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.

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.

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’…

You may be wondering why I’ve gathered you all here…

This summer I intend to read the 37 plays of William Shakespeare in (rough) chronological order and blog my way through them.

What exact form these blog entries will take has yet to be decided; I expect the tone and format will present themselves as I go along. The only thing I’m certain of is that they won’t be particularly scholarly. I have neither the time nor inclination to write an analytical essay on each of the plays, and I’d only end up boring myself to distraction, let alone any of you who make it past this post (to be honest, if anybody’s still with me even at this point, I’m already eternally grateful). I’m also pretty sure that it won’t be a one-post-per-play arrangement: some will have lots, some not so many. There’ll probably be a few extraneous posts about whatever strikes me along the way thrown in to keep you on your toes.

I spent some time thinking about the order in which I should tackle the plays. By genre? By chronology? By whichever-way-I-bloody-well-feel-like?  In the end I’ve gone for the simplest – I’ll read through them in the order they appear in my lovely Norton Edition. It’s based on the the Oxford Edition so, handily enough, they’re in chronological order. And yes, I’m aware of the difficulties of dating the plays in any sort of knowable way, and that other editions would have the young William as penning (I refuse – at this point, at least – to say ‘quilling’) only  Histories for the first few years, but this way the decision’s made for me and I get to start with two Comedies.

There’s also the matter of The Two Noble Kinsmen. At the moment I’m not counting it – I don’t dig on Fletcher – but I’m open to persuasion.

So, that’s about it. I suppose I’d better get cracking and I hope some of you make it back.

Play number one.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona.