TITUS AND LUCRECE
May 20, 2003

by Joe Sobran

     Since last week I've made a new addition to my 
Shakespeare video collection: the recent film of TITUS, 
based on TITUS ANDRONICUS. This is generally -- more or 
less universally -- regarded as Shakespeare's worst play. 
It's so much worse than anything else he wrote that many 
scholars have doubted that he wrote it. The critical 
consensus may be summed up in two words: it stinks.

     Naturally, TITUS ANDRONICUS was popular in its own 
time. Nobody knows when it was first performed; it was 
first printed in 1594, with the author unidentified, and 
two more editions followed. The author wasn't identified 
as Shakespeare until 1598.

     The play's appeal can also be summed up in two 
words: sex and violence. Or maybe sexual violence. The 
story features murder, rape, mutilation, torture, 
miscegenation, betrayal, revenge, and cannibalism.

     If this sounds bad, the film is even worse. Julie 
Taymor directed, blending -- no, grotesquely mixing -- 
ancient Rome with contemporary odds and ends. Anthony 
Hopkins (who else?) plays Titus, Shakespeare's answer to 
Hannibal Lecter. Jessica Lange is Titus's archenemy, 
Tamora, Queen of the Goths. It's all relentlessly ugly, 
pictorially and otherwise. The film keeps trying to top 
itself in horrors, but all proportion is lost and the 
whole effect is confused and pointless. Eventually evil 
becomes merely dreary.

     The story begins with Titus, a Roman general, 
celebrating his victory over the Goths in a war that has 
cost the lives of 21 of his sons. Soon he kills another 
of his sons with his own hands. Meanwhile, Tamora marries 
the Roman emperor Saturninus, while conceiving a child by 
her wicked Moorish lover Aaron. (All this has no basis in 
history, by the way; Shakespeare made it all up.)

     Aaron incites two of Tamora's grown sons, Chiron and 
Demetrius, to rape Titus's daughter Lavinia; they do so, 
ravishing her on the body of her brother Bassianus, whom 
they have also murdered. Then they cut out her tongue and 
chop off her hands to prevent her from telling (or 
writing) who her violators were.      

     Titus's troubled family life gets even more 
complicated. Two of his remaining sons are sentenced to 
death unless he can ransom them by sending Aaron the 
severed hand of yet another of his sons. Titus cuts off 
his own hand, but all he receives in return are the heads 
of the two sons he'd hoped to save.

     Now it gets unpleasant. Passing over some details 
you probably don't need to know, Lavinia manages to tell 
Titus who her rapists were. He captures Chiron and 
Demetrius and cuts their throats.

     In the final scene, Tamora comes to a feast where 
Titus acts as the chef. After serving her and the other 
guests a meat pie, Titus discloses the key ingredients in 
the recipe: Chiron and Demetrius.

     As you might expect, the prank doesn't go over too 
well. Then most of the characters stab each other to 
death. Titus even kills Lavinia, ending her shame. The 
survivors sentence Aaron to death too: he is to be buried 
up to his neck and left to starve.

     TITUS is considered Shakespeare's first attempt at 
tragedy: the title of the first edition was THE MOST 
LAMENTABLE ROMAN TRAGEDY OF TITUS ANDRONICUS. But it's so 
hard to take seriously that some have suspected it was 
all a huge black joke, spoofing the gory tragedies of 
Seneca and his later imitators. Excessive horror in drama 
has a tendency to dissolve in laughter, and surely no 
tragedy has ever produced less grief than this one.

     Most scholars date the play around 1594, when it was 
first printed, but it must have been written much 
earlier. In 1594 Shakespeare also published his long poem 
THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, another treatment of sexual violence 
in ancient Rome, but in an entirely different vein. The 
poem has none of the play's crude horror. Even its verse 
is of an entirely different order. This is the great poet 
in the maturity of his skill, his poetic power, his 
amazingly condensed expression.

     It's hard -- for me, impossible -- to believe the 
great poet could have written TITUS and LUCRECE at about 
the same time. The play is as crude as the poem is 
exquisite -- one more sign that the scholars have gotten 
"Shakespeare" all wrong.

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