.

The fact that Titus traditionally has the reputation of being Shakespeare's worst play is not unconnected to the in-depth examination of the play's authorship; and in fact many of the scholars who initially attempted to prove he had nothing to do with it did so in an effort to 'save' his reputation because they considered the play to be so badly written. Although the play's reputation improved somewhat in the latter half of the 20th century, the examination of authorship has intensified, generally along three possibilities: 1) Shakespeare wrote the play alone, 2) he co-wrote it with another author, and 3) he had nothing to do with the writing of it at all.

Very little external evidence is extant regarding the question of authorship. None of the three quarto editions of Titus (1594, 1600 and 1611) name the author, normal practice for Elizabethan plays. Francis Meres lists Titus as one of Shakespeare's tragedies in Palladis Tamia in 1598, and John Heminges and Henry Condell included it in the First Folio in 1623. While this supports Shakespeare's authorship of the play, questions have tended to focus on the perceived lack of quality in the writing, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the play's stylistic similarities to the work of contemporaneous dramatists.

In 1687 Edward Ravenscroft was the first to question Shakespeare's authorship in the introduction to his own adaptation of the play, Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia,

I have been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not Originally his, but brought by a private Author to be Acted and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the Principal Parts or Characters; this I am apt to believe, because 'tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his Works, It seems rather a heap of Rubbish then a Structure.

Ravenscroft's vague comments tend not to be taken at face value by most critics. Nevertheless, his idea seems to have been seized upon, and several 18th-century editors made similar claims; Nicholas Rowe in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear in Six Volumes (1709), Alexander Pope in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear (1725), Lewis Theobald in Shakespeare Restored (1726), Samuel Johnson and George Steevens in The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765) and Edmond Malone in The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare (1790). All questioned Shakespeare's authorship, primarily due to the violence in the play, which they saw as far in excess of anything else in the canon, and what they perceived as uninspired verse, with each one concluding that at most Shakespeare wrote a scene or two. Other 18th-century scholars who questioned Shakespeare's authorship included William Guthrie in 1747, John Upton in 1748, Benjamin Heath in 1765, Richard Farmer in 1766, John Pinkerton in 1785, and John Monck Mason also in 1785. So strong had the anti-Shakespearean movement become during the eighteenth century that in 1794, Thomas Percy wrote in the introduction to Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, "Shakespeare's memory has been fully vindicated from the charge of writing the play by the best critics."

This trend continued into the 19th century. In 1817, for example, William Hazlitt denied the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship in Characters of Shakespear's Plays. Also in 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a similar claim in Biographia Literaria. Subsequently, in 1832, the Globe Illustrated Shakespeare went so far as to claim there was a universal agreement on the matter of authorship due to the un-Shakespearean "barbarity" of the play's action. Similarly, in An Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1840), Henry Hallam wrote "Titus Andronicus is now, by common consent, denied to be, in any sense, a production of Shakespeare." In 1857, Charles Bathurst reiterated the claim that the play was so badly written, Shakespeare simply could not have had anything to do with it.

However, even in the midst of these doubts, there were voices arguing for Shakespeare's authorship. A major early defender of Shakespeare's claim to authorship was Edward Capell. In his 1768 ten-volume edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, Mr William Shakespeare, His Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, Capell acknowledged that the play was poorly written, but he argued that the violence was normal in the Elizabethan theatre, and he also pointed out the unlikelihood of Condell and Heminges including a play in the First Folio which they knew not to be by Shakespeare. Capell argued that nothing would be achieved by such a move, and in any case, there would have been any number of people who could have disputed such a thing. Capell also argued on aesthetic grounds that the play was Shakespearean, pointing specifically to Act 3 as being indicative of Shakespeare's style, and citing such elements as classical allusions and versification as more akin to Shakespeare than any other dramatist of the time.