Read Titus Andronicus - In Person

Read Titus Andronicus with us!

Trigger warning: This is a Shakespearean tragedy. You have been warned.

Titus Andronicus has the highest body count among all Shakespeare's plays, with 14 deaths on stage. It also has the greatest variety of gruesome deaths, so it is hard to choose a favorite. According to Wikipedia, every one of these deaths has its source in a classical story, mostly Roman but some Greek; so it appears that Shakespeare was attempting to stitch together a "best of" (or perhaps "worst of") play. He also stitched together pieces of Roman history, with aspects of the Republic, the early Empire, and the invasion by the Goths all tumbled together. His Roman history here is about as accurate as his geography of Bohemia.

This is known to be an early play, and it seems that Shakespeare was still finding his feet as a tragedian. The revenge tragedy was a very popular genre in the years just before Shakespeare started his career, and he was likely imitating those plays and trying to outdo them at the gore game. He had some stiff competition (so to speak) from Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays, but seems to have held his own. So popular were these revenge stories that there was a contemporary ballad, Titus Andronicus' Complaint, recounting essentially the same events as in our play. In fact, it was exactly contemporaneous: it was first entered into the Stationers' Register in 1594, the same year as Shakespeare's version, and it is not known which was written first.

Given that this is Shakespeare, there is of course much more going on than revenge. There's also betrayal. There are political and social themes as well: what are the pitfalls in choosing a ruler? how is a leader returning from war to adjust to civic life, and do his soldierly ethics work in peacetime? There are the simultaneous strengths and vulnerabilities of family ties, and the opposing pulls of love, hate, and duty as the characters conceive them.

And there's Aaron the Moor, the villain's villain, who revels in evil itself. Even more than Richard III, he is aware of his evil and accepts it as his nature. While Richard is motivated by power, Aaron seems to have a pure, disinterested love of evil for its own sake. One might speculate that in writing Othello, Shakespeare was making some kind of amends by separating the evil from the Moor and placing it into Iago.

There are some good film versions of Titus Andronicus. Julie Taymor's Titus has a stellar cast, and stays very close to the text while introducing some very odd framing and surreal elements. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be streamable. If anyone still has a DVD player, it is available at public libraries.

It will be a wild and bumpy ride. Join us, but be careful not to fall off the tumbril.

Logistics:

Recommended text is Folger's, but we make it work no matter which version you have!
https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/

This is an in-person reading hosted by Stuart. He promises not to bring the chicken pot pies with the little signs saying "tastes like chicken" this time.

The parts list goes up at the end of the day on February 15. If you have a role preference, please send me a Meetup message with your top three choices. I will do my best to match everyone with their role choice.

On the day, we will read through the first half of the play, take a break, read the second half of the play, short break, then have a short discussion.

We look forward to reading with you!