[In the following review of Julie Taymor's 2000 film adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Welsh and Tibbets encapsulate the plot of Shakespeare's “cruelest and crudest” play, praise the film's outstanding cast, and find Taymor's interpretation perhaps too effective in conveying the grotesque excesses of the original drama.]

Shakespeare's early tragedy was staged on 24 January 1594 by the Earl of Sussex's men at the Rose Theatre. It was published later that year then reprinted in 1600 and 1611. The 1611 quarto was later reprinted in the First Folio of 1623. Dating its composition is problematic. Some scholars have questioned whether Shakespeare wrote all of it. As one of his earliest works, it has all the faults to be expected from an inexperienced, thirty-year old playwright. Its violence and butchery were clearly modeled after that exemplar of classical tragedy, Seneca, whose works included the story of Thyestes, in which the protagonist is served a banquet of his children's flesh. Titus Andronicus begins in Rome where the eponymous general has just returned from his victory over the Goths. Two of his captives are Aaron, a Moor, and Tamora, queen of the Goths. Titus orders that Tamora's eldest son is to be butchered in retribution for the deaths of two of his own sons. Seeking her revenge, Tamora enlists the aid of Aaron and her two remaining sons to bring about the deaths of Titus's son-in-law (by stabbing) and two of his sons (by beheading). Moreover, Aaron tricks Titus into cutting off one of his hands after his daughter Lavinia has been raped and mutilated and her tongue torn out by the sons of Tamora. Unable to communicate to Titus the person responsible for these outrages, Lavinia scratches out their names in the sand with a stick. Now it is Titus's turn for vengeance. First he slays Tamora's sons, grinds up their bones into a pie which he feeds to Tamora, and then he kills Tamora. For his actions, Titus is killed by the emperor (who in the meantime had married Tamora); and subsequently Titus's surviving son, Lucius kills the emperor. As one of the only surviving nobles, Lucius assumes governorship of Rome, punishes Aaron, buries the growing pile of the dead, and instills peace at last over the city. Marchette Chute argues that rather than presume that Shakespeare was “carried away by his desire to please his audience” with “witless atrocities,” Shakespeare was “trying to write a ‘noble Roman history’ and conform to the best standards of the classical drama as they were understood in his day,” but Chute seems to be writing as an apologist for what is generally considered an atrocious play.

Titus is too much of a bad thing, without question Shakespeare's cruelest and crudest play. As an unrelenting revenge tragedy repulsive in its grotesquerie, it is fair game for the sort of post-modern interpretation that Julie Taymor gives it, giving an astonishing high-tech, low-concept spin to the play's post-Senecan horrors. The film begins with a boy, identified as “Young Lucius,” in a contemporary setting, playing cruel games with his toy soldiers. He is then transported back into a post-modern version of ancient Rome to witness the story of Titus as a bystander incorporated into the action, witnessing it, and, presumably, learning from it. After the final spectacle of revenge and blood sacrifice, the image widens out to indicate that the performance has been enacted before a modern audience, clothed in black, in the Roman Coliseum, with microphones in place so that Lucius, the surviving son of Titus (not to be confused with the invented character of Young Lucius) may address the Coliseum audience at the play's conclusion.

The film is splendidly cast. Anthony Hopkins plays Titus, proud, dutiful, soon transformed through grief and madness into a fearsome avenger. Jessica Lange is an overly made-up, stone-hearted Tamora. But the stand-out performances belong to Alan Cumming, looking as though he had stepped out of Cabaret and into Fellini Satyricon, utterly decadent, self-absorbed, and evil, and, especially, to Harry Lennix as Aaron the Moor, the ultimate emblem of subconscious evil and one of Shakespeare's most powerful creations. The film production is marked by gross indulgence and hideous excesses, but it is sometimes shockingly effective and even darkly humorous, as when Titus scampers around dressed in a chef's uniform and hat at the Thyestian feast at the play's awful climax, served to Saturninus, who finds it tasty, and Tamora, who clearly doesn't know what's cooking.

Taymor's stylization purposely jumbles together ancient and modern elements and motifs, lifting part of her concept from Fellini, not only Satyricon, but also Fellini Roma. “Modern Rome built on the ruins of ancient Rome, offered perfect stratification for the setting of the film,” she wrote for a press release, without mentioning Fellini or Carlos Fuentes, both of whom have put the stratification of civilizations to metaphorical use. “I wanted to blend and collide time to create a singular period that juxtaposed elements of ancient barbaric ritual with familiar, contemporary attitude and style.” For her symbolic denouement, Taymor wanted the Roman Coliseum, “the archetypal theatre of cruelty, where violence as entertainment reached its apex.”

In the film's prologue, Young Lucius, involved in pretend “violence” with his toy soldiers, “falls through an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ time-warp, right into the Coliseum,” as his toy soldiers are translated into Titus and his army, marching mechanically in triumph into Rome. Young Lucius himself is transformed into Titus's grandson. The horrors of Shakespeare's play are framed through a coming-of-age metaphor as Young Lucius passes from innocence to experience, “to knowledge, wisdom, compassion, and choice.” His final exit out of the Coliseum towards the dawning of a new day with evil Aaron's baby in arms symbolically is a journey towards redemption, giving the film its own distinctive closure.

Work Cited

Chute, Marchette. Shakespeare of London New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1949.