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A Bit Of The Old Ultra-Violence

Titus Andronicus was one of the most popular plays in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but its longer-term critical reputation has been decidedly mixed. Sam Johnson thought it was so bad as to be unplayable. Tennessee Williams called it his favorite Shakespearean play, precisely because of the “blood and guts” literally and metaphorically on display; this is a […]

Titus Andronicus was one of the most popular plays in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but its longer-term critical reputation has been decidedly mixed. Sam Johnson thought it was so bad as to be unplayable. Tennessee Williams called it his favorite Shakespearean play, precisely because of the “blood and guts” literally and metaphorically on display; this is a story about furiously passionate people acting out their passions through their and upon each others’ bodies. Harold Bloom considered the play to be a parody of the revenge tragedies that were all the rage at the time of its composition – an opinion that, I should note, can be reconciled both with Williams and with Johnson.

Myself, I have never been able to love the play. I don’t think it’s because of the graphic violence. I live in awe of Lear, and the blinding of Gloucester is an exceptionally graphic and cruel bit of stage violence – and the more viscerally it is staged, the better it plays, in my opinion. I am quite fond of The Duchess of Malfi, which is as extravagant in its cruelties as anyone could wish. And I was powerfully moved by the movie, “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” another work of art of exceptionally graphic cruelty (beginning with the opening sequence of a cook being forced to eat excrement and continuing through to a climactic act of cannibalism).

But what all these works of art have, and what I fear Titus lacks, is a center of moral concern. Gloucester is a blind fool whose folly ends with his literal blindness, but this moves us to pity. The Duchess in Webster’s play is a deeply sympathetic quester for freedom, as Bosola is a pitiful example of moral servitude, a man who pathetically hopes for reward for placing his conscience in the hands of others. And every one of the principal characters in Peter Greenaway’s movie – even the abhorrent thief – moves us to pathos to some degree.

The center of moral concern in Titus should be the title character; he is the one who suffers so horribly, and he is the one who exacts his revenge. Yet I find it hard to feel anything for him, for two reasons: first, because he is so horribly cruel when first introduced, killing first Tamora’s son and then his own; and, second, because I don’t believe he learns anything at all from his experience. At the end, he murders his own daughter for the sake of honor, just as he killed his son at the outset, and he is as cruel in his revenges on Tamora and Saturninus as Tamora was in her revenges upon him. When I ask myself “what is this play about?” I have a hard time answering.

Hamlet is a clever deconstruction of revenge tragedies, something Hamlet himself realizes – as he says of Laertes, “by the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his,” and his dying voice for young Fortinbras suggests a similar recognition that the Norwegian’s cause is similarly reflected in another, older mirror (Hamlet’s father killed Fortinbras’s father before the play began). Macbeth is a fascinating and terrible inverted revenge tragedy that sets up the malefactor as the protagonist – the satisfactions of revenge tragedy are subverted by making us identify with the character who deserves to have vengeance visited upon him, and who knows it. The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, is a very straightforward – and effective – revenge tragedy, but it has a clear moral center in its protagonist, Hieronimo; we don’t end the play feeling upbeat (Kyd understands the limits of revenge as a principle better than our modern enthusiasts for revenge – Mel Gibson, say) but we do feel a sense of closure.

Titus is none of these. There is no sense of closure at the end of Titus – no sense that proper order has been restored, if at great cost, nor a sense that anybody onstage has achieved an epiphany like Hamlet’s. At the outset of the play, we are introduced to a collection of horrible people, who proceed to visit horrors upon each other, and by the end of the play they are mostly dead. If Titus is supposed to be a critique of the revenge tragedy in some fashion, I fear it is rather the way “Natural Born Killers” or “A Clockwork Orange” are supposed to be critiques of violence in entertainment. Which is to say: whatever they are supposed to be critiquing, they are actually indulging in. Violence shouldn’t be empty. And making a work of art full of empty violence and saying, well, I’m making the point that violence is empty, and thereby critiquing our acceptance of violence – well, to me, anyway, that never works. What you actually wind up with is an empty and violent work of art.

Which is how Titus usually feels to me. If there is a moral center in Titus, it is Aaron the Moor, the only character who understands the nature of the world he lives in, and who responds rationally to that nature. He has nothing but contempt for everybody and everything – except the child of his own loins, for whom he declares a convincingly genuine love. He is, not coincidentally, the most compelling figure in any scene that he is in. And if Titus were a social satire, then Aaron’s success in leading one character after another down the path to horror would have a Marlovian zest to it, in the way that Richard III can (and that play considerably surpasses Marlowe, I think most would agree). But this is not a social satire; this is not recognizably our world. (Actually, one relatively compelling production of Titus that I saw set the play in fascist-era Italy, which brought the play home in a way that for me doesn’t usually happen – it became a sort of political fable, Titus himself a kind of exemplar of a certain set of martial virtues that fascism made an idol of, and that made fascism possible when not checked by other virtues.)

* * *

So how did the current Stratford production measure up to my expectations for this disfavored play?

