Goths and monsters

Chiron, Aaron, and Demetrius shoot the breeze.

To remind you of where we were when we left off (and I absolutely understand if you can’t remember back that far), the defeated queen of the Goths, Tamora, has managed to wrangle her way from enslaved prisoner to empress in a matter of a little under 500 lines of text. Not bad going. The first act closes with various characters’ sons being killed off and various undercurrents of revenge-to-be-exacted rippling through proceedings. We’ve already established that this is to be a particularly bloody play and it’s started promisingly. Now it’s time to focus attention on Aaron, Tamora’s irredeemably evil bit-on-the-side.

Aaron opens the second act alone on stage, soliloquying his devious little heart out about his ladyfriend’s recent change in fortune. Aaron sees in her elevation an opportunity for him to live it up and, though Tamora is now the first lady of the Roman Empire, he has no intention of letting this get in the way of his position as first cuckolder. His speech is full of intimations of how he is going to “arm [his] heart and fit [his] thoughts / To mount aloft with [his] imperial mistress, / And mount her pitch whom [he] in triumph long / Has prisoner held fettered in amorous chains”. So Tamora’s high social standing isn’t the only thing he’ll be climbing onto, am I right? Am I right? This is Aaron through-and-through: pragmatic and scheming and totally self-interested; not jealous of his lover’s husband-to-be, but welcoming of him as a means to his own lofty end.

The sexual politics don’t stop there, however. Aaron’s alone time is interrupted by Tamora’s two surviving sons bursting on stage in the middle of an argument with the delightful stage direction “Enter CHIRON and DEMETRIUS, braving” – people don’t brave with each other nearly enough anymore. The theme of their quarreling is Titus’ daughter, Lavinia, whom both of them want to “achieve”. Lavinia, remember, is engaged to Bassianus, the emperor’s brother (having been briefly engaged to the emperor himself for about 30 lines in the previous scene). Were it ever in any doubt that Lavinia is no more than a unit of exchange to these men, Demetrius makes it plain:

DEMETRIUS:     Why makes thou it so strange?
She is a woman, therefore may be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore may be won;
She is Lavinia, therefore must be loved.

Charming. In a fit of enormous hypocrisy, Aaron initially warns them against sleeping with the wife (read “property”) of a Roman man, as he reminds them “Know ye not in Rome / How furious and impatient they be / And cannot brook competitors in love?” Well, quite. But no sooner has he scolded them for fighting over another man’s woman than he comes up with a solution to their problem that’s, well, morally dubious at best: instead of fighting over Lavinia, why don’t you both have her? Bros before hoes, man. Why don’t you go to a forest outside the city where she’s known to walk, lie in wait, and both take turns on her to your rapey hearts’ content? In fact, why don’t we ask Tamora for advice on how best to go about ensuring this comes off well? Yes, that’s right, let’s ask your mother – my girlfriend – what might be the best way her sons can gang-rape her future sister-in-law? Doesn’t that sound like a lovely idea, a real family enterprise? 

They both agree, and the three of them head off to tell Tamora. They’re an adorable bunch, really.

In a flourish of racy foreshadowing, Aaron argues in favour of the forest as the rapists’ venue-of-choice as “The palace [is] full of tongues, of eyes and ears, / The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull.” By the end of the play, the woods won’t be the only thing missing a few sense organs.

It’s all a bit much to take, to be perfectly honest, but, if nothing else, this scene has taught us that early modern Londoners used the terms “I’d hit that” and “snatch” in hilariously smutty ways, and for that alone we should be grateful.

Star (cross’d lover) Wars

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the result of a nonsensical conversation with Mr Pete Moles that took place a long time ago (in a galax… ugh, no). Things got silly and then, a few days later, Pete made this. Several weeks after that, I posted it.

Enjoy!

My girl is the queen of the savages

Jessica Lange as Tamora in the 1999 Julie Taymor film Titus

When last we met, Tamora, the queen of the Goths, had just seen her eldest son taken off stage and brutally sacrificed to the gods under the orders of Titus Andronicus. She’s, understandably, a little upset, and sure who can blame her?

