Shakespeare's most violent and gory play, Titus Andronicus was written in 1592, and represents the dramatist's first foray into the popular genre of revenge tragedy (many editors argue with at least one other collaborator). The result was spectacular, including scenes of murder, human sacrifice, rape, bodily mutilation and cannibalism. Set in late-imperial Rome, the action begins with the Roman general Titus Andronicus and his triumphant return from wars with the Goths. Leading Queen Tamora and her sons as prisoners, Titus stumbles into a power struggle between Saturninus and his brother Bassianus. Titus fatally backs Saturninus, who rapidly turns on the old general and marries Tamora. The implications for the Andronicus family are disastrous. More of Titus' sons are killed, his daughter Lavinia is brutally raped by Tamora's sons, and as Titus begins his descent into madness and despair he even has his own hand cut off in an act of awful trickery. As Titus plots his bloody revenge, he reflects that "Rome is but a wilderness of tigers". The ending is one of the most gruesome conclusions to any dramatic tragedy, and leaves Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs looking quite restrained. Although the play has put audiences off for centuries due to its apparently gratuitous violence, more recently critics have discerned something more to it than pure shock, but that might say more about us than the Elizabethans. .--Jerry Brotton

2008-09-05 Titus reappraised

Titus Andonicus is often regarded as something of a joke: crude juvenilia, bloodthirsty sensationalism, tasteless exploitation. Consequently, it has frequently been excised from the canon. TS Eliot, for one, thought it 'one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written'. Here, in this Arden 3rd edition, Jonathan Bate unapologetically champions the play and argues that it is authentically Shakespearean, structurally complex and, contrary to Eliot, 'one of the dramatist's most inventive plays'.

Bate certainly makes a persuasive case. He combines an easy, conversational eloquence ('You don't have to be a card-carrying Freudian to see the sexual significance of ...') with penchant analysis. But this is not always an easy read, despite the occasional appearance of what might be described as a popular touch (he concedes, for instance, that readers may find certain issues, such as the problem of the play's date, 'technical and boring' - a consideration that would scarcely have worried previous Arden editors). Even advanced students may need a dictionary of terms to access the 'hermeneutic blockage' and 'deconstructionist's "aporia" ' of page 35.

What is made very clear, though, is that for a fuller appreciation of the play, we need to understand a contemporary audience's response to episodes which may seem puzzling to us. For example, the barbarian Goth who contemplates a monastery isn't so much a clumsy example of anachronism but an instructive image of escape from Roman tyranny - doubly so, firstly by means of the Goths' defeat of a decadent Rome, secondly through the Reformation's liberation of religion from an equally decadent Papacy. Bate reminds us, in this example, of how perceptions of Romans and Goths have changed over the intervening 400 years. The Goths, from an Elizabethan perspective, were not primarily destructive, shaggy-haired barbarians but a positive, reinvigorating people who helped European culture to flourish after centuries of imperial greed and misrule.

This edition is unconventional in its analysis of Elizabethan attitudes to revenge. I'd always thought that this was quite plain and unequivocal (' "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," said the Lord' being the commonly quoted Biblical text telling us that retribution is a divine, not human, prerogative.) Bate, however, refers to an essay by Bacon which presents an alternative, more ambivalent, view in which the public good is a key consideration. He follows this point up with a demonstration of how Titus, the avenger, is in some sense the embodiment of the legal process, and not simply an individual citizen taking the law into his own hands to right private wrongs.

And what does Bate say about the play's 'excessive violence'? Again, putting Titus in its historical context, he argues that, compared to the real horror and bloody spectacle of public execution, the play's violence is often sublimated through the artifice of masque.

The Arden 3rd edition has established a reputation for being thought-provoking and eloquent as well as authoritative. This, one of the earlier titles, is one that helped to establish that reputation.