Titus: Why Now?

Next week's school play is Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.  In today's post, Mr Broughton offers an introduction to his version of the tragedy: you can also watch a new trailer for the production here.  

‘A heap of rubbish’ was Edward Ravenscroft’s description of the play, although he was happy enough to create from it one of the most faithful Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, one which enjoyed huge popularity for over fifty years.
Possibly Shakespeare’s most successful play in his own lifetime, Titus Andronicus was hugely popular on the continent too before it fell into obscurity during the nineteenth century, finally to be damned by T S Eliot as ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’.

If the death knell seemed to have sounded for Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, everything changed in the aftermath of the Second World War, Harold Hobson writing that ‘there is absolutely nothing in the bleeding barbarity of Titus Andronicus which would have astonished anyone at Buchenwald’. Suddenly the play seemed to offer an honest and important insight into a humanity capable of any atrocity and a universe without divine justice – ‘this is tragedy naked, godless and unredeemed' wrote Kenneth Tynan in praise of Peter Brook’s landmark 1955 revival.

Since then interest in the play has exploded with a near-exponential increase in productions of the play (over a hundred-and-fifty have been recorded in the past twenty years) and academic essays, many of which identify how within this ‘heap of rubbish’ actually lies an intricately structured series of symmetries, parallels and inversions along with a highly complex web of symbolism and intertextual references.

Far from juvenilia, the play is packed with characters and ideas which would resurface in different forms in Shakespeare’s later plays: the Lady Macbeth driven to commit murder, the Iago manipulator, the descent into madness of Lear, the cruel ‘justice’ inflicted on Gloucester. Titus’s son is even compared to Coriolanus.

Never has the play felt so modern as today, not only in its disconcerting Tarantino-like shifts of tone but also in the issues it addresses: knife crime, vigilante-based justice, wars and walls to keep the barbarians out, honour killing, the objectification of women, ritual beheadings as a provocative show of political strength, the denial of voice to the victims of sexual assault and the all too audible voice of male ‘banter’ on sexual conquest – this may be a play where Shakespeare forces the audience to interrogate its attitudes towards violence through sudden tonal shifts but never once is it invited to laugh with its most morally bankrupt characters.

If Tamora’s sons present possibly Shakespeare’s most damning indictment of toxic masculinity, it is a theme which resonates through most of the play’s characters, even ‘civilised’ Marcus providing a devastating demonstration of the male gaze. So prevalent is the savagely patriarchal ideology that one might feel a production is doomed to portray violence and victimisation as inherently male and female qualities respectively.

Julie Taymor’s stunning film adaptation of the play attempted to address this, seeking to decouple masculinity and violence by developing the role of Titus’s grandson (an idea first explored by Jane Howell in her adaptation for the BBC), although its sentimental conclusion hardly corresponds to research into the effects of exposure to violence on young children.

Regarding female victimisation, both films as well as the major recent stage productions by Blanche McIntyre and Lucy Bailey all chose to portray Lavinia as a mostly passive figure and a willing participant in her father’s ultimate plans for her. Shakespeare seals her fate, but there are clear pointers in his script that a production need not interpret her voicelessness in this way.

 Any production of Titus must embrace the bleakness of Shakespeare’s vision, but there is nothing in the play to suggest that the characters are destined to enact the gender stereotypes their society projects on to them. Fate and gods are hardly credible forces in this play: responsibility for the play’s acts of violence lies firmly in the hands of their perpetrators and the society that produced them, and the modernity of this take on tragedy may also account for the play’s regained popularity.

Titus runs from 21st-23rd March, at 7.30pm in the Pepys Theatre, and you can watch the original trailer for the play here.