Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens

Introduction

Titus Andronicus

Timon of Athens

About the Text

Key Facts:
Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus

Textual Notes

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

Titus Andronicus
in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of
Titus Andronicus:
An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Gregory Doran and Yukio Ninagawa

Key Facts:
Timon of Athens

Timon of Athens

Textual Notes

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

Timon of Athens
in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of
Timon:
An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: An Interview with Gregory Doran

Playing Timon: Michael Pennington

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing:
Titus Andronicus
and
Timon of Athens

References:
Titus Andronicus
and
Timon of Athens

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

Shakespeare’s most sustained and enduringly influential encounter with the culture of antiquity, which was itself such a formative influence on his own culture, came in the three plays that he based on Sir Thomas North’s English translation of Plutarch’s
Lives of the Most Noble Grecians and Romans: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra
, and
Coriolanus
. But these great tragedies were not his only forays into the classical world. He also wrote a long poem about early Rome’s transition from monarchy to republic (
The Rape of Lucrece
), a dramatization of part of the Trojan war (
Troilus and Cressida
), a strange, generically hybrid play about the Romans in Britain (
Cymbeline
), and a romance of the ancient world based ultimately on sources from the Hellenistic period (
Pericles
). And there are two further “classical” plays, which, though one belongs to the early Elizabethan phase of Shakespeare’s career and the other to his mature Jacobean years, have fascinating similarities that make them into a most intriguing pair:
Titus Andronicus
and
Timon of Athens
.

The full extent of their Shakespeareanness has always been doubted: scholars are now all agreed that
Timon
was a collaboration with Thomas Middleton, and most agree that
Titus
is marked with the hand of George Peele—though there is still a debate as to whether the play was an active collaboration or a Shakespearean reworking and development of an earlier effort by Peele. Both plays include a high proportion of original plotting, as opposed to the Plutarch-based Roman tragedies, which follow their historical sources with a degree of rigor. Both plays have a hero who becomes increasingly isolated and verges toward madness. Both make much of the contrast between the supposedly civilized but actually corrupt city (Rome, Athens) and a wood or wilderness beyond. Both include soliloquies of great denunciatory force. Yet for three centuries, neither was staged with any regularity.

In the late twentieth century, however,
Titus
came into its own: in an age of genocides in real life and extreme, often playful violence within cinematic art, it seemed a very modern work. Indeed, in 1999 the immensely imaginative director Julie Taymor turned it into one of the finest of all Shakespearean movies, starring Anthony Hopkins.
Timon
, on the other hand, still awaits its modern rediscovery. But in an age dominated by financial anxiety, it may well be about to come into its own, perhaps justifying the sense of its importance that we find in the economic writings of its most famous nineteenth-century advocate, Karl Marx.

From the 1700s to the Second World War
Titus Andronicus
was considered so shocking and so subversive of the noble Roman ideal of decorum that it was hardly ever staged and was frequently said to be by someone other than Shakespeare. High-minded critics and scholars could not imagine the National Poet soiling himself with a barbaric feast of rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism. Yet
Titus
was one of the most popular plays of the Elizabethan age.

A glorious mishmash of history and invention, it creates an imaginary Rome that is simultaneously democratic and imperial. The play is not so much a historical work as a meditation on history. We might call it a “meta-history.” The political structures of the early Roman republic and the decadence of the late Roman Empire are deliberately overlaid upon each other. They are also mingled with the preoccupations of late Elizabethan England: the opening political dispute between Saturninus and Bassianus is over the question of the succession to the recently deceased emperor, a matter of considerable concern at the time Shakespeare was writing, when the old Virgin Queen was nearing the end of her life and there were several rival candidates to succeed her.

We are asked to imagine that this could be any time in the Roman era and no time. The spiral of revenge begins with an act of human sacrifice, the slaying of Tamora’s son Alarbus to appease the shades of those of Titus’ sons who have been killed in the wars against the Goths. Historically, human sacrifice was never practiced in ancient Rome, but mythically all cultures have their foundational myths of such offerings. For Shakespeare and his audience, Rome was evocative of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the pagan empire of the past. So it is that the action is peppered with allusions to the ultimate sacrifice, the crucifixion of God’s own son, and to the doctrinal differences consequent upon it. The word “martyred,” which was deeply significant to both Catholics and Protestants, is applied to Lavinia, and when she assists her father in the butchery of Chiron and Demetrius, she is asked to “receive the blood,” a phrase that darkly parodies the language of the Eucharist, in which we are redeemed by the blood of Christ—though whether the wine of the feast was real or symbolic blood was a matter of fierce debate.

The play sealed Shakespeare’s reputation as the authentic successor to the original angry young man of English drama, Christopher Marlowe. Aaron’s delight in his own villainy is shamelessly pillaged from Barabas’ and Ithamore’s boasting in the same vein in Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta
. Shakespeare was a contrarian. He took the commonplaces of his age and stood them on their heads—or perhaps sliced off their heads and baked them in a pasty. Rome was synonymous with civilization and the Goths with barbarism: so Shakespeare considers the possibility that Rome was just as barbarous as the Gothic forest. Roman Stoicism proposed that it was healthy to keep your emotions under tight restraint: so Shakespeare voices the need to give your feelings vent (“Sorrow concealèd, like an oven stopped, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is”). The law prescribed that punishment should be left to the justice system: so Shakespeare dramatized the primal—though ultimately self-destructive—attraction of acting out revenge for oneself. A daughter has been raped and mutilated. The law is not there to help; even the poor Clown goes from quest for imperial justice to arbitrary execution. Titus accordingly raises the stakes and thinks of a revenge so hideous that it outdoes the original crime. This is but an extreme version of an instinct that is still with us: the police do nothing about burglaries, so out comes the homeowner’s shotgun.