این نمایشنامه ۱۰ تا مرگ داره... سه تا دست بریده و یک زبان بریده... و به این ترتیب اولین نمایشنامه شکسپیر خشن‌ترین نمایشنامه‌ش لقب می‌گیره... البته نمایشنامه‌ی تیتوس اندرونیکوس به اندازه‌ی بقیه نمایشنامه‌های معروف شکسپیر پر از ماجرا و با ریتم بالاست. ( )

My godfathers, this is bloody! The cast count at the end is barely a fraction of the beginning. I can imagine actors eyeing up how far they survive rather than a measure of how many lines they get.
Titus Andronicus returns to Rome with the Queen of the Goths and her sons as prisoners. He has lost 21 sons in the 10 years at the wars, and his first act is the sacrifice the Queen's eldest son to the gods and honour his own dead. It doesn't really get a lot better from there on in.
I listened to this and it was actually really easy to follow because the characters have a habit of announcing themselves by name, so that it's usually pretty clear who our of this predominantly male cast was speaking. The subject matter is so very grim that I can't imagine that this is easy to watch (I barely coped with seeing the King Lear eye scene, this would have been worse). Difficult to rate, it's so terribly violent that it almost becomes cartoonish. I suggest some of the others as better plays and more enjoyable subject matter. ( )

The play’s crude, melodramatic style and its numerous savage incidents led many critics to believe it was not written by Shakespeare. Modern criticism, however, tends to regard the play as authentic. Although not ranked with Shakespeare’s other great Roman plays, Titus Andronicus relates its story of revenge and political strife with a uniformity of tone and consistency of dramatic structure. Sources for the story include Euripides’ Hecuba, Seneca’s Thyestes and Troades, and parts of Ovid and Plutarch. More important, an 18th-century chapbook titled The History of Titus Andronicus, though clearly too late to have served as Shakespeare’s source, may well have been derived from a closely similar prose version that Shakespeare could have known.

Titus Andronicus returns to Rome after having defeated the Goths, bringing with him Queen Tamora, whose eldest son he sacrifices to the gods. The late emperor’s son Saturninus is supposed to marry Titus’s daughter Lavinia; however, when his brother Bassianus runs away with her instead, Saturninus marries Tamora. Saturninus and Tamora then plot revenge against Titus. Lavinia is raped and mutilated by Tamora’s sadistic sons Demetrius and Chiron, who cut off her hands and cut out her tongue so that she will be unable to testify against them. She nonetheless manages, by holding a stick in her mouth and guiding it with the stumps of her hands, to reveal the names of her ravishers. Titus now emerges as the revenger who must bring Tamora’s brutal family to account. Tamora takes as her lover a black man named Aaron the Moor; between them they produce a mulatto child of whom Aaron is intensely proud. Titus’s garish revenge begins as he puts on the guise of madness. He pretends to accept Demetrius and Chiron as the personifications of Rape and Murder, invites them into his house, and murders them, with Lavinia holding a basin to catch their blood. Titus then prepares a feast in which, acting as cook, he serves up to Tamora her own sons baked in a dish. Titus kills Lavinia to end her shame, stabs Tamora, and is cut down by Saturninus, at which Titus’s son Lucius responds by delivering Saturninus a fatal blow. Aaron the Moor is to be executed as well for his villainies. The blood-filled stage is presided over finally by Lucius and Titus’s brother, Marcus, as the sole survivors of Titus’s much-wronged family. ( )

Jaw-dropping. Unrelentingly violent. It's basically the slasher/tragedy counterpart to Comedy of Errors, where Shakespeare decides on the one thing he's doing and then just really packs it in there over and over again. I do see how someone could get enjoyment out of this on a first, surprised, read, and I did.... kind of. But mostly I didn't. The fact that my favorite scene was when Quintus fell in the hole shows you I'd rather have the slapstick of A&C. ( )

My secret favorite Shakespeare play! You can really see the clear inspiration from "The Spanish Tragedie" as Shakespeare adapted the plays and the ideas into "Hamlet." ( )