Titus Andronicus

There doesn't seem to be an existing thread to discuss this play. Have you read it?
Of his plays that I've read, this is the one that, to me, has a very different tone. The amount of violence and blood and the number of innocent characters that are murdered is surprising, even for a tale of revenge. Still a good play, but I can see why it's not often performed live.

It's a very early Shakespeare play, written under the influence of Seneca, and of English Senecan tragedies (such as The Spanish Tragedy) which were then popular. Also, the entire play is not by Shakespeare. George Peele wrote about a third of it: all of Act 1, plus Act 2 scene 1, and Act 4 scene 1. The rest is by Shakespeare.

The play was considered a bit primitive even in its own day: Ben Jonson mocked it as old-fashioned in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair.

I didn't know that someone else had co-written this. And so much of it. Reading it, I began to feel that the amount of anger and well, blood lust, made it seem different from others. I was wondering if this play had been vetted as Shakespeare because the tone was so different, but then there would come a wonderful line or passage that did seem like him.
Thanks for the info.

Jonathan Bate discusses authorship in the Third Arden pp. 79-83. According to him, the only standing question is whether Shakespeare wrote the first act, an argument he carefully dismisses. He argues strongly for single authorship.

>4 messpots:
Bate has now changed his tune, and accepts Peele as co-author. I'd have to do a little digging to find where he first did so, but I imagine something could be found in the recent-ish RSC edition of Sh's works, which Bate co-edited.

Bate and the majority of Sh. scholars have been convinced by the evidence gathered and extended in Sir Brian Vickers' Shakespeare Co-Author, which also addresses the presence of co-authors Thomas Nashe in Henry VI Part 1, George Wilkins in Pericles, Thomas Middleton in Timon of Athens and John Fletcher in Henry VIII.

These suggestions are not new, but the evidence (a confluence of stylistic, linguistic, metrical, and lit-critical evidence) has been accumulating for the last century, give or take. The idea that Shakespeare, like more or less ALL of his playwriting contemporaries (not excluding Marlowe, Jonson, Webster and other greats), sometimes wrote in collaboration is not a stretch once we shed the post-Romantic idea of him as a 'lonely genius on a peak.' He was a working man of the theatre, and collaboration was then a frequent mode of operation; think of today's screenwriters for an analogy.

And of course Shakespeare has also been identified as a collaborator in a handful of non-Folio plays, from the now-accepted Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher), Edward III (with an unidentified writer, Sh. having contributed the "Countess scenes"), and Sir Thomas More (which Sh. helped to revise, contributing the "Ill May Day" scene and a few other brief passages -- see John Jowett's recent Arden III edition) to the more recent attributions of Act III of Arden of Faversham (see MacDonald P. Jackson's recent Determining the Shakespeare Canon: Arden of Faversham and A Lover's Complaint and the 1602 Additions to Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (see Shakespeare, computers, and the mystery of authorship by Hugh Craig et al.

And speaking of Jonathan Bate and Shakespeare's collaborations, I just saw this:
http://isebeta.uvic.ca/Foyer/herald/2014-dec/new/

Very interesting, and heartening that a scholar publicly changes his mind. As a private reader my sole test is "is the language getting lousy?"

Well, with due respect, 'language getting lousy' isn't a safe criteria to judge authorship by. Even Homer nodded etc etc. Shakespeare could crank out some mediocre stuff and Peele (or Nashe, Fletcher, Middleton etc etc) could be pretty good -- after all they were professionals in the same game who Shakespeare chose to work with. In the bad old days critics tried to absolve Sh of anything they didn't like by claiming it was by 'the actors' or an 'inferior writer'. (In his edition of Shakespeare Pope relegated an amazing amount of text to his footnotes for this reason.) But it's not (necessarily) that Peele or Middleton aren't as good, they're just different, and in ways that can be analyzed or measured.

Is it appropriate to discuss film adaptations on this thread? My introduction to this play was my viewing of Julie Taymor's Titus, which I admired. I only read the play a year ago.

>9 Coach_of_Alva:
Why not ? discuss away.

I've seen part of that movie but not the whole thing. I have seen the BBC-TV Titus Andronicus with Trevor Peacock as Titus. (Peacock also played Jack Cade in the BBC-TV Henry VI, and is perhaps best know as the eccentric Jim Trott on Vicar of Dibley.) I liked the BBC version a lot.

Two interesting bits of info about Titus...

- For centuries the original ending was lost. It was first printed in 1594, and then reprinted in 1600; but the compositor's copy for the 2nd quarto was a damaged copy of Q1 with part of the final page torn away. Faced with what appeared to be a missing ending, the printer had someone vamp up a handful of lines to complete the play; but when Heminge and Condell were putting together the First Folio, they used a copy of Q2 (or anyways some later quarto), meaning that some anonymous vamper's lines were enshrined as the ending of Shakespeare's play. Then in 1904 a single copy of the lost Q1 was discovered, in the home of a Swedish postal clerk. and scholars were able to restore Sh's original ending. It turned out that only a line or two was lost when the page was torn, so the vamper overdid it.

