Come Down and Welcome Me to This World's Light: Titus Andronicus and the Canons of Contemporary Violence | "Come Down and Welcome Me to This World's Light": Titus Andronicus and the Canons of Contemporary Violence
"Come Down and Welcome Me to This World's Light": Titus Andronicus and the Canons of Contemporary Violence
Philip C. Kolin, University of Southern Mississippi
Early criticism of Titus Andronicus tried to come to terms with the violence in the play by confining its horror to Elizabethan England. The bloody grotesqueries in Titus were seen as characteristic of Shakespeare's age. In the process, both the times and the mores were indicted; Shakespeare and his Elizabethan audience were tainted. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, pronounced that Titus was "obviously intended to excite vulgar audiences by its scenes of blood and horror."1 In the early 1850s, Georg Gottfried Gervinus similarly attacked Titus and accused Shakespeare of pandering to the Elizabethan demand for blood and guts: "If it be asked, how it were possible that Shakespeare with his finer nature could even have chosen such a play...
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