Titus Andronicus (Vol. 73) - Jonathan Bate (essay date 1995)
Jonathan Bate (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: Bate, Jonathan. Introduction to Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate, pp. 1-122. London: Routledge, 1995.
[In the following excerpted introduction, Bate surveys the structure, language, and critical reception of Titus Andronicus, and studies the drama's themes of revenge, passion, grief, and rape.]
SPACE AND STRUCTURE
The theatres built by the Elizabethans allowed for triple-layered performance. There was a gallery or upper stage (Juliet's window is the most famous use of this ‘above’ or ‘aloft’ space), the main stage which projected into the auditorium and on which the actors—in Hamlet's image—‘hold as 'twere the mirror’ up to the lives of the theatre audience, and the ‘cellarage’ below the stage, reached by a trap-door (through which Dr Faustus descends and the weird sisters' apparitions arise). In Titus Andronicus Shakespeare...
[The entire page is 11236 words long]
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