- Although the Folio text is based directly on a copy of a printed quarto, it adds an entirely new scene, known now as the "Fly Scene". In this addition the actor of Titus (no doubt Richard Burbage) gets to show his creeping madness and his scenery-chewing skills by condoling in great measure over the death of a fly. The purpose and effect of this addition is very similar to the so-called "Painter Scene" in Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. in which Hieronymo, descending into madness after the murder of his son, asks a painter if he can paint 'grief'. This scene was probably also added for Burbage, possibly around the same time; and a strong case has recently been made that this scene was written by Shakespeare.

I had trouble with Titus when I first read it, and then listened to a BBC production and then Julie Taymor's film. I struggled in a tug of war between a kind of instinctive revulsion, and an intellectual appreciation. It took me almost a month to come to terms with the play, which I am now glad to say I have seen, but will likely never attempt to see again.

I ended up writing about the experience for an old e-zine to make sense of my up and down response to it:

http://www.bibliobuffet.com/a-reading-life-columns-193/archive-index-a-reading-l...

>9 Coach_of_Alva: Funny you should mention the film as I just watched it over the weekend. It's amazing-the direction, the cinematography, the costumes (which won an Oscar), the mixture of present day with ancient and Alan Cumming looking like a cross between Hitler and Pee Wee Herman. The scenes of Anthony Hopkins' madness in the bathtub, then as the chef, were riveting. It's hard to believe that I had to go looking for this film; it should be more well-known.

>11 southernbooklady:

Fascinating, insightful review from your blog, southernbooklady.

A few comments on the issue of collaboration in Titus...
You say "The opening speeches felt wooden and preemptory (they are political speeches, so that may be why). The struggle between Bassianus and Saturninus--the two men vying for the Imperial throne—is muted and rather low key despite the legions of soldiers on hand and the real potential for riot. That Titus, the incoming victorious general, awards the throne to the latter despite his petulant nature seems inexplicable. The whole scene lacks the breathless intensity of Richard.
Not to fall into the "Shakespeare is good, collaborator is bad" trap, but this part whcih fell flat for you is from Peele's Act One.

Further on in Act Two it comes alive for you:
" Why, ’tis no matter man: if they did hear,
They would not mark me; or if they did mark,
They would not pity me; yet plead I must,
And bootless unto them."
And by this point we are reading Shakespeare.

You further note:
Commentators... point out that the play was probably a collaboration (although perhaps not quite so much as originally surmised)...
I decided, for example, on really listening to some of the dialogue, that there was no way Shakespeare merely “collaborated” on the play...
If Shakespeare was collaborating, he had the upper hand and the last word.

Peele's presence and just where is pretty widely accepted since the publication of Vickers' Shakespeare Co-Author. Vickers did not originate the idea that Peele co-wrote Titus --it's at least 100 years old -- but he assembled the best past arguments and then added his own analysis and more evidence. He convinced, for instance, Jonathan Bate who just a few years previously had argued strongly for Shakespeare's sole authorship in the Arden III edition.

Also, the early modern mode of collaboration did not resemble modern modes -- Moss Hart and George S Kaufman sitting down with whiskey, cigarettes and a typewriter and hashing out a scene together; or sun-tanned people sitting down with cocaine and a pc and hacking scenarios back and forth. There is pretty strong evidence that early modern playwrights worked from a scenario-sketch drawn up beforehand but then scenes or groups of scenes or whole acts were alloted to the different writers (sometimes up to 4 or 5) who went off and wrote their shares alone. When the scenes were turned in there was likely a little bit of adjustment, perhaps by the 'senior' writer. But the upshot is that (for the most part) when you're reading Peele in Titus, you're reading Peele, not Peele+Shakespeare; and when you're reading Shakespeare in Titus, you're reading Shakespeare, not Shakespeare+Peele.

>13 Crypto-Willobie: Also, the early modern mode of collaboration did not resemble modern modes

One of the more fascinating aspects of my year-of-Shakespeare was reading about the technical issues that had to be taken into account when writing for theater in Shakespeare's day. Actors who had to take multiple parts and required enough time between each part to change costumes, the differences between writing for an indoor venue and an open one, stuff like that. And, given that I'm in the book business, the mechanics of publishing a play and getting it past the censor and performed and (more to the point) lucratively performed, were both fascinating and familiar. Writers are writers in any era.

And speaking again of Jonathan Bate, he's just been knighted in the latest New Year's honours!

Congrats Sir Jonathan!

http://www.today.com/money/heard-about-aaa-tipsy-tow-facebook-its-not-all-areas-...