Already victorious against the Goths, and with their queen and her heirs (and her bit on the side) in captivity, is this not quite literally overkill on Titus’ part? Why not just let well enough alone? This could be seen in two ways, I suppose. We might initially think of it as excessive cruelty, merely the first needless death in a play that will see many more, but it could also be seen as exemplary of Titus’ Romanitas, his Roman-ness.

TITUS: Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me.
These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld
Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain
Religiously, they ask a sacrifice.
To this your son is marked, and die he must
T’appease their groaning shadows that are gone.

Titus orders Alarbus’ sacrifice to mark and honour the deaths of the Roman soldiers killed during this conflict with the Goths (specifically his own sons, of which 21 were killed during the donnybrook). It is the good and dutiful gods-fearing Roman thing to do. So, fine, let’s accept it as a necessary evil from a time that placed a lower value on human life than we aspire to. At least he gives him a nice clean death – to quote Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North – a soldier’s death, right?

LUCIUS: See, lord and father, how we have performed
Our Roman rites. Alarbus’ limbs are lopped
And entrails feed the sacrificing fire

Oh. Who are the real barbarians here, eh? Eh, comrades?

It is a move that Titus will regret, as it is this sacrifice that sets Tamora’s lust for vengeance in motion. Tamora publicly prostrates herself in front of Titus and pleads for her son’s life, a plea he ignores. This debasement of her royal status will not go unpunished.

It is at this point that we meet Titus’ daughter Lavinia for the first time. Later, she will come onstage with one of the best stage directions in all of Shakespeare, but for now a simple ‘Enter LAVINIA’ will have to do. Soon after she arrives, the tribunes offer Titus the throne, which he, having already done his duty for Rome, refuses and offers to Saturninus instead.

Lavinia gets a very hard time in this play. When we first meet her she’s engaged to be married to Bassianus; she’s then claimed by his brother Saturninus by way of thanking Titus for offering him the throne, but is then, lines later, rejected by him in favour of Tamora and is thus re-engaged to Bassianus. She is a unit of exchange; a very mild, meek, obedient, unit of exchange. Not the best for the old sense of self-worth, to be fair.

While all this is happening, Titus further throws his sense of honour and Romanitas into question when he kills his own son Mutius for trying to protect Lavinia from being handed over to Saturninus (who, as we’ve just seen, has just developed a thing for Goth chicks, and doesn’t want her anymore). To Titus, Mutius’ protection of his sister is an act of disobedience against his father’s wishes, and is deserving of punishment. True, respecting your father is the good pious Roman thing to do, but then so, surely, is protecting your sister? And one would think that slicing open your son isn’t exactly the behaviour of a good pater familias? What would Aeneas think?

After much back-and-forth over who killed whom with what and why, who’s engaged to whom and for how long, and who dishonoured whose father and in what way, Tamora finishes the scene as Empress of Rome having entered in shackles, a prisoner of war. All in all, not bad going.

Quite clearly not one with whom to fuck.

Ay, Caesar, but not gone

For the day that’s in it.
Absolutely love this version of the assassination; it’s not Shakespeare, obviously, but still great.

Pulp Shakespeare

For those of you who haven’t seen this already, here you go.
Cleverer than I was expecting, i’faith.

Senatus Populusque Cruentus

As I suggested in the last post, it’s probably best to take Titus Andronicus as Shakespeare jumping on the bandwagon of the violent and popular revenge tragedy genre, and, as also noted, what better place to choose as a setting for such a play than ancient Rome?

Senatus Populusque Romanus

The delightfully-named Katharine Eisaman Maus, who supplied the introduction to Titus in my edition (“What edition is that, James?” Christ, we’ve been over this), argues that to the early moderns ancient Rome was less a physical place than “an anthology of stories” to be appropriated as required in the production of new art. Your typical Renaissance artistic standpoint. And, though Titus Andronicus is the only purely fictional of his Roman plays, as Eisaman Maus (again, great name) notes, Shakey “puts a great deal of emphasis on the play’s ‘Roman-ness’, making constant reference to classical myths, to legendary and historical figures, to imperial institutions, to the places and customs of ancient Rome.”

Mythologically, Ovid’s version of the story of the Athenian princess Philomela is particularly important, as is the Roman legend of Lucretia (whose rape was the catalyst for the formation of the Republic and to whom Shakespeare will return in his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece). Not only are these stories useful to Shakespeare from a plotting point of view but, in an almost postmodern twist, he has the characters on stage make near-constant reference to how like the story of Philomela the events unfolding around them seem.

Now, to the matter at hand.

The play begins in the aftermath of the death of an unnamed Caesar with an emperorless Rome on the brink of civil war. Leading the opposing sides are the two sons of the deceased Caesar (the Decaesar? …no?), Saturninus and Bassianus. Saturninus, the older of the two, sees the crown as his birthright, while Bassianus wants to put the decision to the Senate and people of Rome. A tribune, Marcus Andronicus, manages to calm the fraternal factions by announcing that the plebs would have his brother Titus, a general right this moment on his way back into Rome in triumph, as their emperor. The brothers agree to offer the throne to this third party and disband their followers, whereupon Titus Andronicus arrives on stage, with some high-profile captive Goths in tow. This party of inexcusably malignant miscreants comprises of the following: Tamora, queen of the Goths and conniving wench; her sons Alarbus, Demetrius, and Chiron – the latter two, at least, degenerates both; and one of the most one-dimensional, demonically evil, and racially problematic characters ever to corrupt a stage with his presence – Tamora’s lover, Aaron the Moor.

Goths in Rome. Wait…

In a play in which approximately 40% of the named characters that appear on stage will be killed (all horribly and mostly, the Dowager Countess would be delighted to hear, in full view of the audience), Shakespeare wastes no time. Despite Tamora’s pleas for clemency – pleas that see her debasing her royal status by kneeling in supplication to her captor – Titus allows his own sons to drag her eldest, Alarbus, to the wings and murder him as a sacrifice to honour the Romans killed in battle. The body count has begun, as has the instigation to horrible, horrible vengeance.

Now, though the first death happens off-stage – meaning we can’t really comment on how nasty it is (though Titus’ sons, Quintus, Mutius, and Lucius, do re-enter “with bloody swords“) – I promise you this the exception rather than the rule.

Suffice it to say there will be limb chopping.

There Will Be Blood

So it’s been so long that I forgot my password and had to reset it when I logged in, but I’m willing to ignore the radio silence of the last twelve months if you are. Deal?

Deal.

Titus Andronicus. It’s a meaty role.

I’m jumping over the end of the most recent Henry play in the interest of getting a decent start back into this thing. It’s been read, but nothing’s been written on it as yet. Ideally, I’ll do a general overview of all the Henrys when they’ve been finished, and I hope to get back to it then.

So, to move on.

For your consideration, I present to you our boy Shakespeare’s very first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, the play T.S. Eliot called “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all”. Harsh words, Thomas. The hatchet-job reviews don’t stop there, mind. Samuel Johnson, he of the dictionary (not to mention Dictionary 2: The Return of the Killer Dictionary) fame, complained that “the barbarity of the spectacles, and the general massacre which are here exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience”. The list of detractors is long and filled with legions of leering literary luminaries and acrimonious academics alike. More recent scholarship holds the play, by and large, in higher esteem; its shortcomings are looked upon as those of a young playwright trying his hand at tragedy for the first time. But do let’s try and make up our own minds when we come to it.

noT impreSsed Eliot

Not only is this William’s first tragedy, it’s his first Roman play: his first dalliance with a genre that will bring us the likes of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and, currently undergoing a bit of a revival thanks to Ralph Fiennes’ new talkie, Coriolanus.  It’s a genre in which Shakespeare will become very comfortable. And no wonder, as ancient Rome and its citizenry make for good tragedy fodder. It seems that ancient Rome, particularly if we listen to Plutarch (as William certainly did), abounded with egos that were ripe for the stage. It was lousy with god-like autocrats. You couldn’t move for fellas bestriding the narrow world like Colossuses.  And not only were Roman lives larger-than-life, they were bloody as all hell. Raping and pillaging that puts the Vikings to shame. Incestuous sheets that Claudius and Gertrude would blush to sleep in. All in all, good tragedy material.

That said, Titus Andronicus, unlike the other Roman plays, is entirely fictional. Shakespeare, at this point in his career, is merely using ancient Rome as a setting. Later on, he’ll dramatise the lives of historical and semi-historical figures, giving us an entirely different sort of history play than he gives us in the History Plays. For now, Rome offers him a lofty and violent context to set his first revenge tragedy.

The revenge tragedy was a genre of play, prevalent during the era, that was hugely popular, incredibly violent, and enormous amounts of fun. And I think it’s in this light that we should view Titus Andronicus. Taken in the context of the theatre of the late 16^th century, the seemingly adolescent vengeance-bent slasher-movie approach to drama was all the rage. Shakespeare’s livelihood, and that of his company, depended on the success of his plays, so it’s entirely understandable that he would seek to cash in on the popularity of the genre. Let’s, therefore, take this next play as our own introduction to the revenge tragedy.

And what better bloody revenge tragedy for us to – o-ho! – sink our teeth into than that of Titus Andronicus, eh?

You’ll see why that’s funny in a few posts’ time.

Well, I say ‘funny’…

We’re going to need matches, a lot of twine, some tar, and check next door for discarded bear limbs, will you? I dunno, whichever’s more flammable…

Bear in the Big Blue Playhouse

So. It’s the 1590s. Elizabeth is on the throne and I want to put on a play. Banned from performing in the City of London itself, I’m forced to produce it on the seedy south bank of the Thames, surrounded by bear-pits, prostitutes, and the actual Clink. Nevertheless, the show must go on, legs must be broken, there’s no business like show business, and it’s at least another ten years before we have to worry about saying ‘Macbeth’ with our customary reckless abandon – let’s get to it.

Hmm, what’s that? Ah, that Stratford chap’s got a new one? Excellent, let’s do that then. Oh, it’s another Henry play, eh? Well, people will go to anything that gets them in from the filth for a few hours. Call it Richard, Duke of York, or something – punters won’t realise what they’re letting themselves in for. No, don’t use that! Think of something better.

Anything strange or startling? A bit with a dog would be nice; went down very well in that Verona play last year. No? Well, never mind. Wouldn’t do to have the mutt humping Margaret of Valois’ leg while she’s petitioning the king of France, I suppose. Alright, well this seems fine. A few battles, some political intrigue, a bit of saucy banter with the commoner wife – very nice. Christ though, must they all be called either Richard or Edward? And we’ll need some different coloured hats or something so the poor buggers can tell who’s on which side. I hope you’re writing this down.

Right so, looks like we have ourselves a show, gentlemen. Now, casting – see if Burbage and Alleyn are about and…

What’s that? Yes, the second act, what about it? The battle scene with the York boys? Some special effects required? Oh, that’ll be no problem. We pulled off that gimmick with the heads on pikes kissing in the last one, didn’t we, so what’s he thrown at us this time?

EDWARD: Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns?

Three blazing suns that appear spontaneously in the air, descend from the sky, float around the stage, then merge into one glorious prophetic beaming gaseous fireball?

Ah.

…

How combustible do you reckon Will Kemp is?

The Names of the Roses

Edward IV. One character, many titles.

It would help if I actually went to see one of these things.

 

When you’re just reading the History plays it’s bloody difficult to remember who’s who and who’s on what side and when… and why has this character disappeared completely? (What’s that? Oh, they haven’t? They’re actually the king now? Ah.) This would, of course, all be overcome were I sitting there watching the characters in person, as opposed to dealing with their ever-changing titles in print.

In the first three acts of the play the Duke of York’s eldest son, Edward, is firstly the Earl of March, then the Duke of York, before suddenly becoming King Edward IV. Alright, that one’s not too bad, I grant you; at least he’s called Edward in the margins the whole way through. More confusing is how his younger brother, the hunchback Richard (son of Richard, Duke of York – who’s now dead), suddenly disappears and the Duke of Gloucester makes a stunning return from the grave. Now, had I been sitting in a theatre watching the play I can only imagine that I’d have thought to myself “Hang on a moment, this Duke of Gloucester chap’s vertebrae are suspiciously out of kilter. Why, that’s Richard!” and the action would have continued apace, and all would have been well.  What actually happened was that I began reading Act III, Scene ii, and had to stop for a minute, flip back to the start of the play, and check the cast of characters. There it was under the ‘Of the Duke of York’s Party’ section: ‘RICHARD, Edward’s brother, later Duke of GLOUCESTER’. Sneaky. In my defence, my main issue was that the original Gloucester (well, probably not the original Gloucester; but the one I knew and loved) was a pretty big hitter in 2 Henry VI, and in that play he was killed fairly definitively, his body having been dragged on stage ‘n’ all. It just seems cruel to change the name of a character you’ve just gotten used to to that of another one whose death you’ve just gotten over.*

The Tudor Rose, combining the white rose of York with the red rose of Lancaster. The emblematic equivalent of "Oh, can't we all just get along..."

The stage directions help out a little sometimes, come to think of it. In the opening scene of the play the main players of both the Yorkist and Lancastrian sides pile onto the stage to fight over the throne. The stage directions specify that the Yorkists all wear white roses in their hats, the Lancastrians red. This would have been fantastic. Just think how easy it that is for a spectator: Richard’s wearing white, that guy’s wearing white – they must be on the same side! Simples. Unfortunately for me, in their boundless editorial wisdom Greenblatt et alia decided against highlighting the characters’ names in red and/or white for my benefit. But I live in hope for the next edition.

While I have you here, a quick word on the naming of this one. I’ve already gone through, at length, the composition and performance chronology of the 3 parts of Henry VI. As we learned, what we now know as 1 Henry VI was, in fact, written after parts 2 and 3 (indeed, a Roman tragedy comes in between the writing of the third and first parts), so, obviously enough, this play wasn’t originally called Henry VI, Part 2. In its earliest known published form (the octavo of 1595), it’s called The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the Whole Contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke, with the further qualifier ‘as it was Sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his servants.’ Incidentally, it’s thought – for various reasons which I’ll leave to you, most esteemed readers, to wiki in your own time – that it was probably first performed at least three years before that. In the hallowed First Folio, on the other hand, the play has been titled according to the chronology of the events portrayed, rather than the order of composition, giving it the name The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Duke of Yorke. So there you have it.

It’s mildly interesting to note that in the octavo naming it’s seen as a play about the Duke of York, with the death of Henry VI thrown in for good measure, while the First Folio editors have it as a play primarily about Henry, with a bit of York death on the side.

…I did say mildly.

*This is a lie. I got over Gloucester’s death in 2 Henry VI pretty quickly. I didn’t really care about Gloucester, and it seems neither did Henry VI, as he completely passes the blame for losing England’s French territories onto him at the start of the play. He snivels to Warwick: “The Lord Protector lost it, and not I. / When I was crowned, I was but nine months old.” Yes, Henry, but you only lost France at the beginning of the last play, when you were fully grown, fully accountable, and shacking up with Margaret of Valois. AND Gloucester was your main supporter. Christ, won’t you just die already…

Action Bard. The Greatest Playwright of Them All.

Just a quickie to say that yesterday I became the proud owner of this delightful collectible. I’d like to say that I’ve kept it box-pristine, but I wanna play with this bad boy. And perhaps buy a G.I. Joe Mobile Command Centre and put Shakey in charge. It’s gonna be a fun few weeks.

Regular service will resume shortly – anon, even.

Next in this series of children's entertainment / Shakespeare mash-ups: William Shakespeare Junior.