On the one hand, this production boasted a series of very strong performances. John Vickery was an affecting Titus, helped considerably by that sonorous voice. Claire Lautier made a fierce and regal Tamora, completely believable as a woman who could, even in chains, charm the spoiled brat heir to the purple, Saturninus, who was played in turn with a perfect blend of petulance and cruelty by Sean Arbuckle (and, as an aside, it is such a pleasure to see Arbuckle play these kinds of roles; he does an excellent job as the Camillos and Theraménès, but he really shines when he gets a role that lets him do a bit of sneering – like this one, or Nick in Who’s Afraid). Dion Johnstone was a more convincing Aaron than he usually is in these villainous roles – I normally just don’t believe he has the darkness in him, but his strong chemistry with Bruce Godfree and Brendan Murray (as Tamora’s two surviving sons) carried me along; he was so obviously much more intelligent than these two numbskulls, or than anybody else on stage, and I believed in that frustrated intelligence as the ultimate motivation behind his murderous career. Paul Fauteux was an appealingly stolid Lucius, and Michael Spenser Davis and Roberta Maxwell lit up the stage in their brief turns as, respectively, a clown and Tamora’s nurse. The weakest links, to me, were Amanda Lisman as Lavinia and David Ferry as Titus’s brother Marcus. I’m afraid I’m always too aware that Lisman is acting, not just in this production but generally, but it’s fatal to a role like Lavinia where, if we are to remain in the play, and not titter at it from the outside, we have to believe that what is happening to her is actually happening. And while the role of Marcus is generally a thankless one, Ferry’s performance seemed to underscore that fact rather than find a reason for being on this bloody stage. But on the whole, the performances were quite strong.

And they were matched by a design concept that was visually engaging: a stage of white marble inlaid with monumental Roman lettering, backed by columns topped with life-sized human torsos in agony. I thought the production flinched from the most visceral moments of stage violence – the rape of Lavinia and the behanding of Titus were each somewhat muffled – but the aftermath of violence was appropriately visceral, particularly the gruesome display of the heads of Titus’s two falsely-accused sons, impaled on the horns of a white marble bull, and the Edward Scissorhands-like appendages that Lavinia sports in her last moments.

Yet, somehow, the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Each scene worked in its own right – but they didn’t build on one another. The Roman setting, while visually engaging and, obviously, appropriate to the material, was also distancing: I never thought that this play was relevant to my world, that these were people I could encounter. (Or perhaps I shouldn’t blame the setting – this year’s Richard III is set in period, and I recognized plenty of people on that stage; the Coriolanus Stratford staged several years ago was set in a vaguely middle eastern version of early Rome, and it also felt completely relevant. But Titus, as I’ve said, is all about being visceral – that’s all it’s got – and so it’s especially vital that the production bring the horror home, where we live, and not give us any excuses for distancing.) And I continued to be nagged by that central question: what is this play about? Why am I watching all this horror? What does it mean?

I think the director wondered that as well, and decided: it doesn’t mean anything, and that emptiness is what it means. At the end of the play, Lucius is offered the laurel crown, and is about to take it, when he thinks better of it, and hands it over to a member of the audience. You take the throne; I’m not going to get involved. And, with a chuckle-earning thumb’s-up, he leaves the stage.

It feels like this is intended to be a Brechtian move – something that pulls us out of the tragedy into reflection on what we’ve seen. Presumably, this is supposed to let us know that Lucius is the one who actually learned something, and that this “something” is that revenge tragedies don’t lead to closure; they lead to everyone dead on the stage. But first, declining the imperial title is precisely how the tragedy started two and a half hours earlier – Titus is offered the throne, and declines, in favor of Saturninus. So what has Lucius actually learned if he does the same thing at the end? And, second, his exit is staged so jokily that it robs the preceding tragedy of whatever reality, and hence whatever meaning, it may have had. If the whole play was a kind of joke, what, exactly, is the punchline?

Comedy springs from pain; satire and parody, from the anger that emerges as a response to pain. When Lavinia carries off her father’s hand in her mouth, like a faithful spaniel carrying home a downed waterfowl, it’s supposed to be funny – precisely because it’s supposed to be painful. If we mock it, so that it seems unreal, that might also work – if we are mocking it out of a genuine anger. But what are we supposed to be angry at? If Shakespeare was making a parody, then he must have been angry at his audience, that this was the kind of play they seemed to want (Titus as Shakespeare’s “Stardust Memories”). But if you want to bring that kind of joke home, we need to be implicated earlier on. If we supposed to see ourselves as like Saturninus – vicious, petty and easily led – then Lucius would be making a very mordant joke indeed in handing us the laurels. And that punchline would be powerful indeed. That it isn’t is the fault of the setup: we are not implicated earlier in the tragedy. “Natural Born Killers” and “A Clockwork Orange” go wrong in wanting to have it both ways – indulging us in our visceral lusts while maintaining plausible deniability by saying that they are critiquing us for those lusts. But you can’t have it both ways. And this production can’t, as it were, have its Brecht and Williams, too.

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