Product Description

Titus Andronicus was the young Shakespeare's audacious, sporadically brilliant experiment in sensational tragedy. Its horrors are notorious, but its powerful poetry of grief is the work of a true tragic poet. Introducing this edition, E.M. Waith provides a fresh view of the play in its historical context as well as an original discussion of the famous `Peacham' drawing - the only surviving contemporary Shakespeare illustration. An illustrated account of performances, notably Peter Brook's production with Oliver as Titus, leads to an assessment of the play's qualities in the light of its critical reception. The eighteenth-century version of the play's probable source is given in one of the appendices.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200590 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

Synopsis
Titus Andronicus was the young Shakespeare's audacious, sporadically brilliant experiment in sensational tragedy. Its horrors are notorious, but its powerful poetry of grief is the work of a true tragic poet. Introducing this edition, E.M. Waith provides a fresh view of the play in its historical context as well as an original discussion of the famous 'Peacham' drawing - the only surviving contemporary Shakespeare illustration. An illustrated account of performances, notably Peter Brook's production with Oliver as Titus, leads to an assessment of the play's qualities in the light of its critical reception. The eighteenth-century version of the play's probable source is given in one of the appendices.

About the Author
Eugene M. Waith is Professor Emeritus at the Department of English, Yale University.

Customer Reviews

Titus reappraised
Titus Andonicus is often regarded as something of a joke: crude juvenilia, bloodthirsty sensationalism, tasteless exploitation. Consequently, it has frequently been excised from the canon. TS Eliot, for one, thought it 'one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written'. Here, in this Arden 3rd edition, Jonathan Bate unapologetically champions the play and argues that it is authentically Shakespearean, structurally complex and, contrary to Eliot, 'one of the dramatist's most inventive plays'.

Bate certainly makes a persuasive case. He combines an easy, conversational eloquence ('You don't have to be a card-carrying Freudian to see the sexual significance of ...') with penchant analysis. But this is not always an easy read, despite the occasional appearance of what might be described as a popular touch (he concedes, for instance, that readers may find certain issues, such as the problem of the play's date, 'technical and boring' - a consideration that would scarcely have worried previous Arden editors). Even advanced students may need a dictionary of terms to access the 'hermeneutic blockage' and 'deconstructionist's "aporia" ' of page 35.

What is made very clear, though, is that for a fuller appreciation of the play, we need to understand a contemporary audience's response to episodes which may seem puzzling to us. For example, the barbarian Goth who contemplates a monastery isn't so much a clumsy example of anachronism but an instructive image of escape from Roman tyranny - doubly so, firstly by means of the Goths' defeat of a decadent Rome, secondly through the Reformation's liberation of religion from an equally decadent Papacy. Bate reminds us, in this example, of how perceptions of Romans and Goths have changed over the intervening 400 years. The Goths, from an Elizabethan perspective, were not primarily destructive, shaggy-haired barbarians but a positive, reinvigorating people who helped European culture to flourish after centuries of imperial greed and misrule.

This edition is unconventional in its analysis of Elizabethan attitudes to revenge. I'd always thought that this was quite plain and unequivocal (' "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," said the Lord' being the commonly quoted Biblical text telling us that retribution is a divine, not human, prerogative.) Bate, however, refers to an essay by Bacon which presents an alternative, more ambivalent, view in which the public good is a key consideration. He follows this point up with a demonstration of how Titus, the avenger, is in some sense the embodiment of the legal process, and not simply an individual citizen taking the law into his own hands to right private wrongs.

And what does Bate say about the play's 'excessive violence'? Again, putting Titus in its historical context, he argues that, compared to the real horror and bloody spectacle of public execution, the play's violence is often sublimated through the artifice of masque.

The Arden 3rd edition has established a reputation for being thought-provoking and eloquent as well as authoritative. This, one of the earlier titles, is one that helped to establish that reputation.

Arden Shakespeare
In some respects I think it'd be rather presumptuous of me to attempt to review Shakespeare. Someone so well known and influential wouldn't benefit from my opinions on their work, plus there are more scholarly and concise reviews out there. But I can comment on these Arden versions. Of all the Shakespeare I've read I've always found the Arden copies to be well laid out and to have excellent commentary and notes on the text. They really add to your understanding of Shakespeares outstanding plays and introduce you to the depth in his work. They have superb paper quality and are bound well, withstanding repeated readings and intensive study. For your collection of Shakespeare you can't do much better than Arden publications, some are quite hard to get hold of but it's worth the effort.

Shakespeare invented action films three centuries ago
Everything and even more has been written on this play, even that it was not authored by Shakespeare himself, as if it had any kind of weight in analyzing and appreciating the play. It has a perfect shakespearian pattern. Titus Andronicus, a victorious Roman general, comes back home and yields the emperor's throne that is proposed to him to the legitimate heir Saturninus. He also presents the newly chosen Emperor with his prisoners the Queen of the Goths, Tamora, and her two surviving sons, after he has dispatched the third son to the sacrificing altar on which his own four sons cut him up in pieces, limb from limb, and ungut him before burning these offerings for the satisfaction of their twenty one dead brothers. Along with these three war prisoners, understood as slaves that can be dismembered any time for just any kind of rite, comes Aaron, a black Moor with a Jewish name. His skin color will systematically be transferred to his soul and he will be depicted as thoroughly evil, irreligious and misbelieving. The Emperor accepts the present but instead of keeping them as slaves, pleasure slaves, even for the pleasure of a sacrifice or dismemberment, which would have been normal, he marries Tamora and promotes the two sons to princedom and Aaron to counselor to the Queen-Empress. This disturbs the natural order of Rome and it sends the story reeling on the most devilish trail. But we must keep in mind that this barbarity is normal if performed within the canons of Roman society. They only become evil when they go against these canons. The play will run its bloody course till the final rehabilitation or restoration of just Roman order in the person of the last surviving son of Titus Andronicus. The whole play is thus a long depiction of violence justified and sanctified by power, treachery in the name of pleasure for the treacherous one and pain for the victims. The objective is to inflict pain and inspire horror, fear, awe. But the play is filled with references to Greek or Roman myths, Philomel's and Lucrece's first of all, and many others. In the Elizabethan context it's even quite in phase when we think of the standard death penalty spectacle of the time, drawn-hanged-quartered-eviscerated-all-parts-and-guts-burnt- beheaded-and-the-head-set-on-a-pole-for-public-exhibition. Can we say as has been recently written by JDWActor on Everything2.com (October 19, 2006) that it is a comedy of violence? I think it's more than that. It is the attempt to invent an all-sensory show that does not require any intellectual effort nor imaginary work. We are bombarded with the real thing all along. Shakespeare has invented here what he will rarely do again, viz. an action play in line with modern hollywoodian action films or TV news programs. The objective is to shock the audience into enjoying the grossness of the depiction and situation. We can just wonder how they did it without modern special effects: hands are cutoff, heads are decapitated, throats are slashed, even two men are decapitated and bled on the stage. But it is all, even if extreme, Shakespeare. Think of the five dead on the stage in Romeo and Juliet for one example, two killed with a sword, one with a dagger and two poisoned. What's more the poetic style is intense and rich and dominated by birds and tigers brought together in the last few lines: "But throw her forth to beasts and birds of prey/ ...let birds on her take pity." Even if at times slightly sickening: "Lend me a hand and I will give you mine" says Titus Andronicus meaning every single word of it.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne