Shakespeare’s Roman Shades (Titus Andronicus and Titus)

REVISTA Scripta Uniandrade, 2019

The present work addresses two contemporary performances of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, written in collaboration with playwright George Peele. The present work analyzes Michael Fentiman's (2013) and Lucy Bailey's (2014) productions. The focus of the analyses lies on the relationship between the most violent moments in the play and characters' submission or resistance to State power. Instead of trying to establish "Shakespeare's politics" or arguing whether the play is reactionary or revolutionary, the present work, drawing mainly on the works of Anderson, Fernie, and Gil, concludes that contemporary performances of the play reveal intricate ideas about power, freedom, and politics. It is precisely in the moments of violence that those ideas can be perceived more clearly.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2004

English Studies, 2007

Elizabethan poets and playwrights had a remarkably open view of literary borrowing. They reasoned that since ideas belonged to no one man, it was perfectly natural to manipulate others' narratives and incorporate them into ''new'' dramatic works. Sir Philip Sidney noted in his Apologie for Poetrie that ''even historiographers. .. have been glad to borrow both fashion and. .. weight of the poets; so Herodotus. .. and all the rest that followed him, either stole or usurped, of poetry, their passionate describing of passions, the many particularities of battles which no man could affirm.'' 1 In a similar view over two hundred years later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge reflected that truth is ''a divine ventriloquist'', and that an author should ''care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed''. 2 The usual subjects of these Elizabethan revivals were classical Latin works. Shakespeare, despite the way Ben Jonson praised his works as ''not of an age, but for all time'', 3 was also a man of his era, subject to many of the same rules and trends as his contemporaries. When adaptations of classical Greek and Roman drama such as Seneca's Thyestes came into vogue with works like Marlowe's Hero and Leander (c. 1598) and Beaumont's Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (c. 1602), Shakespeare's immersion in the masters led to an extreme play that reaches classical levels of grotesqueness. His Titus Andronicus (c. 1594) takes parodic delight in its roots in Ovid's version of the Philomela myth, transforming it into stage drama that both delights and sickens its audiences. Shakespeare's Ovidian precursor delivers a tale of gore that develops the themes of barbarism and silence. In Titus, Shakespeare roots out the essence of Ovid's characters, exposes their most primal motivations, and establishes a partnership with the long-dead poet. As Frances Meres wrote in his 1598 piece, Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury: ''As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoreas, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.'' 4 As sweet

Titus Andronicus and Violence.

Disrupting the cinematic narrative of Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), an adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, is a nightmare sequence in which the newly crowned empress, Tamora, stands face-to-face with her enemy, Titus. Images of dismembered limbs engulfed in flames appear in the background, sailing forward, until they inundate the screen behind the characters' silhouetted profiles. 1 Invoking the murders of Tamora's eldest son Alarbus and Titus's youngest son Mutius, the flying, burning body parts symbolize the powerfulness, unpleasantness, and mysteriousness of the creative process, harkening back, via homage to the horror of Seneca, to the ritualistic, religious roots of theater in the Greek festival of Dionysus. In Titus, especially in such magnificent scenes as this, Taymor combines a slew of culturally rich metaphors, in effect demonstrating what transversal theory calls "investigative-expansive wherewithal" and the "principle of translucency." (See photo 9.1.)

2014

The problem addressed in the present study concerns William Shakespeare’s plays in performance on television, most specifically the presence of violence in BBC’s production of Titus Andronicus, directed by Jane Howell. I have come up with two sets of hypotheses. The first is that the violence identifiable in the playtext seems to have been recreated by Howell through the specificities of the medium, making such violence neither excessively gory nor comic. The second is that Jane Howell’s utilization of alienating devices in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, as pointed out by Graham Holderness, can also be verified in Titus Andronicus. Such elements may be related to the aforementioned treatment of violence in the play and may serve as a way of making political or aesthetic commentaries on the play itself. Thus, in order to approach my corpus I relied on television and performance studies and Bertolt Brecht’s and some of his commentators’ writings on epic theater. I have also brought to...

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy takes seriously the speculative and world-making properties of Shakespeare's art. Maintaining a broad view of 'philosophy' that accommodates fi rst-order questions of metaphysics, ethics, politics and aesthetics, the series also expands our understanding of philosophy to include the unique kinds of theoretical work carried out by performance and poetry itself. These scholarly monographs will reinvigorate Shakespeare studies by opening new interdisciplinary conversations among scholars, artists and students.

2015

Since Jan Kott’s monograph entitled Shakespeare Our Contemporary had been published, the question whether Shakespeare is our contemporary, received a distinct edge. In answering this question, I wish to examine the concept of the world as theatrical, being permeated with media – or in other words, being a universal stage, a Theatrum Mundi. I wish to examine the role this concept plays in making Shakespeare’s dramas our contemporaries in the sense that they relate directly to the present, the actual “here and now” of the audience, their lives and their personal responsibility in their life choices. I am interested in the way two contemporary cinematic adaptations may become, or strive to become our contemporaries by applying versions of the Theatrum Mundi concept. What is it, that may address a 21 st century global audience of Shakespeare that will make his dramas our contemporaries? Both movies to be examined thematize the grim social reality of the Second World War, and make the co...