Titus Andronicus (edition 1995)

This play is both horrific and kind of funny in a black humour kind of way... Now, the real work begins - as I will have lots to do with this - an essay, a film-review and more. ( )

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This is one of those stories. I lump it in with The Sixth Sense he was dead all along , The Crying Game she has a penis , Planet of the Apes it was Earth all along and Titanic. the ship sinks

Each of these tales has a big, big surprise... and that's great, don't get me wrong... but the surprise is so shocking and memorable, it leaves the rest of the story looking like a flimsy lead-up. It's as if the shocker ending has so much gravity, it crushes the other plot elements like a black hole. After a while, I can't remember anything but "the big surprise."

That isn't to say Titus Andronicus is no good. Of course it's good; it's a pulp revenge story set in ancient Rome, written in Shakespeare's beautiful language... but my appreciatiation of it is limited by the irritating sense that most of the story was only there to set me up for the big kick-in-the-pants ending.

Does that make sense?

Remember the 1970's Incredible Hulk television show? I can't recall the plots of almost any episodes, but it doesn't matter; their only purpose each week was to set up some situation where Dr. David Banner could get angry and transform into the Hulk, and then do something cool like flip over a car or smash something.

Whatever else happened each week... well, most viewers could have hardly given a fuck, so long as there were those scenes with the Hulk. Those were an ironclad, non-negotiable requirement of each episode. Imagine viewers' reaction if an episode were to air without any Hulk escapades (i.e. just some story about David Banner). Unthinkable!

The show always seemed lesser to me for that fact.

Neverminding all that, this read was a revisit for me to Titus Andronicus, so there were no surprises this time, but the gore was still gory and shocking. It's the best representation of barbarism, excess and degeneracy in the Roman Empire, this side of Malcolm McDowell's performance in Caligula.

In my present disillusioned mood, I can see Titus Andronicus is maybe not Shakespeare's best work. For one thing, the entire yarn is an unraveling Hatfield-and-McCoy feud between Roman general Titus and the Goth queen Tamora, in which they alternately kill or torture each others' children. The trouble starts with Titus slaughtering Tamora's vanquished son Alarbus, right in front of her- in fact over her impassioned and heartbreaking pleas for mercy. It seems like Titus and Tamora should go after each other directly, but the story has a higher body count this way. I'm not sure even the Romans were this gratuitously violent. Shortly after Alarbus's death, Roman emperor Saturnius marries the captured Tamora... AND TITUS STAYS ON AS A TOP GENERAL, HOPING HIS CAREER CAN CONTINUE TO RISE, WITH TAMORA AS THE NEW EMPRESS! What could possibly go wrong?

Outrageous.

Absurd.

Ridiculous.

On one hand, Titus is a brilliant and merciless Roman general. On the other hand, is he so naive as to not anticipate retribution? Are we just going to give the Bard a pass on this?

I guess we can, because Titus is Shakespeare's first tragedy, and the play reflects the vulgar popular tastes of the day. I hadn't known this when I posted the above pic of Sissy Spacek, but Carrie is similar to Titus, in that Carrie is one of Stephen King's earlier and bloodier works, and arguably not as artful or sophisticated as his later writing.

Moving on with my complaints about Titus, there is a lot of back-and-forth between Titus and Tamora killing each other's children, which in itself is disturbing enough, but the whole treatment of Titus' daughter Levinia is just too over the top cruel and mean-spirited. I've never seen an author abuse a character so, and here it isn't even in the service of any important or profound point. It's pure pornography of suffering, like those Saw or Hostel movies. In fact, I'm pretty sure no character in any of those movies gets worse than Levinia does in this play.

After pointing this out, I feel a little weird raising my last complaint with the Titus: that none of it is true. No, I wouldn't want all this grusome stuff to have actually happened, but I'm just saying I always appreciated learning a little history from Mr. Shakespeare. Julias Caesar and Coriolanus were both based on real events, which gaves them an added cool Titus Andronicus will never have. ( )

Shakespeare's most violent and gory play, Titus Andronicus was written in 1592, and represents the dramatist's first foray into the popular genre of revenge tragedy (many editors argue with at least one other collaborator). The result was spectacular, including scenes of murder, human sacrifice, rape, bodily mutilation and cannibalism. Set in late-imperial Rome, the action begins with the Roman general Titus Andronicus and his triumphant return from wars with the Goths. Leading Queen Tamora and her sons as prisoners, Titus stumbles into a power struggle between Saturninus and his brother Bassianus. Titus fatally backs Saturninus, who rapidly turns on the old general and marries Tamora. The implications for the Andronicus family are disastrous. More of Titus' sons are killed, his daughter Lavinia is brutally raped by Tamora's sons, and as Titus begins his descent into madness and despair he even has his own hand cut off in an act of awful trickery. As Titus plots his bloody revenge, he reflects that "Rome is but a wilderness of tigers". The ending is one of the most gruesome conclusions to any dramatic tragedy, and leaves Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs looking quite restrained. Although the play has put audiences off for centuries due to its apparently gratuitous violence, more recently critics have discerned something more to it than pure shock, but that might say more about us than the Elizabethans. .--Jerry Brotton

I know it's not his best, and it's not as much fun as Tamburlaine, the Marlowe play Shakespeare was ripping off, but I have a soft spot for it. ( )

Incredibly bloody, even by modern standards. ( )